Bladewatch.com

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101214005260/en/GlassHouse-Technologies%E2%80%99-Whitepaper-Details-Risks-Rewards-Cloud

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–GlassHouse Technologies, a global provider of independent data center consulting and managed services, today announced the availability of a whitepaper that highlights the drivers, challenges, advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing initiatives in higher education institutions. The whitepaper, “Clouds on Campus: The Risks, Rewards and Potential of Cloud Computing in Academia,” outlines strategies and best practices that will enable university CIOs and IT managers to effectively meet compliance regulations and the growing need for faculty and students to easily access classroom technologies while controlling costs. In the coming year, taking a cost effective approach to implementing new technologies is critical as states continue to cut operating budgets for state run institutions.

I saw this and it sounded interesting, it’s always great to see and examine the possibilities of cloud computing as a platform particularly in different sectors such as education, I’m off to check it out.

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http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/new_rend.jsp?DocId=618947&lang=en

Bull (Euronext Paris: BULL), the only European company offering combined expertise in IT infrastructures IT and complex systems, today unveiled ‘BullWay 2013′, its strategic plan for the years 2011 to 2013, along with its associated financial objectives1.

The aim of this strategic plan is to position Bull within three years as a European leader in mission-critical digital systems and to ensure that the Group is on the path of profitable growth.

A vital stage in the Group’s development plan, the strategy will capitalize on its existing fundamental strengths:

Its technological expertise, in terms of power and security which represent two of the most pressing current issues for organizations

Its understanding and experience of growth markets, especially the public sector, defense, finance and telecommunications

Its long-standing geographic presence in rapidly growing economies, such as Brazil.

It’s interesting to see the mention of countries like Brazil, it’s the developing economies where we can explore the most possibilities not just in terms of demographics of size or scale, but also in developing new platforms sometimes in terms of the ‘greenfield’ site, doing it right the first time, I wonder if we might see opportunities in cloud in these countries not just in terms of accessibility and price, but also in terms of business empowerment and new services. We’ll have to see.

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http://www.bladewatch.com/2010/01/08/follow-the-moon/

I was reading an interesting article talking about virtualization of storage being the next big thing, and for many it will be. I wonder though if we should not be looking more towards the follow the moon vehicle for IT infrastructure, the concept of data center virtualization.

We need to be thinking of virtualization as an evolving path, in which we continue to further abstract the end user from the infrastructure and the application, where we move towards service down a wire or online rather than locking the user to a specific device with a client application, with all the anciliary components to deliver that service. At the same time from an IT cost and business empowerment angle virtualization of the data center allows us to transform not only how we organize and support the IT services that the business needs, it allows us to look at how we host and power these services towards a follow the moon approach.

I was having a chat with colleagues over dinner the other night about follow the moon/follow the sun, they had some great comments and got me thinking, I’ve written about it before but thought I’d publish this brief PowerPoint document that I put together sometime ago. It’s in PDF here.

It’s meant as an overview and I confess that it could be missing some concepts, but nonetheless do check it out.

Hope it helps, if you have any questions, do email me.

Regards

Martin

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I’ve updated the Dell and HP firmware spreadsheets with current advised firmware revisions and where possible we’ve tested it on the systems we have in the bladewatch labs. Do check the release notes to see if there are any dependencies and try on a test system if you can.

For those that have missed my interest with firmware, it’s that the first thing you get asked about when logging a call is about the firmware and drivers being up to date, besides they can provide enhanced functionality and fix known issues, so do check them out.

There are some important updates for the HP servers including the later generation servers, as well as updates to the enclosure firmware and the various ILO2 and ILO3 remote lights out components.

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http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/news/pr/fs_20101209.html

London, 9th December 2010 — The results of Fujitsu’s first bi-annual Business Certainty Index, a pulse check of the mood of British business, has shown apathy is the main reason for the lack of investment in IT innovation. Cut backs in IT budgets were cited as a significant reason for lack of investment (47%) but more worryingly 67% stated the fact that it is ‘too easy to keep things ticking over’ as the primary reason for lack of investment. This is echoed by the fact that only 23% of an IT budget is invested in innovation versus 38% on IT operations and maintenance – a figure that is set to only increase marginally (by 1 or 2%) in 2011.

Duncan Tait, managing director of Fujitsu’s Private Sector Business, said: “It is quite right that the economic climate has made businesses take stock and reassess where their priorities are – and in many instances this has been for the better. However, as a nation that is proud of its innovation heritage, my concern is that the very low investment levels we are seeing at the moment will simply be too low to help businesses adapt to the changes we’re all currently facing.

It’s a mixture of things, but it’s underpinned by the need for two things, IT to become more business savvy, more able to communicate and understand the business requirements, and for business leaders to be more long term, more strategic looking at the total picture, the total cost rather than the per application per business unit or business line cost. Only as we understand and accept that simple things like refresh and renew, to keep moving forward the infrastructure can we get the best performance, reliability and the lowest cost – that looking at payback, return on investment and looking at how we do things is the first step to developing a flexible efficient and scalable platform. It’s a debate that is set to go on, one that unfortunately is dependent on communication at all levels between end users, service providers and the vendors alike, not internally in the business or the IT space, both must combine to move forward and develop the IT and the business creating opportunities and in doing so revenue generation.

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http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101214005577/en/HP-Improves-Performance-Reduces-Costs-Support-Virtualized

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced a comprehensive support solution that enables clients running business-critical applications on virtualized HP ProLiant servers to improve performance and availability while reducing costs and complexity.

The new HP Critical Advantage service provides clients with an assigned account team to deliver support and maintain uptime of business-critical, virtualized environments. Account teams focus on problem resolution and process improvement, which enables clients to redirect staff resources toward innovation.

“As enterprises virtualize their industry standards-based environments to control costs and gain flexibility, they are realizing the vast complexities the technology can introduce,” said Matt Healey, research manager, Software and Hardware Support Services, IDC. “End-to-end support services such as HP Critical Advantage can improve availability and reduce downtime of business-critical applications so that clients can fully realize the potential of virtualization.”

This is great news and creates new opportunities not only for the start ups or SMB space, but also enterprises looking at ways to provide infrastructure in a different way, either to segregate costs or buy in compute capacity. It will be interesting to see how the service works and how it could also act as a bridge between current requirements with our existing infrastructure, I’m off to read more about it, is the next generation equivalent of virtualization on demand?

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http://www.realwire.com/releases/Fujitsu-agrees-new-7-year-shared-services-contract-with-Cambridgeshire-and-Northamptonshire-County-Councils

London, 20 December 2010 – Fujitsu has successfully retained its contract with Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire County Councils to work in partnership to deliver a pioneering shared service.

Fujitsu was originally appointed four years ago to deliver an ERP shared services platform based on Oracle e-Business Suite – this included functions such as financials, procurement and payroll. In March 2011 this contract was scheduled to finish and the Councils began to procure its replacement in June 2010. Fujitsu subsequently re-bid against a competitive field and was re-appointed; both Councils have agreed a new 7-year contract, projected to save the Councils approximately £7 million.

The two Councils are the founding partners of Local Government Shared Services (LGSS), the shared service venture set up to provide business support services to the Councils and potentially other public sector organisations. Through LGSS, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire County Councils share services including: finance, human resources, and procurement, supported by the ERP shared services platform.

The new contract will see Fujitsu provide shared application hosting, support, and development services to LGSS enabling them to leverage efficiency and cost saving benefits by streamlining internal business functions and IT infrastructure. The next stage of the LGSS programme will also see integration and streamlining of their internal processes delivering further savings.

With finances in the public and private sectors under pressure, these kind of deals are becoming more popular. Whether it’s projects to renew and refresh technologies, a drive to adopt cloud services, consolidate data centers or improve internal processes, identifying your bottlenecks both technical and non technical are the first steps to understanding where savings and improvements can be made. Simple things like the help desk processes, the way we schedule workloads or interact between the teams can be the difference between delivery as one cohesive IT team, or as a series of departments doing their bit and only their bit to get their job done. It will be interesting to see what range of technologies and concepts Fujitsu is planning to use to aid in service delivery, and if any cloud or bought in services might be leveraged, I’m off to read up more.

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I’ve updated the IBM firmware spreadsheet with firmware that we have tested with the limited devices we have in the Bladewatch labs, so do check it out. As per usual, these documents are meant as a guide only and you should check with IBM for latest updates/readme or deployment documentation, and note that some firmware changes or updates require a driver upgrade or firmware on other components to be at specific levels.

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http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1525116,00.html

As 2010 draws to a close, users, partners and industry experts say they want greater clarity from VMware about its virtualization management tools.

For virtualization pros, sorting through the increasing number of virtual data center management tools that have hit the market lately is easier said than done, whether the comparison is between new products from VMware Inc. and those of third-party competitors or those in VMware’s existing portfolio.

Check out this article talking about virtualization management tools, it’s an interesting read and got me thinking below, do check it out.

There is a buzz still around the virtualization space, it’s been ‘mainstream’ for a while now and in doing so customers have been deploying their virtual machines more and more using Hyper-V, VMware, Xen as well as the other alternatives. What remains an issue though is management. It’s an interesting issue, it’s not so much management as it is fitting virtualization around our existing processes, we have a billing system, we have reporting and supporting lines, specific levels of access between support teams, and indeed all can be resolved in some way or another with the various management tools on the market place, and as these evolve we’ll see more competition and innovation in this space.  What would be helpful or worth exploring though is a movement towards a debate, a discussion as to how it is or even what it is we mean when we mean management, and what it is we expect from these tools, combined with how I manage the virtual estate and what tools I really need and what are a nice to have, a virtualization 4.0 if you like.  I suspect we’re at that stage of in-between-ness (though let us keep it a secret), infrastructure 2.0, where I have the infrastructure becoming ever more virtual, though I haven’t quite managed to move the applications that way, nor moved towards a mixture of private internal and bought in external cloud platforms. Ultimately IT needs to change from infrastructure provisioning, box building (physical and virutal), to one of service delivery, service management and innovation. One in which I have the smartest people with real business understanding establishing how we really can do more with less, what range of services and products we need on a per application and an enterprise level we need to deliver more with less. This might mean private clouds for the proprietary internal applications, storage and maybe email, with the lest being provided by the cloud where issues of charge back, of service delivery and ownership matter, but matter without the legacy platforms, legacy processes and understanding “that we just don’t do things like that here, we’ve always used VMS on DEC”.

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http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/2010-12-cti-ir-release.aspx

Dell (NASDAQ: Dell) and Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: CML) today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Compellent, a rapidly growing provider of highly-virtualized storage solutions with automated data management features, including tiering and thin provisioning, for enterprise and cloud-computing environments. The acquisition is the latest strategic investment by Dell as it expands its portfolio of enterprise-class storage solutions and is consistent with Dell’s strategy to help customers better manage data growth, reduce storage costs and dramatically simplify the management of IT infrastructure.

The acquisition of Compellent will deliver on Dell’s commitment to provide its customers solutions that are open, capable and affordable. Dell delivers an open and integrated approach to data management that drives efficiency and dramatically reduces costs by streamlining operations.

This is exciting news and I wonder if we might see further innovation and developments around the storage virtualization space, anything we can do to develop best practices and technologies to help in improving the efficiency and the agility of the storage infrastructure has to be a good thing. I wonder if we might see more developments around their storage products for the SMB and the enterprise space.

Data tiers and the growth of storage is a continuing issue both internally for the enterprise and for the cloud space, as we continue to keep more data ‘online’ accessible on demand, we need to examine the cost/benefits of doing so, we need to be mapping (one of those dangerous terms) our business and storage requirements. The business need information to be accessible on demand, but not all information is the same, not all information is going to be demanded in the same regularity and in the same way. I may need my daily risk report, but the number of transactions performed since last Wednesday is going to be more on demand, less regular. With that in mind, what technologies and processes can we do to distinguish data that is ‘core’ and needs to be online and at the same time use new ways of distributing and centralizing that data. The billing process keeps my transactions online, as does the deal capture, as does the point of sale, with that in mind can I not have an XML which loads the data I need and runs the queries I need against one set of data, capturing the data once, transmitting and processing it once centrally rather than duplicate data, databases and transactions? It’s something that we could look at, however we need to balance cost savings, innovation to deliver change with politics, with business line responsibilities, regulatory requirements and operational risk. We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up more about the announcement.

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