Bladewatch.com

http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/press-releases/2011-1-31-dell-ut-entrpreneurs.aspx

Dell and the University of Texas Empower Young Social Entrepreneurs

• The University of Texas at Austin is accepting entries for the 2011 Dell Social Innovation Competition through Feb. 14, 2011
• The Dell Social Innovation Competition is open to university students worldwide who have groundbreaking ideas to improve areas of critical human need
• More than $100,000 in prize money will be awarded to turn innovative social ideas into a new business or non-profit organization

Dell and the University of Texas at Austin’s RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service are working together for the fifth consecutive year to help fuel the entrepreneurial spirit of the best and brightest young minds with the 2011 Dell Social Innovation Competition .

This is very cool and it will be interesting to see what ideas, what services and solutions we receive as a result of this announcement, well done Dell, do check out the article for more information, I’m off to read up more about it.

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Microsoft should be releasing their security patches for February, as we often publish be sure to check what’s in scope for your environment and apply the updates to some test/non production systems before going on to live, as having the latest drivers/firmware and security patches/service packs will be the first question when logging a call:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms11-feb.mspx

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification issued: February 3, 2011
Microsoft Security Bulletins to be issued: February 8, 2011

This is an advance notification of security bulletins that Microsoft is intending to release on February 8, 2011.

This bulletin advance notification will be replaced with the February bulletin summary on February 8, 2011. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

To receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft Security Bulletins are issued, subscribe to Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft will host a webcast to address customer questions on the security bulletins on February 9, 2011, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the February Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

Microsoft also provides information to help customers prioritize monthly security updates with any non-security, high-priority updates that are being released on the same day as the monthly security updates. Please see the section, Other Information.

There appear to be twelve updates this month applying to Office and Windows, so do check the Microsoft site tomorrow or the webcast.

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I got an email from one of the small businesses owners I know, he had to replace a failed disk and he had submitted the report, the summary is below:

“Hi Martin,

They’ve said that the bios is out of date and to run the online firmware update and then reboot, will the online thing take long and does it cause the server to go down?

Cheers

Bill”

My reply is below:

The online updates take about five minutes max, and are perfectly safe to do and very rarely cause the server to go offline or have any problems, the only thing you have to be careful with is the array controller updates, they can reduce the system performance until the server is rebooted and the firmware applies itself.

Download the file(s), run it and when it says reboot, either press the ok to reboot or reboot the server when you’re ready, though technically I wouldn’t leave the server without rebooting it for long, it’s just not good practice.  I have run the system update, said no to the reboot and then run the array update, said no to the reboot, run the network firmware and then rebooted, the exact process depends on your comfort levels with the servers and the process of upgrading the firmware, as with drivers, firmware and applications if it asks to reboot and you’re not sure, just reboot, you wont cause any problems.

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We had a problem with one of our BL460c blades trying to upgrade from driver pack 7.90 to the latest one 8.60, on Windows 2003 x64, basically the network card driver was too out of date to upgrade straight to the latest version.  The work around isn’t overly complex, the driver itself was 3.4, I wanted to upgrade to 5.2, the process which worked for me and is on the HP Support site, is to upgrade to 4.6, then to upgrade that and then apply 5.2 (part of PSP 8.60), anyway it’s all here, on the HP site.

The problem only highlighted itself when I was playing around with the blade and decided to upgrade from the PSP 7.90 to version 8.60, and the network card driver failed to install, I rebooted as it asked me to and all was fine. I then upgraded the system/array/nic and ilo firmware, then tried to reinstall the specific driver from the PSP (and re-ran the PSP) but both failed. I then did some searching online, the fix to save you any trouble is as follows:

Install version 4.616 driver and reboot (I rebooted anyway)

Install version 5.222 which is currently the latest version included with the PSP 8.60

This url explains it all wonderfully.

You’ll either get: HP Virtual Bus Device installation requires a newer version. Version 4.6.16.0 is required.

Or if you double click the HP Network Configuration Utility, it mentions that the driver (3.4xx) is too old to work with the utility.

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http://www.neverfailgroup.com/

READING, UK – 2^nd February – J O Hambro Capital Management (JOHCM), a boutique investment house working with high net worth individuals and institutional investors, today announced that it has deployed the Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite to address high availability and disaster resiliency across 16 critical and bespoke applications including Blackberry Enterprise Server and Microsoft Exchange. With Neverfail, JOHCM has reduced its disaster recovery (DR) window from six hours to just minutes, meeting the demands of its corporate client portfolio as well as the expectations of private investors from James Hambro & Partners LLP (JH&P), a sister company which manages the wealth of private investors and charities.

The availability of IT systems has always been a priority for JOHCM, particularly as traders and customers rely on regular interactions to build investment portfolios and manage capital growth. After virtualising its primary datacenter in 2009 the business deployed VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager^TM (SRM) to provide disaster recovery for six critical applications. Following the significant growth of JOHCM and the launch of JH&P, it was decided that the original failover time objective of six hours was no longer sufficient. With increasing numbers of clients and assets to protect, failover within minutes became a key requirement, and after reviewing a variety of alternative options with managed services supplier, Selection Services, JOHCM selected Neverfail due to its ability to provide immediate failover within an attractive overall cost model. The application-aware approach combined with a bandwidth-friendly deployment architecture provided a durable business continuity solution which could support seamless failover of the business’ bespoke applications and critical systems. These include key collaboration tools such as Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry as well as a critical internal information portal built on Microsoft SharePoint and SQLServer.

There are a range of different high availability services and products on the marketplace, ranging in levels covering everything from the infrastructure to the application, with or without automation, as this example illustrates, finding the right solution for your business is what matters, as one server manager had told me: “a simple list of servers in a spreadsheet with name, application and location was what mattered, everything else was noise – I need to know where things are so that if we need to power the data center back up for example, I know where the dns, the active directory and infrastructure servers are so we can power everything up in the right order”.

High availability can mean different things to different people, it might be something as simple as a cluster, or log shipping, a backup ESX or Hyper-V server, not all businesses and technical requirements are the same, simply switching to a cloud based solution does not mean you have to consider your requirements any less, there should still be a list of applications with at least an understanding of the impact if we lost service to that application or suite of applications. I’m off to read up more about Neverfail, I met their guys a few months back, it had some interesting features.

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http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20110202-305056.html

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—February 2, 2011—NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) technical experts and industry leaders will be on hand for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference 2011, and they will also participate in a panel discussion and tutorial at the Ethernet Technology Summit in February 2011.

Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference and Exhibition
NetApp will exhibit at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference and Exhibition (HiMSS) 2011, February 20–24, 2011, in Orlando, FL. HiMSS is the largest technical exhibition in the healthcare IT industry, offering a complete collection of educational sessions and networking opportunities. NetApp’s technical experts will be on hand to discuss powerful solutions that help customers increase efficiency, securely exchange patient data, and reduce the cost of healthcare. NetApp will be at booth #4073. For more information, visit www.himssconference.org.

It will be interesting to see what NetApp will be discussing and highlighting at both the healthcare exhibition and the Ethernet Summit, whether there will be any talk about data de-duplication, over convergence of san and storage, of using NetApp as part of a virtualization solution with blade technology, or how we can be more efficient with our storage both from a financial and an operational standpoint, particularly as the volume of storage that is ‘kept online’ continues to grow. We’ll have to see, in the meantime, the more scalable and adaptable we can make the platforms, the more we can empower business transformation and create opportunity, great news for technologists and business users alike.

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http://www.esilo.com/

JUPITER, Fla., February 1, 2011 –eSilo, a leading provider of comprehensive online data backup, storage solutions and data management services, today announced SiloSphere™, a groundbreaking global backup and disaster recovery software technology designed and optimized for the era of cloud computing, offering midrange users for the first time enterprise-class functionality and performance typically reserved for the Fortune 1000.

Today’s backup software is unsuited to meet the local and remote office needs that geographically dispersed infrastructures now demand.  SiloSphere was built on the philosophy that backup is merely a means to an end with data recovery being the ultimate objective.  By tailoring a solution that accounts for the needs of remote backup, archiving and recovery, SiloSphere allows businesses from the midrange to the enterprise to take full advantage of cloud computing’s potential for the first time in a single comprehensive package.  SiloSphere’s proprietary global architecture including Reduplication™ data rehydration, Backive online backup and archive storage and Recover Assure™ data deduplication makes SiloSphere the most compelling solution on the market today.

I was doing some reading up on different backup technologies and this looks interesting, anything that we can do to make complex and diverse solutions be accessible and manageable in terms of backups and restores has to be a good thing, I’m off to read up more.

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http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2501696.mspx

Executive Summary

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in all supported editions of Microsoft Windows. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to cause a victim to run malicious scripts when visiting various Web sites, resulting in information disclosure. This impact is similar to server-side cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. Microsoft is aware of published information and proof-of-concept code that attempts to exploit this vulnerability. At this time, Microsoft has not seen any indications of active exploitation of the vulnerability.

The vulnerability exists due to the way MHTML interprets MIME-formatted requests for content blocks within a document. It is possible under certain conditions for this vulnerability to allow an attacker to inject a client-side script in the response of a Web request run in the context of the victim’s Internet Explorer. The script could spoof content, disclose information, or take any action that the user could take on the affected Web site on behalf of the targeted user.

Do check out this announcement regarding a vulnerability report regarding Microsoft Windows and see if it affects your infrastructure or applications, as ever do apply any changes to test or development systems before applying to live to avoid outages or issues to your end user community.

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http://blade.org/bladeU-press.cfm

Piscataway, NJ January 31, 2011 – Blade.org, the industry leader driving market innovation in blade-based solutions, today announced Blade.U, a new technical and educational initiative exclusive to members of the organization. Administered by Blade.org, Blade.U has the mission to promote the value of blade server technologies and solutions to small and mid-sized businesses in new and emerging markets throughout the world. Blade.U activities take the form of technical presentations from Blade.org member companies held in conjunction with various IBM road shows spanning the globe. Blade.org members APC by Schneider Electric, Brocade, Emulex, Intel, and QLogic will each present their products and technologies during IBM’s The Evolution of the Datacenter road shows beginning on February 17 in New York City. After visiting several North American hubs, these road shows will extend to countries with strong emerging IT markets, specifically Australia, China and Russia for 2011.

It’s great to see Blade.org continue to the blade message, exploring the solutions and opportunities that exist in the blade platform for large and small businesses, a platform that can be transformational to your business, not just in ease of deployment and management, but in terms of volume. That different members will discuss the opportunities and technologies during these road shows is to be praised, equally that the events extending to the emerging markets, I love the concept. I wonder what type of content will be discussed and presented, off the top of my head I would love to see:

• Business benefits of the blade platform
• Making blades work in your business – case studies and examples (virtualization/compute farms or even application servers)
• Blade best practices and usage cases combined with the different networks and storage options – this could be cooling, or talking about integrated switches working within your existing operational constraints – the build process, the support processes, patching etc.

I’m off to read up more, I wonder if they’ll be posting any of the content online or on youtube?

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