Bladewatch.com

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22143

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has confirmed that his new mobile payments venture Square has raised $27.5 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital.

Check out this article talking about Square. I remain a fan of the concept, anything we can do to make credit and debit card payments more accessible, creating opportunity for the small businesses in payment terms has to be a good thing, the more retailers, the more businesses we online the more consumer choice, the more competition and innovation across a range of market places both in terms of payments and retailers alike -wicked as my little brother would say.

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If you need to check your Dell server or pc/laptop is in warranty, the url is here,  you will need the service tag (serial number).

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So going over the highlights of today, it was great to be shown around the Cowboys Stadium which is home of the Dallas Cowboys football team, but equally as interesting was hearing about how the organization had used and deployed HP’s Converged Infrastructure, the challenges that they had faced and how they had been addresed.

The stadium itself is very impressive both in terms of design and architecture, the facts and figures in terms of it’s capacity, it’s dimensions and the infrastructure deployed in order to provide the visitor with a complete end to end experience were amazing, the HD screen in the center of the stadium being 172ft wide, with some 3000 displays around the venue to keep you informed, to provide advertising and branding are equally impressive, with a capacity of over 100,000 people, it is a significant achievement.

Going back to the infrastructure, and what we were there to see and learn, was the Converged Infrastructure that had been deployed in order to meet key deliverables which involved aligning not only the IT with the business, but also the individual businesses for a unified approach to establish requirements from end to end.

The approach seems to have been focused on understanding the business needs through discussion with the business sponsors with a focus on integrating and aligning these requirements where possible to create a unified set of requirements across business lines. Most interestingly was the fact that the infrastructure was designed to meet not only the requirements of the stadium, but the subsidiary and partner companies of the business across 96 locations using 3 data centers, with a focus on highly available and scalable platforms for revenue generation. The results, are impressive, a change towards 80% innovation against 20% business as usual (keeping the lights on), real empowerment through having the right sets of technology and control to create opportunity and revenue in doing so, a few examples are noted below:

• Wireless for guests visting the centre
• 3000 HD IP televisions which using networking allow separate or concurrent content as derived and determined by the business line – removing items from the menu when they’re sold out, or customizing content for a specific event or target market.

Using a range of technologies as part of the HP Converged Infrastructure including VMware and their HP Insight Dynamics they have been able to automate and consolidate their infrastructure, using integrated application policies to transform their infrastructure, the business processes and the opportunities for revenue and customer end user experience accordingly. Fascinating.

There is a PDF here, and video here (click the featured success stories) if you would like more information.  The interesting concept for me aside from HP Converged Infrastructure was how we could achieve business transformation and create opporunity with the right suite of applications and possibilities, with the infrastructure aligned to the business need, the business teams could create opportunity as the focus had been migrated from business as usual to innovation, what if, what can we do…

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If you need to check if your HP server is still under warranty, you can check it here:

The full url is:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/WarrantyLookup.jsp?country=&prodSeriesId=454811&prodTypeId=12454

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I got a text from a friend asking me when Windows 2000 ends or ended, I confessed I wasn’t sure but I did reply that I am sure it’s now seen as a legacy platform, one that security patches are not downloadable unless you have a special extended support warranty.

I did a search and found this article: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/1131#tab0

Basically a healthy Windows 2000 server to be easily supported should:

• Be Service pack 4 with post SP4 patches applied, you can find this by right clicking my computer for the service pack
• Have the latest vendor driver and firmware pack – this will prevent any driver issueso
• Continue to have sufficient disk space free on the drive to let the operating system ‘breath’ so to speak
• Ensure that the drive is defragmented
• Have no red entries in the event log (or as few as possible)

Keep in mind that any server engineer will state that if your operating system is out of support officially it should be decommissioned. But avoiding the heebie-jeebies, a well built and maintained Windows 2000 physical or virtual server is still suitable for business today, going forward though for .NET support, for security patching and to be able to use new hardware, you should be moving to Windows 2003 or Windows 2008.

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Where I’d love to see it go

I am a car geek (UK/Europe based, I don’t know American cars that much), anyway I’ve been watching with interest car manufacturers movements into the social networking space and remain fascinated as they try different approaches to get out the message, to sell more cars, build up their brand and reach out to potential customers.

I wonder if there isn’t another way, the first problem they have is that they tend to have one topic, the car so let us take of the top of my head Audi, they can only write about Audi, there is only so much news about Audi, so many press releases and updates to ranges/models or motor sport news.

So off the top of my head and as I suggested when I met one of the PR guys for a car company, my complete guide to social media for the automotive target market. Now I did this in my spare time on the plane home one time when I was visiting a client site, I had two objectives focussing on the brand and in distributing the message without it seeming like a sales pitch. So here we go, nothing IT related, but it could so easily be adapted:

• A word from the head of the universe – product design, product marketing – but about their favourite product, not a buy one of these, or did you know finance is at 4% this month. “I was talking to customer about… or my favourite product is… and why – background”, what genuine feedback you have had and implemented as result
• The internal blog – what articles and content we’re preparing – a behind the scenes viewpoint – this could just be bullet points or appeals for comments/recommendations
• Heritage post what we’ve done, where we’ve come from, where we are going to, this can be crucial for newer entrants or companies entering the new markets, which leads to
• Our USP, or perceived USP, we’re proud of our achivements which shows our attention to detail, our delivery and our industry leading….
• Our recommended drives – our non apologising articles taking a car each month driving a reasonable distance, travelling a published route which exposes the possiblities and can cross link with partners – we drove to Devon in (insert car and relative fuel economy as well as how wonderful the drive was) and stayed in this hotel
• Meet the owner – a brilliant way of making owners feel cherished, “he we love you, why did you buy our car”, I would be surprised if someone hasn’t got something positive to say, and you know what the negative can be so important for product feedback, and recognition, once people feel recognized their complaints can easily evaporate.
• Meet fellow owners, but in a relaxed way through the dealer network, look you own a whatever, come and meet twenty people that also own one, have some nibbles and some orange juice, great for the dealer, great for the brand.

The same thing could be so easily translated to most products/services, the aim is not to try and sell products, we have sales teams for that, this is the vehicle through which you gain feedback and keep the returning customer, keep the faith if you like.

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With this in mind we’ve been toying with a concept of the Bladewatch bundle. It’s vendor independent, by that I mean, we’d have to do one for Dell, HP and IBM, possibly others (but I confess that would involve a lot of work for the team including myself). At this point, it will be something that we may need to speak to the vendors about to avoid any conflict of interest, licensing concerns or avoid any issues of control. But let me publish Mike’s email which illustrates the issue perfectly:

“I look after four vendors servers for just the Windows platform as we have recently merged with another organization. This means that I now receive email notifications once a week saying that a recommended or critical release has been made by a vendor, the problem I have is it’s becoming white noise, and what I want is not so much the current driver and firmware set, the one released yesterday, I want a monthly or quarterly update pack which I carry around with me containing everything I need, and we can upgrade that every now an again. When I say everything though, I want firmware, diagnostics etc on multiple platforms not the generic support pack per vendor, I can do that myself.”

As I said, the aim for me, for us as a team is to get everything to a set level and from there we can then plan ahead and standardize on the next versions at a later stage.”

So, we called Mike and had a chat with him and from that combined with some effort on our part testing a few options and packs, came the concept of the Bladewatch HP bundle. Of course, it’s something we’d need to check that HP are ok with, it would be independent of HP and be mandated and managed by Bladewatch, using the test kit that we have in our labs. With Mike, with colleagues the bundle was set to include as an example:

Firmware for HP p class and c class blades, a series of DL and ML server firmware including Smart Array controllers and

ILO versions

Driver packs for say Windows 2003 both x86 and x64 as Mike stated

SmartStart iso with the firmware and and drivers

Something that Mike could download every quarter or every month, as he said on the phone if they log a call to the vendor to fix a problem and their server is out of date they can upgrade that server, and then the rest of the estate as part of an estate wide upgrade plan using a determined bundle of PSP and firmware versions. The thing for Mike is that the bundle has to apply to the whole estate, from is legacy kit, through to the current, and his aim is standardization, not compliance (from a vendor driver/firmware standpoint).

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I meet up with colleagues every now and again at the pub and over dinner to see what they are working on. It’s always interesting to see what point of the IT road the different organizations are on, how far they have got with their virtualization projects, what they are working on, how the IT function is changing and what the priorities are both in terms of BAU (business as usual or keeping the lights on) and projects.

A number of them had said that they were spending time on system upgrades, keeping everything in line with either their own in house standards or those of the vendors. These upgrade projects might be an IT initiated project, or as a result of another part of the infrastructure being changed requiring changes be made to the existing server estate, a new network, or 1GB Ethernet for example.

A couple of engineers, which means a couple of enterprises had recently switched from a managed service hardware support contract, with vendor engineers, gold stock and support contracts, (where the on site vendor engineers would track the server hardware estate) to what colleagues call the SMB support model. One in which they operate under the warranty concept, the front door formal approach of obtaining support, a real change in mindset and approach, one engineer remains horrified by the concept, regardless of how I explain or justify the concept.

(The following points are written in a world where we are ignoring the virtualization opportunities, with that defined, let’s move on.)

This approach has caused a number of things:

• The need to actually fully understand what hardware we have in what volumes – how many DL380 G1′s do we have and what are we doing with them, why are they not virtual, what operating systems are they running and how much longer are they remaining in service?
• Attribute an operational risk or value attached to a hardware platform, a model or an application – what platforms power my tier one systems, how can I make the maximum impact on stability on reliability to my tier one systems, and what ‘parts’ do I need to keep on site for those or maybe commit to a support contract just for those systems
• The flexibility with vendors tends to be that bit reduced. We now go through the front declared door, no longer can the phrase do you know who we are be used. The rules of firmware, of drivers and service packs are now applied – where as before, we could say to the on site engineers ‘it’s not firmware, can we replace the board’, the windows, the unix guys now need to understand their hardware, know about firmware and drivers, ensure that everything is in line. It always should have been, but keeping everything up to date when you start entering complex and high volume estates can become a full time job in itself from co-ordination and resourcing regardless of the tools that we have to achieve this.
• The operational support model changes, and you can sometimes get what could be perceived as strange behaviour on a purely financial or operational basis.
  • The engineer I met who was decommissioning 4xDL360G2s but keeping the 23xDL360G1′s, why? There isn’t budget to replace 23 servers, if one breaks, chances are we have a spare one on site, or we can take down the development DL360 for a while, but with 4 what you can get away with gets more complicated.
  • The best example of this though was the team working in Newcastle who took a disliking to a server vendors hardware and simply at every opportunity would decommission it, and keep the older servers online until they could get budget and sign off with another vendor.

It’s easy for me, for anyone to write what is best practice, what is the right thing to do, it’s all relative to you, where you are in your business and IT support model. What analysts, engineers and I dare say vendors might forget is that the if it still works standpoint still carries weight, why spend thousands to keep an IT engineer happy, of course there is the middle ground, the economic point where you should refresh to be getting the best value for money, to avoid what one manager had complained that he was forever on the server buying treadmill – IT had implemented a three year rule that on the second year of ownership a new server was scoped, provisioned and signed off, ready for the team to switch on to the new server, so he was forver paying maintenance and depreciation.

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I’ve posted pictures from the HP blogging event I got invited to, they are here, there are more here.

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My wife has become quite IT literate and has a passable working knowledge of some of the applications that I have worked with over the years, in fact this had led to a conversation we were having as I had just got called and she had answered the phone as I was driving.

“Hello, Martin’s phone…., no sorry he’s driving, I’ve answered the phone for him, can I take a message? The man says application….. which is tier 1 is down, can you dial on and look?” says my wife

Just say yes, we’ll be home in a few mins (we’d been to the supermarket) I reply.

So in grattitude for my wife answering my phone and to answer question which was when we hung up, what’s tier 1?

So in non geek or business speak, (as instructed by my wife), here we go:

1. Tier 1 is a platform which if there was an outage,  would be business impacting or (world ending) for example, the email, the file and print, the active directory (infrastructure) or important trading/reporting or customer facing applications (application) are down or service has been disrupted.
2. Tier 2 is a platform which if there was an outage would be impacting or potentially world ending event but one with which there is a work around, for example the team support documentation SharePoint site being down is disruptive, but hopefully work can continue for the time being. It may contain elements of the application or infrastructure platforms which are considered to be important but an outage does not cause customer facing or potentially damaging impact to our brand, our ability to do business or report statements to authorities.
3. Tier 3 is a platform in which if there was an outage would represent disruption, but it being unavailable would not affect our core businesses. These might be intranet or shared platforms which are not directly involved in the day to day activites, for example, the HR handbook, the ability to book holiday,the shift rota, that kind of things, the kind of applications or services that we can work around for several hours or days without the world ending.

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