Bladewatch.com

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110607xa.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP today extended its Hybrid Delivery solutions portfolio so enterprises can improve their agility and quickly respond to changing customer and citizen needs.

Hybrid delivery environments, which combine traditional IT infrastructures with private and public clouds, enable enterprise agility by using flexible delivery models to best meet changing market demands.

Recent research conducted on behalf of HP reveals that 95 percent of business and government executives believe agility is important to the success of their organizations. Investments in technology were viewed as a key factor to increasing agility in the next five years.⁽¹⁾

That HP continues its research and furthers innovation on its products and services to meet the business need through providing agile and flexible platforms for infrastructure using technologies like cloud, both in the public traditional sense, and the private or internal cloud has to be a good thing, the more innovation both technically and operationally, the more we can discuss best practice, opportunities and get the right mix of products and services to meet not just the provider but the range of end user communities that cross borders and markets or industries.

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http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/press-releases/2011-06-07-fluid-data-architecture.aspx

• New Dell EqualLogic FS7500 brings the first scale-out NAS and unified storage capabilities to the Dell EqualLogic platform providing up to 10 times more file share scalability than legacy unified storage offerings
• New Dell EqualLogic software to deliver support for Data Center Bridging over iSCSI; enhanced, automated load balancing
• Dell Compellent demonstrates 16Gbps Fibre Channel infrastructure interoperability
• Dell PowerVault MD3600f/MD3620f adds Fibre Channel to the PowerVault lineup

At its Dell Storage Forum customer and partner event, Dell today announced new solutions built on its Fluid Data Architecture to optimize cost, performance and protection as storage scales with a growing organization. New solutions include its first unified Dell EqualLogic platform, updated Dell EqualLogic software capabilities, a Dell Compellent demonstration of 16Gbps Fibre Channel, and the introduction of Fibre Channel on its PowerVault product line.

These solutions represent a milestone in Dell’s vision for a Fluid Data Architecture designed to help customers efficiently and flexibly manage data. Dell is uniquely unencumbered by legacy storage technologies and rigid philosophies that do not support customer needs in the Virtual Era. Instead, Dell is focused on the development and acquisition of storage intellectual property that delivers productivity and efficiency gains for highly-virtualized data centers.

It’s great to see Dell’s innovation and continued investment in their Fluid Architecture to improve their offerings in the storage virtualization and consolidation space, it will be interesting to read up more about their innovations in their EqualLogic and PowerVault platforms, I’m off to read up more.

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http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/34704.wss

Armonk, NY, USA - 09 Jun 2011: IBM today announced new high performance computing (HPC) cloud offerings to help clients tackle advanced  scientific and technical computing workloads like analytics, simulations for product development, climate research and life sciences.

Today, many organizations operate with separate pools of high performance computing systems. The HPC cloud offerings from IBM will allow clients to link computing resources across their organizations into a single, high performance, private cloud while providing system administrators the flexibility to set priorities based on business or technical needs.

In order for cloud computing to be cost efficient for scientific use, clouds must be optimized for scientific applications, according to a paper written by Lawrence Berkeley Lab as part of its Magellan Project. IBM is currently the only major vendor to offer a private cloud solution tuned for HPC users.

By knitting disparate systems together into one centralized resource, clients can gain easier access to more computing that can be used to support their most important business priorities. For example, instead of segmenting computing resources by department, life sciences organizations can now pool systems from across the organization and devote them as needed to their most pressing, intensive projects like drug discovery or analysis of massive amounts of genomic data without the need to seek outside resources.

Extending their high performance cloud offerings not only creates opportunities for IBM, it also drives innovation of hpc in the cloud space, and also creates opportunities as research organizations and institutions realize the potential of hpc solutions using cloud technologies, and more importantly make some projects possible as a result of the reduce acquisition or start up costs through the cloud delivery mechanism, pay on use. That I can pay on use, avoid the initial capex costs and barriers to entry might create further opportunities for research, further discoveries and further adoption of hpc and cloud technologies alike which has to be a good thing for both vendor and end user communities.

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http://www.hardcorecomputer.com/about/news/index.html

Rochester, MN (May 31, 2011) – Chad Attlesey, president, CTO and founder of Hardcore Computer, Inc. (www.hardwarecomputer.com), announced today that that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued three patents in his name for a total of six in the United States and one in Japan to date.

No. 7905106

“Case And Rack System For Liquid Submersion Cooling of Electronic Devices Connected In An Array”

No. 7911782

“Liquid Submersion Cooling System”

No. 7911793

“Case And Rack System For Liquid Submersion Cooling of Electronic Devices Connected In An Array”

With Attlesey’s patents, Hardcore Computer continues to be the dominant leader and pioneer in liquid submersion cooling for computers. The company submerges all of the heat-producing components of its computing systems, which allows these systems to more effectively and efficiently remove heat. Heat is the greatest barrier of performance and reliability in electronics. Because Hardcore’s Core Coolant® is 1350 times better than air by volume at heat removal, liquid submersion technology has significantly better thermal management than air cooling resulting in optimal performance and improved reliability.

As we see more vendors adopt technologies to reduce both their operating costs and improve their systems efficiency, we see further investment in technologies such as liquid cooling and protection via patents, it’s great to read more about Hardcore Computers’ innovations, I remain a fan of their platform, and see what further innovations we will in the near future from Hardcore in liquid cooling, as well as those in the marketplace.

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Got a phone call from a colleague who’s started at a medium sized business outside London, their Windows 2003 cluster was rather unresponsive, the resources were in a hung state trying to come online to their BCP node and everything was stuck ‘online pending’, “It’s stuffed, any ideas”

It was at this point I sent him my basic cluster steps, now what you do in your situation will depend on your business and levels of comfort.

• First steps check the event logs – system and application, look for any specific error messages.
• Check the cluster log – this is usually set and lives in c:\windows\cluster\cluster.log – it logs what’s going on from a cluster perspective
• If you use EMC SRDF/C.E or GeoSpan – Check c:\program files\emc\symapi and look at the logs or use the GeoSpan/EMC SRDF/C.E tool to see what is happening from a storage perspective
• Follow standard Bladewatch.com rules – if in doubt, call it out, to your service provider, your vendor or service partner

Basic steps to restore service

Shut down the inactive node – the one from which you are trying to fail over

Reboot node with hung resources.

Steps to restore service with further troubleshooting

Shut down the node which is not in use – if possible set the cluster disk driver and the cluster service to disabled before hand

Shutting down the inactive node and disabling the cluster disk and cluster service will unlock any locks and should force the services back online.

Now reboot the active node which is unresponsive – the services should come back online to this node

Steps to restore and troubleshoot issue- it’s broken but there is time to play

If you’re using EMC – RUN EMCRPTS – it gathers all the logs and as a support tool is stunning (on both nodes)

On node one set cluster disk driver and cluster service to disabled and reboot

Wait for it to come back online

On node two set the cluster disk driver and cluster service to disabled and reboot

Let the cluster nodes settle

On both nodes we should now at least see the disks we expect on both nodes, we have in effect set it back to default.  Now we need to restore service.  On node A, set cluster disk service to system, set cluster service to automatic (or manual for more control) and reboot

The node should reboot and with the cluster service start, take ownership of the nodes and resources. Once the services have come online

On node B set the cluster disk service to system and the cluster service to automatic (or manual for more control and reboot)

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http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-hp-virtualsystem-060811.html and http://www.hp.com/go/discover

LAS VEGAS, Nev., June 8, 2011 — Today at HP DISCOVER 2011, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced a new collaboration with HP on turnkey solutions to simplify and accelerate virtualization for customers on the journey to cloud computing. Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new HP VirtualSystem solutions will be integrated, pre-tested IT infrastructure stacks delivered as appliances that will help improve business agility, lower costs and enable cloud computing for enterprise customers of all sizes.

The new appliances will include optimized, turnkey virtual infrastructure and end-user computing solutions that deliver a full compute stack consisting of server, storage, networking and services from HP and leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure and management software from VMware. Offered in three scalable deployment options that are “right-sized” for customers, HP VirtualSystem solutions with VMware technologies will enable significant savings in deployment time for customers, helping them focus on more strategic projects for their organizations.

So it’s the HP Discover event in Las Vegas, however due to a number of reasons I wasn’t able to attend it this time, however there is some great content covering everything from their SuperDome, through to their networking, blade and Converged Infrastructure solutions, with great coverage of the different features of the event here. Do check it out, it looks like a great event!

There was the announcement above talking about the HP/VMware collaboration to improve their offering of virtualization and cloud technologies, making the technologies more accessible and scalable which has to be a good thing for their customers, the market place and competition alike, I’m off to read up more.

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http://www.ciscolive.com/

Been thinking about Cisco Live and what will be covered this year, I’d love to see some content, discussion in the UCS space covering not only best practice, innovation but also customer success stories and how customers are using the platforms, I also wonder if we will hear any more about convergence or wire once technology, providing network and storage down the one pipe, reducing cost and complexity of the network, we’ll have to see. Do check out their site for more information and be sure to register, the earlier you register the better.

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