Bladewatch.com

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110829xa.html

HP today announced HP VirtualSystem for VMware, a highly optimized, turnkey solution that gives organizations a virtualized infrastructure that speeds implementation and provides a foundation for cloud computing.

As virtualization has gained adoption, multitier network architectures, virtual sprawl, inflexible storage, unpredictable workloads and security concerns have increased complexity and limited broad deployment. To help midsize to large organizations address these challenges, HP VirtualSystem for VMware includes virtualized HP Networking solutions, HP Converged Storage, HP BladeSystem servers, HP Insight software with on-site installation services.

Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, HP VirtualSystem features architectural innovations and services that help eliminate virtualization complexity, consolidate IT infrastructure and improve performance, enabling clients to:

• Accelerate virtual machine mobility by up to 40 percent while doubling throughput and reducing network recovery time by more than 500 times⁽¹⁾ with the new HP FlexFabric virtualized networking solution;
• Cut capacity requirements by 50 percent, double virtual machine density⁽²⁾ and speed deployment with HP LeftHand and HP 3PAR Storage Systems;
• Improve virtual server operations with HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter™ Server, which alerts IT administrators and allows for remote troubleshooting and management;
• Align virtualization strategy and investments to business goals with consulting, planning, preintegration, deployment and support services from HP Technology Services and HP ServiceONE partners.

It’s great to read about HP’s continued innovation in the cloud and virtualization space, anything they can do to assist customers meet their needs for agility and enhanced functionality has to be a good thing, the announcements illustrate some impressive figures in terms of efficiency, I’m off to read up more.

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http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-dell-vmworld-083011.html

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 29, 2011 – Today at VMworld® 2011, Delland VMware jointly announced the availability of the Dell Cloud based on VMware vCloud® Datacenter Services designed to provide a seamless multi-tenant environment for running virtual systems. Dell is one of the first providers authorized to provide VMware vCloud Datacenter Services for enterprise-class, secure, public, private and hybrid clouds.

Today’s announcement is the first public and hybrid cloud offering by Dell and supports Dell’s strategy to provide customers next-generation computing solutions composed of hardware, software and services. Dell will also offer consulting, application and infrastructure services to help companies transform their legacy IT environment and integrate these cloud services effectively in their business.

Dell and VMware will provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) choice for customer organizations, hosting and outsourcing firms, system integrators and service providers. The offer provides automation, multi-level security and availability in order to manage on-demand capacity, workload scalability, or as a platform to respond to changing business needs more rapidly.

This is very cool and illustrates further movements towards infrastructure as a service as an ideal and a platform, it will be interesting to see how we align existing legacy platforms with these new agile and scalable offerings, I wonder how far away we are from application down a wire?

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http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-cisco-vmworld-083011.html

LAS VEGAS, Nev., Aug. 30, 2011 — Today at VMworld® 2011, VMware and Cisco announced new technology innovation and enhancements to their combined virtualization solutions that help customers accelerate their journey to the cloud. Expanding on a strategic relationship and engineering collaboration that spans more than four years, the companies, in conjunction with industry partners, unveiled a breakthrough in network virtualization that will broaden the mobility range of virtual machines across multiple datacenters and cloud environments. The companies also announced enhancements to several desktop virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions designed to boost scalability, security and performance.

Key Facts:

VXLAN: Network Virtualization Breakthrough

• Virtual Extensible Local Area Network, or VXLAN, is the next major step in the path towards logical, virtual networks that can be created on-demand, enabling enterprises to utilize computing and storage capacity for mission critical applications — wherever it’s available.
• For applications running in the cloud, IT managers need to control every user’s access to data and applications with logical networks for each instance of the application.  VXLAN will scale to meet the millions of logical networks required to run applications in the cloud with efficient utilization of network resources.
• VXLAN will also support applications running in hybrid clouds where compute capacity is delivered from pools of resources that may span across private and public clouds, VXLAN will offer a network encapsulation technique with segment identifiers for creating millions of logical networks and for enabling workloads to seamlessly move across datacenters and cloud infrastructures.
• These networking segments will support cloud infrastructures that support multi-tenants that require segmentation for added security and compliance.
• VXLAN, which has the support of multiple industry leading vendors, has been submitted for standardization at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and a draft of the VXLAN specification is available on the IETF website.
• VMware demonstrated the VXLAN technology during today’s VMworld general session keynote delivered by Steve Herrod, VMware CTO and senior vice president of R&D.  Additionally, during today’s Cisco Super Session, Soni Jiandani, senior vice president Server, Access and Virtualization Technology, will highlight benefits from this cloud innovation.

Anything Cisco and VMware can do to extend the possibilities of the virtual infrastructure, further convergence and platform agility or efficiency has to be good for the end user and industry alike. I’m off to check out the announcement.

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http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2011/08/steve-jobs-resignation-expect-commercial-fireworks-from-apple.html

Now then — that day has arrived. Steve Jobs has resigned from Apple. It is only right to point out that the chap has made a phenomenal difference to the planet. I wish him every success, in particular with his health.

Let’s get the full resignation text documented for posterity:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

My brother did a very good post about the announcement from Steve Jobs and his role within Apple.  What does the Apple management team need to remember, ‘emotion and the product’, that Apple have created a very effective marketing platform and framework for customer interactivity around their business and that they need to continue the ongoing differentiation on price, functionality and delivery to maintain their place above the rest of the vendors in the pc and mobile device space.

Why do I buy an Apple product?

• It works
• The styling is outrageously good
• I feel a part of something – the branding, the marketing is all geared around it being made for me, made to work for me, an empowerment device to my life, digital, both on and offline

What differentiates:

• Quality – both real and perceived
• Design and attention to detail
• Niche products with open markets – I am not segmented, my abc rating, my usage patterns do not mean I need product 1789F with the plus pack, it’s one of three carefully defined platforms which fit my lifestyle
• Ownership of the retail experience – I want a mac, I want a geek to sell me, it an enthusiast else I would buy and other vendors forgive me a beige box at PC World or Best Buy

What went wrong when Steve Jobs was away

• Product segmentation – too many models, to complicated a sales pitch
• Lack of defined strategies and businesses – what was Apple as a brand, as a delivery mechanism and an end user experience
• Perceived innovation and focus on lawsuits with other companies than investment in their products

The challenge?

How to further integrate the vendor be it Apple, Dell or HP into my digital lifestyle, to change the nature of the game from one of ‘selling computers’ to be a service provider, a lifestyle partner and an innovator, a vendor or service provider that gives me and ONLY me, the right set of products to meet my requirements, a set of tools to make me the consultant, the guy working in Starbucks by day, and developing iPhone apps or doing design at night through services like 99designs or freelancer.co.uk

I want someone to handle everything, the computer, the software, the network (broadband and mobile), the service provider (fix it or replace it when it breaks) and to keep innovating the services and offerings around me?  To set up www.luxurymotorcars.co.uk, my new blog I called Ewan, why couldn’t Dell or HP do it for me, host it on their servers with their software, their billing and their branding? Whether they outsourced it to Ewan or a guy working in Starbucks, what mattered was that it was the world I looked to my problem and the person or persons/vendors around me that I looked to first. For all those micro-businesses around us, the 2 man business with a phone, with a fax and an established customer base, where are the vendors? Where are the micro services, here’s a pc for £40 a month with support, with a free web site, using wordpress, with a flickr account paid for the year, with backups, with a guy you can call who’ll sit down and go through it with you. From here you can expand on your offering a free online store, an iPad or iPhone app, a virtual server or email system, again who does it is less significant to me as knowing who I call.

The next generation IT revenue is not in products, it’s not in service. It’s in being the guy that does it. It’s in being the guy that can say you need this, here is a portfolio of services in a bundle, the cost is £40 a month or whatever and it takes 5 minutes, 3 hours or four days to set up, but because the experience is so stunning you’ll never want to leave. It’s both capitalizing on the products and services that you can provide, with the ones that you can’t to be that guy.

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One of my colleagues sent me a text saying he was ordering ‘a few’ and said that this was brilliant, I promised him (Danny) that I’d do a post and as promised here it is:

http://www.serversplus.com/product.asp?s=SVHEW-PMS4TBNAS&utm_source=SP_Eshot&utm_medium=email&utm_content=msnas&utm_campaign=spt_msfreenas

This bundle gives you everything you need to build a 4TB NAS box, including the FreeNAS 8 bootable USB drive, perfect for installation in the internal USB port on the MicroServer.

FreeNAS is an Open Source Storage Platform based on FreeBSD and supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. FreeNAS 8 includes ZFS, which supports high storage capacities and integrates file systems and volume management into a single piece of software.

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http://www.oracle.com/openworld/register/packages/index.html?src=7013425&Act=226

You’re sure to discover new ways to optimize your systems, new solutions that will help you take your business to the next level, and new practices that will make you more successful in your job and in your industry.

It will be interesting to see what’s on the agenda for Oracle OpenWorld, I confess that I’ve never been to an Oracle event, I wonder if we will see coverage not only of the Oracle software offerings but announcements and further discussion of their hardware solutions, including their servers, storage and ExaData. I’m off to check out their official blog, will there be any talk about their virtualization offering? We’ll have to wait and see, It’s great to see that they have keynotes from Dell, EMC and InfoSys to name a few, anyone else thinking about attending? Email me to let me know.

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http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh082211-story01.html

Back in early May, I gave you what little information I had been able to gather up on the impending Power7+ and future Power8 processor designs and their possible announcement dates in Power Systems machines. The data was a little thin, and intentionally so on the part of Big Blue. But with Oracle kicking up a big fuss over Intel‘s Itanium processor roadmap, which the software giant is saying is a dead end, it looks like IBM decided it was time to be a more specific.

Not terribly more specific, mind you. Server makers and chip makers don’t like to make promises because business conditions change and issues crop up in reality that can cause a processor or server design and its schedule to diverge from the roadmap.

Check out this interesting article talking about the Power platform, it’s always interesting to read about the real alternatives out their and to examine the possibilities of what lies ahead, I’m off to read more and check out the IBM site for specific road-maps.

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

Rochester, MN (August 22, 2011) Hardcore Computer (www.hardcorecomputer.com), the industry’s most innovative computer design and manufacturing company, will showcase its Total Liquid Submersion technologies for data center management professionals September 11 through 14 in Orlando, Florida at Data Center World 2011. Hardcore Computer will highlight their Liquid Blade™ server in booth number 638.

The Liquid Blade™ high-performance server has been proven to significantly improve cooling efficiency and server reliability while reducing energy costs, maintenance expense, and facility spending in data centers. Named “Best Datacenter Innovation” at the 2010 Blade Insights Summit, Hardcore’s servers can save 80% or more on energy required for data center cooling, resulting in an overall potential energy savings of 50% or more.  Without the need for air handling equipment and with reduced infrastructure costs, new data centers using Liquid Blade servers can be built with at least 30% less footprint and capital cost than air cooled servers.

It will be great to see the Liquid Blade platform on display, I suspect there will be significant interest from consumers and vendors alike, not only to learn about the technology underpinning it, but to see it all put together, very cool, I hope to see some coverage on the Hardcore Computers site!

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110825b.html

HP has earned the Excellence in Service Operations certification from the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) for delivering superior technical support and services in North America.

This marks the fourth consecutive year HP has earned recognition for its commercial notebook and desktop PC support, and the third year in a row for consumer support, including both PCs and printers.

“HP is clearly committed to strive for excellence; it was apparent during the audit process and in the results HP achieved,” said Thomas W. Pridham, vice president and general manager, Organizational Development Services, TSIA. “We recognize that Excellence in Service Operations certification is an extra effort that HP makes in delivering on its commitment to customers.”

This coveted third-party industry recognition includes a comprehensive evaluation of customer-centric phone, field service and web service operations. Auditors from TSIA compared HP support operations against nearly 300 industry best practices, including executive commitment, talent management, support tools and technology, and operation metrics – plus such core components as strategy, marketing, assisted and unassisted support, and field service.

Well done to HP for the recognition, continued focus on delivery and client engagement not only when it comes to support call handling or effectively understanding requirements, but in real end user empowerment is the way forward, I’m off to read up more about it.

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http://www.albawaba.com/business/pr/red-hat-enterprise-virtualization-30-beta-now-available-389510

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the release of the Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, the next-generation version of the company’s end-to-end virtualization solution. With the release of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta, Red Hat previews new capabilities that build upon its industry-leading scalability and performance for both server virtualization and desktop virtualization use cases.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor technology have experienced strong momentum and support leading up to today’s 3.0 Beta release. Customers such as DreamWorks Animation and NTT Communications have announced that their cloud services and offerings are built using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. In addition, in collaboration with other industry leaders, Red Hat helped to establish the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) to promote KVM as an open alternative to proprietary virtualization solutions. The OVA has been well-received by the industry with significant growth in membership. Further, KVM has powered the majority of published SPECvirt 2010 benchmark results at www.spec.org, including the highest score and highest scale-up overall, clearly demonstrating its performance excellence.

It is great to see Red Hat investment and innovation of their virtualization offering for their Enterprise offering, I’m off to read up more about it.

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