Bladewatch.com

http://www.codestone.net/news/story/royal-mail-benefits-from-microsoft-hyper-v-server-virtualisation/800290407/

Royal Mail Group has announced an upgrade of its server system to Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation infrastructure.

The company has predicted a return on its investment over the next 19 months and is hoping for a reduction in costs of £1.8 million through this switch to hardware virtualisation over the next four years, Computer Weekly reports.

Royal Mail Group will use the new system to enable it to run its legacy systems on state-of-the-art hardware, with the deployment allowing the group to set up a maximum of 720 RMG servers.

“Hyper-V allows us to consolidate all of our legacy servers into a data centre. We have 500 distributed offices, all quite large,” said Adrian Steel, head of infrastructure management at Royal Mail Group.

Meanwhile, PC World recently reported research carried out by Molten Technologies showing that the uptake of virtual server technology has been boosted by the perceived additional business agility that this system allows, particularly in supporting flexible and contract workers.

An interesting article illustrating how the Royal Mail Group has used Microsoft Hyper-V in an effort to reduce their operating costs and deliver more with less. It’s always great to see what platforms and technologies end users are using and what perceived benefits and savings they are seeking to deliver. Virtualization can deliver real savings in terms of the hardware support costs, in data center space, scalability and business agility, the more innovation we have in the virtualization space both in terms of best practice, in end user support and in transparency of costs and empowerment, the more end users we can bring on board, the more opportunities for revenue generation and delivery.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10280/products_configuration_example09186a0080af4547.shtml

Introduction
In order to upgrade the BIOS on a Server Blade or a Server Pool, you complete five major steps:

I was talking to a colleague about his experiences with the Cisco blade and range of servers, he’s been testing them for a corporate in the London area. His viewpoints on their platform were positive overall with a few hesitations as their always are when switching or comparing vendors like for like. Keep in mind that in the hardware space, engineers can so easily get used to a certain way of doing business, of doing set procedures or management tools, moving them away from that can be just as big as an issue as price, performance or perception. Anyway, he sent me this article talking about Bios upgrades, something he had just complete that morning.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/x86-cloud-193089.html

Oracle today announced the expansion of its Sun Blade systems portfolio with new SPARC and x86 blade products and blade integrated solutions targeting private clouds and highly virtualized business environments. The expanded portfolio adds the SPARC T3-1B blade server and the dual-node Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module, as well as an Oracle VM blade cluster reference configuration and Oracle’s optimized solution for Oracle WebLogic Suite.

Benchmarks on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 demonstrate the outstanding performance characteristics critical for running varied commercial applications used in cloud and highly virtualized environments. These include best-in-class SPEC CPU2006 results with the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series, six Fluent world records, and 1.8 times the price-performance of the IBM Power 755 running the NAMD workload.

Powered by the industry’s first 16-core processor with up to 128 simultaneous threads, the SPARC T3-1B blade server has integrated on-chip cryptographic acceleration and delivers 2x the throughput, 2x the memory, as well as a 4x I/O bandwidth improvement over previous generation models.

It’s great to see Oracle continue the platform evolution of their x86 and SPARC blade platforms, anything Oracle can do to innovate their offering has to be a good thing for the blade platform and the end user community alike. The benchmark results are impressive and can indicate possibilities of the platform, it’s interesting to see the mention of cloud and virtualized environments, both could be ideally suited to a blade platform. I’m off to read up more about the Oracle Sun Blade platform.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-dec.mspx

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for December 2010.

With the release of the security bulletins for December 2010, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued December 9, 2010. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft is hosting a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on December 15, 2010, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the December Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

Microsoft have released a new series of patches for Windows 2000/2003 and 2008 server operating systems. As ever applying security patches to your server estate is the cost of doing business both to secure your environment and to keep in line with vendors/service providers support. Be sure to apply the patches to non production systems to avoid any impact or loss of service through changes made as a result of the security patch deployment. Check out the site for more information and to determine what is (or is likely) to be in scope for your platforms.

One of my friends/colleagues had emailed this to me quoting a problem where the blade would loose network connectivity but not show anything in the logs that would indicate a physical problem or issue with the network. As ever, he remains nameless, but I remain grateful nonetheless and thought it worthy of a post

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=3709945&prodSeriesId=3884098&swItem=MTX-e7b62ce9d9d64334aabac62d0e&prodNameId=3884099&swEnvOID=1113&swLang=13&taskId=135&mode=5

This driver addresses an issue where where the ethernet connection is lost or ping stops for some time during high traffic conditions.

The driver is included with the Proliant Support Pack 8.60, so it might be an idea if you’re going to apply this, to check out the new firmware for the blade, apply that and then the Proliant Support Pack, there are silent switches for the firmware.  So you should be able to do something like this in a batch script (or anything more advanced), note i have renamed the files for ease of reference;

Ilofirmware.exe /silent

Arrayfirmware.exe /silent

Nicfirmware.exe /silent

Systemfirmware.exe /silent

Then run the PSP, at this point, you could just run the bp00834.cmd file which runs all the driver pack

Finally something like psshutdown -l -t 14 -r -f

At this point remember that the correct support pack for your server will depend on the operating system and model, 8.60 will run on an older server, but there may be a more appropriate version specific to your server, for example the DL580 G2 which currently has Proliant Support Pack 8.25 available for download, this pdf contains more information.

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22057

“We believe there are real benefits in our working environment that can be realised using this device – as well as the personal productivity and enjoyment that come as part of the package,” two managing directors at New York-based JPMorgan said in an e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News.

The shift to Apple represents a real threat to Research in Motion, which has traditionally held sway as the mobile supplier of choice for Wall Street financiers. RIM has announced plans to debut its own version of the iPad in Q1 2011, and has already signed up Sun Life Financial and the Canadian arm of ING as test beds for the Playbook.

At JPMorgan, associates will be able to access e-mails, contacts, calendar and attachments via the iPad, as well as have the ability to mark-up and annotate confidential documents and make client presentations, says Bloomberg.

I know a number of organizations are looking at the impact of the iPAD, how it might be a tool that could empower business functionality internally, it might also create further opportunities though in porting current and legacy applications to external clients – access to the pricing or risk tools for example. I wonder if we could see a move to a trading application store? We’ll have to see, an interesting read.