Bladewatch.com

http://www.bladewatch.com/servers/ or this ebay auction.

I have been discussing the state of the server estate for some years, writing a few guides introducing concepts like ILO, discussing virtualization best practices, and interviewing colleagues in the enterprise and SMB space, from the CIO looking to reduce his support costs, to the server guy trying to get that blade enclosure working for their next virtualization project. There are some common themes and common concerns throughout the SMB and enterprise space, both may want the same thing for different reasons, for the SMB their first server might be a two or three year old box ‘something reliable’, for the enterprise they might just need a part which their supplier hasn’t got in stock, or to act as the bridge between now and when they can migrate their application or services off that box, with that in mind, Bladewatch is beginning a service. It’s small to begin with, and we are not going to oversell ourselves or make promises that we can’t keep. It’s a network kind of thing, that is we’re not necessarily looking to make money through it directly, we’re aiming to solve problems first for our end readers.

We work with a few local small businesses and we also have a few resellers that we have worked with in the past, as part of this we managed to obtain some HP Proliant DL385 G1 servers. It is a great server, they aren’t new, but they are extremely reliable and based on AMD’s Opteron processor, with plenty of room for disk space, for memory expansion, an ideal server for running an application a web site, or your email platform, equally for testing VMware. We’ve recently just added them to ebay, but we’re doing it in a different way, a Bladewatch style.

So what differentiates us from any other ebay or reseller? Well we aren’t planning to sell in volume or necessarily live in this space, the aim of the game very much is to carefully make the right purchases when necessary in order to meet end user requirements, and as such, we’re offering some unique things.

Every server sold goes through the following:

• Upgrades to ensure it’s fit for purpose – simple things like a DVD drive, two power supplies, enough memory and disk space to get you started
• Diagnostics run and verified
• Operating system installed, driver pack loaded and online diagnostics and logs checked for errors
• System wiped and reset to factory default so it’s ready out of the box
• SmartStart and the PSP downloaded on CD ready again so you can plug in your Windows/VMware CD and press go
• Firmware upgraded to the latest version – System bios / Array / Network and iLO

We would love to hear your comments and suggestions on this, when we spoke to one CIO about the idea he said great, as long as you take amex and he then told us why:

“I’m in, we had a server die last month our support provider wanted £1000 for a system board or they offered an engineer on site for about half that plus parts, we said no and told our customer, sorry game over, and spent weeks migrating the application off. What neither realized was that we had the money but couldn’t economically pay that much, we would have paid for a server or the parts for say £300 or so, if had we known someone we could trust”.

That’s where hopefully Bladewatch as a site, as a community and a company can help, (with no hard sales), we’ll update the page for the servers we purchase every now and again, in the meantime if you are after anything, let us know and we’ll see what we can do to help, as we said, it’s about end user engagement and linking the dots, the more end users we help, the more people we on board to servers, the better for the community in terms of engagement and opportunity.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110224a.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP today announced it is participating with Business Matchmaking Inc., a not-for-profit corporation supporting procurement opportunities for small businesses, to launch the 2011 Business Matchmaking event series. Now in its eighth consecutive year, Business Matchmaking provides opportunities for small businesses to secure contracts from federal, state and local government agencies, as well as many Fortune 500 companies at key events and through an online network. In addition, the program offers education, training, counseling and resources. Through regional events held across the country, and in online sessions, Business Matchmaking has enabled more than 77,000 small business sales appointments resulting in more than $8 billion in contracts granted. All events are free to both participating small businesses and representative buyers. “HP is dedicated to enabling small businesses beyond technology with alliances, webinars, social forums, blogs and training to help them manage and grow their business,” said Michael Nordstrom, manager, Small and Medium Business Marketing – Americas, HP. “As a flagship sponsor for the past eight years, we continue to support Business Matchmaking because it successfully provides small businesses new opportunities to help them thrive.”

I love the concept and these kind of concepts like the blade.org events, where we’re directly speaking with people in the SMB space is exciting and great ways of creating opportunity and revenue for both those small businesses and the vendors alike. The more discussion and understanding we have together, the more opportunities to solve problems and create opportunities there are which has to be a good thing, it would be interesting to attend one and see what they’re like.

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http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/3926226/Gartner-Reports-Server-Sales-Up-Nearly-17-Percent.htm

Global server sales jumped 16.8 percent in terms of shipments last year while, in terms of revenue, they grew 13.2 percent, according to Gartner, a leading analysis firm.

Check out this post talking about server sales from Gartner, it’s always interesting to see what is going on in the server space, as well as those infamous leagues as to who has sold the most servers in specific segments and markets, regardless that your server, your IT works for your business, everything else is analysis, white noise so to speak, concentrate on whatever works for you, but keep in mind what others are working on, what others are doing and what you could achieve with all the new developments and innovations coming on stream through cloud, through virtualization and in the power/cooling space.

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http://www.finextra.com/News/Fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22305

The Exchange moved to halt trading in Sets and Setsqx at 07.54 and reverse or cancel trades affected by an apparent market data-related malfunction in the opening auction. By 09.30, trading remained at a standstill, frustrating brokers who could only sit and watch as European markets rebounded and UK fourth quarter GDP data was released showing that the economy contracted even faster than previously estimated in the last three months of 2010.

It’s an interesting article, outages whether it’s this business or another damage not only their direct revenues or profits, it’s the damage to reputation and image that can be ever so more impacting, regardless never to derive pleasure from such activities and understanding that these things happen, let’s move on.

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http://www.newswise.com/articles/grid-and-cloud-computing-meet-at-globusworld-2011

Newswise — (Chicago, IL) February 22, 2011 – Researchers, software developers, and cyberinfrastructure providers will convene at GlobusWORLD 2011 to see and experience new technologies at the intersection of grid and cloud computing. GlobusWORLD 2011, to be held April 11-13 at Argonne, near Chicago, will feature Globus user success stories, expanded software-as-a-service capabilities in Globus Online, updates on Globus Toolkit development, and sneak peeks into new features in the pipeline. For more information and to register, visit the GlobusWORLD web site (www.globusworld.org).

This does sound like an interesting event particularly as it discusses both the grid and cloud computing space, both platforms which continue merge as we start offering a range of services around the HPC and compute on demand space, as well as virtualization or applications down a wire so to speak. There are exciting times ahead and real opportunities for innovation, for transformation and revenue generation, not to mention making applications and services more accessible where they might not necessarily have been so before thanks to the economics involved, as we scale up the users the opportunities to reduce licensing costs, to pay on use create models of consumption at a lower entry cost, Office on demand so to speak, rather than the full edition so to speak, great for the user and the enterprise alike.

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http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Storage/Acer-Server-Storage-Appliances-Boast-AMD-Intel-Processors-494412/

Acer America announced a line of server and storage solutions across a broad range of usage models, including tower, rack, blade and multi-node platforms that are based on Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. The Acer server and storage solutions also support the release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Microsoft’s virtualization capabilities.

The Acer tower server (AT) line incorporates one or two processors to maximize compute capabilities with increased I/O and storage options, while the company’s rack server(AR) line feature up to four processors and are designed for flexibility by minimizing space requirements in rack server environments.

I saw this article talking about Acer servers. It’s great to see Acer continue the innovation of their server platforms including their blades, I haven’t read much about their blade infrastructure, it looks interesting, I’m off to read more about them, regardless, it’s great to see another vendor working on the innovation of blade servers as a platform, the more innovation and competition in the industry, good for the end user and the industry alike.

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http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/cloud-computing/3262199/cloud-adoption-will-create-90000-public-sector-jobs/

The adoption of cloud computing services in the public sector will lead to the creation of 90,000 jobs in the UK, according to new figures from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).

This may be good news for the public sector employees facing redundancy as a result of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, as well as the possibility of not being considered for employment by the private sector.

An interesting article talking about the opportunities in the cloud computing space for the public sector, do check it out. Cloud computing and sharing capacity could be transformational for public organizations, as well as the small medium business communities. What excites me as much as the concept for job creation, for technical innovation is the opportunities for revenue and business empowerment, that we can help end user groups, communities realize the benefits of the platform, to have the tools they need to deliver their services, to meet and exceed their end users expectations. Anything we can do to make both the technology and the platform more accessible has to be a good thing, that we might create the bridge between the organization looking for a particular service or part being linked with a new small business that’s come on stream, what could be better for the economy, for the platform both in terms of revenue and end user participation – very cool.

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I was on the Dell site the other night doing some research (in fact that’s where this post about the Lifecycle controller came about), anyway I was looking around and saw the ideastorm concept where you can make suggestions to Dell about their products and services. It was interesting reading them, I had a few thoughts with regards to my trusted Dell D430 laptop (the disk is not fast), but I love it otherwise.

Anyway, I have posted an entry on ideastorm. I’m not going to say what it’s about (not for any particular reason) it was great to see a reply – I love the concept, very cool and great to see Dell interact with their end users direct. My suggestion was in no way critical and indeed is not unique to Dell themselves.  Every time I meet any of the vendors I always mention a few of the fundamentals to remind them that as much as we love their products, we’re always up for making things that little bit easier.

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I got emailed by a Project Manager/Server manager asking for some advice, I’ve summarized his email to remove anything that might identify him at his request and we’ve changed the names and the data a bit again to protect privacy but the content, the concept remains the same, anyway check it out:

Hi Martin,

I’ve been given the task of upgrading all the drivers and firmware for this manufacturing company, and I wondered how you would go about it. When I speak to the server guys and the application teams involved I seem to get different signals, and I’m now at the point where we just need to start work in the next week or so, if you could put together some bullet points that would be great. I’ve enclosed some sample data so you can see where I’m coming from, do I start with development, do it by application or model? Are there specific risks?

Cheers

Fredrick

My response:

Hi Fredrick,

It’s great to hear from you, there are a number of options:

1. Schedule and action by application – take each application at a time and do there development systems then staging and production, complete it on an application basis can make the scheduling a little bit easier and managing the impact a bit easier, the only thing is that this can create a range of systems and issues to address.
2. Schedule by environment – do say all the development systems and then staging and production, this can be a very effective way as making changes to development can be a good way of testing and examining or understanding issues, and doing more due diligence testing before you move on to production.
3. Schedule by platform – take a selection of models and schedule those for upgrades, it can be easier to group similar models and get through for example the older or the newer servers first, the newer servers should have fewer updates and involve less risk for example.

My preference looking at your list would be to break it down into segments based on models, you mention that there are a few spare servers around should there be problems and that the older boxes should be getting replaced, regardless you have your objectives with this in mind:

• Schedule all the Compaq Proliants first – let us get the older ones out of the way first – the CPQ 1850s/4500s etc
• Next schedule all the Compaq/HP Proliant servers that are G2 or older – the DL380s, DL580s and DL360s as the bios versions share similarities and the driver packs similar
• Following on from that aim for the remaining HP Proliant servers – the DL385s, the DL380 G3s etc – they should be fine.

Why not by environment or application, numbers and complexity, it can often be easier to take a range of three or four models of servers which might only be 8 servers and arrange to have downtime for an hour or so to carry out the upgrades. Asking for downtime of the entire development platforms, or an entire application might make the process more time consuming and more difficult to achieve operationally and therefore delay further progress.Hope that helped, if you have any questions, do drop me a mail or give me a call.

Regards

Martin

The concepts I’ve outlined above are my own viewpoints, and could easily be transferred to other vendors, as with anything what works for me might be different for you and your business, do whatever works for you, and if you do have any comments or advice, do let me know.

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I was speaking with one my consultant friends, he had been sent in by a consultancy to help a medium manufacturing firm with the automation of their server and desktop/laptop builds, the current procedures were too time intensive and lacked flexibility. I was interested to hear that the consultancy had been giving an interesting brief:

• Deliver a build mechanism compatible with our existing operation systems/deployment mechanisms
• Deliver a next generation platform and build which could be evolved and easily maintained

Why the interest? I was chatting away asking what technologies they were using and why, what operating systems were to be supported, when my friend mentioned “we’ve got to support Windows 2000 you know on the legacy project, it’s rubbish”, at that point the conversation interested me. It was interesting to note that the CIO who had defined the deliverables absolutely wanted his guys as he had apparently put it using their time wisely, being empowered to deliver improved server and client builds going forward, but that he still wanted to be able to rebuild there old servers or clients with the old operating system build so that if the system broke, he wasn’t as he had apparently said in the meeting “searching for cd’s and being reliant on the server guy who’d been there the longest having some old cds or build media”, that he wasn’t told “you need to buy a new machine” when that was an option in the here and now – for example where the application had not yet been upgraded to Windows 2008.

The deliverable bullet points (which I have summarized dramatically):

• Client build – Windows XP and Vista Business (legacy) and Windows 7 – to support four different types of client, two laptops and two desktops
• Server build – Windows 2000 and 2003 (legacy build) and Windows 2008 to support six types of Proliant, three deemed as ‘legacy’ and three ‘current’ for Windows 2008.
• Both the legacy and future build processes supported for virtual equivalents so that we can deploy virtual equivalents if necessary.

In both cases, systems deemed as legacy were not supported or deemed as compatible or upgradeable to the new operating system to simplify the build platforms and support.

I suspect it’s a challenge which many organizations or IT teams are discussing at the moment, how to continue moving forward, support the latest options, but continue to be able to support those end users or customers that haven’t quite got up to date, though it will depend on where you are in your IT and business life cycle.

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