Bladewatch.com

http://www.violin-memory.com/news/press-releases/violin-memory-sees-ten-fold-growth-in-emea/

Nov. 28 — Violin Memory, provider of the world’s fastest and most scalable Memory Arrays, has just announced an 10x quarter on quarter growth in EMEA sales.

Both revenues and on-site customer POCs (Proof Of Concept) have exploded into multi-million euro opportunities in the last two quarters. This growth has been matched by the investment and recruitment of its EMEA field sales operation. By year-end Violin will have 20 field sales employees & delivery capability in UK & Ireland, Austria, Germany, France, Nordics and Benelux, with additional resource, expected to reach 50 in 2012, to support the remaining EMEA territories.

The technology does sound cool, and I wonder if combined with the right combination of technologies could deliver an extremely fast solution configured to utilize these memory arrays, I’m off to read up more.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/IBM-Brings-Windows-to-the-Mainframe-298629/

IBM has made good on its promise to deliver Windows integration with the IBM mainframe via the zEnterprise System.

When IBM introduced the zEnterprise in July 2010, the company also announced plans to deliver additional general-purpose blades for the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension including IBM System x-based blades running Linux in 2011. IBM also suggested it would support Windows, and in April 2011 it confirmed its plans to deliver Windows support on z/Enterprise.

IBM says this capability is a first of its kind and is a strategic, demand-driven move by Big Blue. As of Dec. 16, this new technology enabling IBM zEnterprise System users to integrate Windows applications into the mainframe environment will become available.

I can certainly see the appeal of being able to deploy a holistic solution to host your Windows and Mainframe requirements, it will be interesting to see what the response and sign up to the new rnage of zEnterprise platforms is. I’m off to read up more about the announcements and Mainframe as a platform – http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/index.html

When walking around HP Discover in Vienna, I stopped in to speak with Violin Memory, they’re an organization that I have been meaning to speak to and heard quite a lot of buzz about from colleagues across the industry. They offer a series of solutions using DRAM and solid state disk technology for high performance computing requirements including database, middleware and virtualization.

They had one of their arrays on display and I had a brief chat, so I’m off to read up about their offerings in the Oracle space – http://www.violin-memory.com/applications/oracle.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1383194

Helping customers and partners reach the cloud faster, Oracle announced the Oracle Solaris 11 Training and Certification Programs from Oracle University.

Oracle Solaris 11 is the first Cloud OS, designed to meet the security, performance and scalability requirements of cloud-based deployments and allow customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications in private, hybrid, or public clouds. For more information, click here.

Oracle Solaris 11 Training includes the most up-to-date curriculum from Oracle Solaris experts to give customers and partners the knowledge and skills they need to efficiently deploy Oracle Solaris 11 and capitalize on its latest features.

The Oracle Solaris 11 Training courses are designed to help expand the skill-set and expertise of system administrators managing data centers with Oracle SPARC and x86 servers, storage and engineered systems.

The new courses available include What’s New in Oracle Solaris, previewing the latest innovations in Oracle Solaris 11; Transition to Oracle Solaris 11, designed for experienced Oracle Solaris 10 system administrators; and Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration and Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced System Administration, intended for new Oracle Solaris or UNIX® system administrators.

Anything vendors can do to better empower their clients and partners, whilst preparing them for use in next generation platforms including cloud has to be a good thing. I’ll need to read up more, I wonder if this will include making best practice and support information more accessible to the end users, we’ll have to see.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/29/cisco-google-ventures-vmware-put-8-5m-in-data-center-automation-startup-puppet-labs/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Puppet Labs, a data center automation company, has raised $8.5 million in Series C financing from new investors Cisco, Google Ventures, and VMware. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners also participated in the round. This brings Puppet Labs’ total funding to $16 million.

A number of colleagues have suggested that I look at Puppet Labs tools, this article mentions the venture capital and interest from the likes of Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware. I’ll need to read up more.

There are many build solutions, many levels of automation and interactivity all aimed at emotive subject of the one click deployment, in some cases, with the right technology, the right processes and investment, we are indeed there, for many we aren’t.

For many we rely on spreadsheets and provisioning forms to meet requirements for billing and inventory management, some way of capturing for IT to know what has been requested and built that week, that month or year, inside or outside of the SLA.

When I write spreadsheet it could be something as simple as the Project Manager, the business guy logging a call or sending an email requesting a new server be built. For the moment, I’m looking at addressing the virtual server space, this is the space where we have deferred success, we can indeed build virtual servers typically in an hour or much less, however our internal processes don’t work like that, the change process, the data gathering and the cross charging mean a form of some sort has to be filled in.  I’ve made an example below.

So what am I doing, what are we working on?  Well I’ve called it buildmyvirtual. It’s a simple web based tool which works from an XML template file, the user selects from pre-determined values to select the virtual machine they want, the specification they want, when the press submit, it then generates an XML input file.

Some notes

• The input file is user editable meaning you can specify the disk sizes, the memory or operating systems your IT department supports.
• The export file contains the values selected from that file allowing you to script this into your build mechanism as a template, as an input file using whatever language you choose, Powershell, C or anything else.
• The application is distributed for the end user to use on a not for profit basis as an end user, ideally if you’re going to sell it on and make millions you would buy me a cup of tea.

So what do I provide or support?

Well it’s end user configurable, I will make sure that you can take the zip file that will be made available put it on a Linux web server or a IIS webserver with PHP support, then you can edit the html file to have your company logo, your team name and then edit the xml so it meets your corporate standards. If it breaks, then you will need to fix it or download it again. We can however put you in touch with our developer who can customize it for you.

So what is it not

It’s not a provisioning tool. It is a bridge between olden days IT processes around requesting service or compute resource and the time at which automation and your in house processes have been improved.  It’s a branding tool, one which allows you to empower the user, free them from paperwork, and at the same time streamline the provisioning process by having just the information you need as an engineer to build the virtual machine.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-nov

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for November 2011.

With the release of the security bulletins for November 2011, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued November 3, 2011. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

With many organizations trying to keep their infrastructure secure whilst working within complex operations, specific timelines, I  suspect some are just completing their patching exercises in time for December’s announcement. With that in mind, HP/Microsoft anyone, patching as a service, so that I can have my teams carry on the plethora of changes and scheduled work that needs to get done outside of standard Microsoft Patch releases.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007108

Symptoms

• ESXi 5.0 experiences a delay when booting during the the software-iscsi step.
• After the boot process completes, the sysboot.log file contains entries similar to:

  [01:57:50.925338] sysboot: software-iscsi
  [02:28:22.330320] sysboot: restore-paths

I saw this whilst on the VMware site, do check out the announcement, it’s a fix to a specific issue relating to ESXi and iSCSI.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hp-bridges-human-information-and-extreme-data-to-drive-customer-insight-foresight-action-2011-11-29?reflink=MW_news_stmp

VIENNA, AUSTRIA, Nov 29, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — HP HPQ +4.49% today extended its Information Optimization portfolio with new solutions that help enterprises turn information and ideas into insights to drive better decision making.

An explosion of data from new sources is challenging traditional methods for storing and analyzing information. For example, only 15 percent of data is found in structured formats that computers understand.

Some interesting announcements today from HP building upon their experience with industry standard offerings to end user customers in the storage and backup space.  This includes the HP X5000 G2 Network Storage System which is based on industry standard blade servers, Windows Storage Server in a 3u format, with active/active clustering out of the box to support thousands of users on the highest configuration. Also to note is their HP B6200 StoreOnce Backup System which looks interesting, I’m off to read up more.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111123a.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

Hewlett-Packard Denmark today announced Maersk Line, the largest global shipping company, has signed a $150 million-plus infrastructure services agreement that will support the shipper’s global growth strategy.

Under the five-year agreement, HP will help Maersk Line become an Instant-On Enterprise by using HP’s cloud-enabled data centers and HP Workplace Services to optimize its technology infrastructure.

“Maersk Line operates in a competitive global industry that demands innovation to create the agile technology infrastructure we need to be a leader among our peers,” said Adam Gade, chief information officer, Maersk Line. “HP’s global scope combined with its proven expertise in standardizing technology across large enterprises will help us deliver greater value to our business and support our ability to remain the world’s most reliable container shipping company.”

It’s interesting to note that the solution is based on cloud-enabled data centers in order to deliver infrastructure with a focus on reliability and improved reliability. Aligning the business needs with the right range of services both bought in and self provisioned is one of the first steps to transforming the infrastructure and the possibilities for revenue generation, with the barriers removed, its then that we can identify the possibilities for new customers