Bladewatch.com

I got emailed this from the guys over at Peer1, it’s a map of the internet and it was very cool to see a graphical representation of the online world and it illustrates the range of connections, data centers and service providers all working together to provide the online experience that we have seen developed to what it is today. Going forward with cloud and with virtualization as well as the further developments in the social media space I wonder how this will change. As my device my smartphone or tablet makes me mobile and enables me to share my access does this extend the range, shape and reach of the internet? Do check it out.

Share and Enjoy

An email from George (we will call him):

Hi Martin,

A bit of a silly question but do blade servers have RAID array controllers or do they use those notebook drives, one of the guys in the office was saying he didn’t think they do. There are rumors head office are going to be sending some down for testing and it would be nice to know what’s different.

Thanks

George”

My reply:

“Hi George,

Great to hear from you. Blade servers come in a range of types and specifications, to answer your question yes and no. Some of the earlier blade servers used notebook hard drives and didn’t always have an array controller but that was back in the IDE days. These days the blade servers tend to have array controllers and the discussion tends to be more about whether you require hot swap disks or not, the hot swap ones being SAS disks like the ones you have on your existing rack servers.

To know the array controller model and the type of disks installed we would need to know more about the type of blade and model, but yes it will typically have a RAID controller.

Regards

 

Martin”

Share and Enjoy

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110223xa.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP today announced that Paycor Inc., one of the largest independently owned payroll processing service providers in the United States, has upgraded its data center to an HP Converged Infrastructure to increase its business agility and ability to deliver superior client services while the company continues to grow.

During its most demanding days, Paycor – which supports more than 19,000 corporate clients – executes 1.7 million transactions while processing nearly 130,000 paychecks.

To improve customer response time and support its growing business, Paycor needed to upgrade its legacy systems. After a review of solutions from IBM and HP, Paycor chose the eight-socket HP ProLiant DL980 G7 servers running Microsoft Windows® server and Microsoft SQL server database software.

It’s always interesting to see articles about convergence and equally to see how businesses are benefiting from technology through renewal or migration. The benefits of converged infrastructure are certainly exciting, being able to switch to wire once concepts, utilize the infrastructure capacity you have through allocating resources more efficiently can be a liberating experience both from an IT and a business concept – spending more time delivering projects and less time on the nuts and bolts, business transformation and empowerment is what it’s all about. Even switching from legacy systems can help reduce your support costs in both hardware and software, at the same time, offer more capacity and create more opportunities for what you can achieve with the infrastructure that you have, for example virtualization. I’m off to read more, do check it out.

Share and Enjoy

http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/press-releases/2011-02-24-dell-oem-momentum.aspx

Building on 12 years of success and growing customer momentum, Dell OEM Solutions today announced multiple new customers across the globe, bringing its total to more than 2,000 customers in various industries, including healthcare, industrial, information management, retail, communications and aerospace/defense. Dell OEM Solutions is a division within Dell that supports original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with customized services, support and technologies. The division has expanded its global reach in Europe, Latin America, the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region and the United States through customer acquisitions, tripled headcount and a new office opening in Tokyo, which will lead the divisions’ presence in the growing APJ market.

I was reading about Dell’s OEM division and have seen examples of their systems for numerous vendors, that they continue to supply vendor or operational specific solutions based on requirements illustrates the opportunities and drivers behind their business, very cool. Do check out this article, its an interesting read./

Share and Enjoy

http://topnews.us/content/233744-apple-discontinues-sales-xserve-rack-mount-servers

With Apple Monday announcing its decision to discontinue the sales of Xserve rack-mount servers, which the company launched nine years back, it is being assumed that the next product to face the axe will be desktop Mactintosh.

A comprehensive survey of Apple’s Xserve experiment reveals that a majority of the users of the Jobsian rack-mounted server apparently do not hold any grudges against Apple for announcing the discontinuation of the servers.

In some respects it’s a shame that Apple is discontinuing sales of their Xserve rack mount server, but then in some ways I had heard musings in this space and Apple need to focus on their revenues and their core business. I suspect that the Xserve product is one of those that you either bought into and loved, or one of those things that wasn’t quite your cup of tea and possibly for many not on the radar, though I remember one friend saying that their Xserve with their storage array was at one time one of the cheapest ways of providing shared storage, regardless it will be interesting to see if Apple has an alternative strategy, we’ll have to see.

Share and Enjoy

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/data_centers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218751&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

The latest technologies include a new offering for the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX), the Storwize Rapid Application Storage, and a pre-configured eX5 Blade System for database applications. IBM said the systems bring more efficiency to the data center to help improve systems management and achieve quicker response times for critical workloads.

I read this article when doing some research on IBM blades, its something I’m off to read up on, do check it out.

Share and Enjoy