Bladewatch.com

I was having a conversation with a PM who works in Edinburgh deploying servers for an enterprise, I was asking his views on some concepts and issues which I have been discussing with colleagues in the server and middleware space.  The market is changing, with Converged Infrastructure, with Instant-On-Enterprise, we’re aiming to reduce complexity, improve deployment times and agility of the infrastructure. The silos are therefore getting broken down, quoting my Project Manager colleague ‘what matters is good enough’, I don’t need a rocket scientist, I need someone with the following characteristics:

• Service delivery and business focused individual – someone who isn’t process bound
• Understands how my specific enterprise works – who does what, what the rules of engagement are
• Is familiar with the technology from an operational and a technical basis
• Owns problems and sees them through to completion.

It’s interesting, as we automate, as we reduce the complexity we need what I refer to the olden days traditional engineer, skilled in the technologies used, but at the same time, we need client facing and client conversation capable engineers that can not only aid in delivery of projects, of maintaining support, but also in aiding in identifying issues before they happen, illustrating what technologies we could be using or how by using the technology differently, we might achieve business goals.

At the same time, the PM wants more from the business:

• To be asking the right questions to our suppliers, our service providers and our clients
• Be engaged in the technology to understand what components make our services and our business
• Understand the concept of Service Level Agreements in partnership with the business needs – what backups do we need as opposed to ‘everything’ for example, or stating the 5×9 (99.999% availability) when what we actually need is a batch run and complete between Saturday 10am and 4pm.

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I’ve flown out to Vienna to attend HP’s Discover 2011 event. It will be exciting to see what HP announcements there are and to refresh our knowledge about what is going on in the industry, what their road map is and what range of technologies they have to aid their customers and the end user community.  I’ll be online through twitter, which you can follow me @martinmacleod, and I’ll also be blogging throughout the day.  I wont just be covering HP content, there is some other content that I’ve got to publish, so do keep in touch. If you’re walking about, I’m the guy with a legacy iPhone in a grey suit.

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http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-11-07/fujitsu_announces_supercomputer_that_can_scale_to_23_petaflops.html

TOKYO, Nov. 7 — Fujitsu today announced the global availability of the PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer, which is capable of scaling to a top theoretical processing performance of 23.2 petaflops (PFLOPS).

Combining high performance, scalability, and reliability with superior energy efficiency, PRIMEHPC FX10 further improves on Fujitsu’s supercomputer technology employed in the “K computer,” which achieved the world’s top-ranked performance in June 2011. All of the supercomputer’s components—from processors to middleware—have been developed by Fujitsu, thereby delivering high levels of reliability and operability. The system can be scaled to meet customer needs, up to a 1,024 rack configuration achieving a super-high speed of 23.2 PFLOPS.

By leveraging the new system, it will be possible to address societal challenges—including new drug development, disaster prevention, disaster mitigation, and other measures, to bring about a safe and secure society—and to pursue cutting-edge research, such as enabling the development and manufacturing of new materials without the need to make prototypes. This has the potential to help companies enhance their competitive edge.

It’s always great to see what achievements there are in the high performance space, this article is talking about Fujitsu’s progress and achievements with their FX10 supercomputer, I’m off to read up more.

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http://servers.cbronline.com/news/dell-enhances-poweredge-server-portfolio-with-new-amd-processors-231111

PowerEdge C6145 packs up to 128 AMD 6200 Series processor cores in 2U with shared infrastructure

Dell has enhanced its Dell PowerEdge server portfolio with new AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors for better energy efficiency and performance for enterprise applications, Web, private cloud and virtualisation.

The AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors is available with PowerEdge R715 and R815 rack servers, the PowerEdge M915 blade server and the ultra-dense PowerEdge C6145.

The Dell PowerEdge M915′s 4-socket AMD-based blade servers supports four high-performance AMD Opteron 6282SE processors, enabling it to outperform HP’s Proliant BL685c G7 blade servers by up to 8%.

Check out this article detailing Dell’s innovation of their PowerEdge platforms using the new AMD Opteron processors, this brings further enhancements in energy efficiency and performance, not to mention competition in the market place which has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up about the announcement on the Dell site.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111122xb.html

HP today announced “Odyssey,” a project to redefine the future of mission-critical computing with a development roadmap that will unify UNIX® and x86 server architectures to bring industry-leading availability, increased performance and uncompromising client choice to a single platform.

Organizations are challenged with increasingly stringent service-level agreements for their most demanding workloads, along with the pressure to be more efficient with their IT budgets and resources. They need the availability and resilience of UNIX-based platforms along with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of industry-standard platforms.

Using advanced technology across a common, modular HP BladeSystem architecture, HP is developing platforms to enable clients to choose the best environment aligned to their organizations’ needs without compromise, helping ensure investment protection for the long term.

Very cool, I wonder what range of technologies we will see as a result of this announcement going forward and if it will be mentioned at HP Discover 2011 this week. We’ll have to see, I’m off to read more.

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http://www.ca.com/us/news/Press-Releases/na/2011/New-CA-Cloud-360-Solution-from-CA-Technologies-Helps-Enterprises-Accelerate-Time.aspx

LAS VEGAS, November 14, 2011 — CA WORLD -– CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today unveiled CA Cloud 360, a new solution that provides enterprises with a prescriptive approach to validate and select which applications and business services are best suited for private, public and hybrid clouds or traditional models.

CA Cloud 360 offers enterprise CIOs the visibility, foresight and predictive intelligence needed to effectively create new cloud services in as little as three months. As a result, customers can build comprehensive, transformative and sustainable cloud strategies that deliver business services when and how the business needs at predictable cost, risk and return.

“Enterprise CIOs are at a crossroads, shifting their focus from traditional cost-cutting activities to delivering innovation and business value through cloud computing,” said Adam Famularo, general manager, Enterprise and Cloud Solutions, CA Technologies. “CA Cloud 360 gives customers the best mix of technology and in-depth experience they need to make informed decisions about the right service delivery models that directly align to their business initiatives. Ultimately, this solution allows our customers to focus on using the cloud for competitive advantage with rapid time to market of agile business services.”

Being able to manage and monitor the different stacks to provide a holistic viewpoint of the infrastructure and the application can be a transformational experience, anything the vendors can do to help their customers better understand their portfolio, tune the application and the infrastructure to meet service level agreements, to proactively identify and prevent issues has to be the way forward, I’ll need to read up more about it.

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http://www.ca.com/us/news/Press-Releases/na/2011/CA-Technologies-Next-Generation-Mainframe-Management-Enhances-IT-Agility.aspx

LAS VEGAS, November 15, 2011 — CA WORLD — CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced its Next-Generation Mainframe Management strategy,  designed to address the most pressing customer needs to reduce costs, sustain critical skills, and increase IT agility in the hybrid data center and the cloud.

“Our Next-Generation Mainframe Management strategy focuses on increasing IT agility by delivering ground-breaking innovation across every facet of mainframe management,” said Dayton Semerjian, general manager, Mainframe, CA Technologies. “This strategic focus also expands our cross-enterprise management capabilities, to help accelerate cost savings and improve productivity as the IT workforce converges from platform-based silos into a unified management team.”

With the Next-Generation Mainframe Management strategy, CA Technologies plans to deliver innovative solutions that:

• Embrace the IBM® zEnterprise™ hybrid architecture;
• Enable the mainframe in private and hybrid clouds;
• Empower the multi-platform, converging IT workforce;
• Extend management to support multi-vendor environments.

“As companies move to a private/hybrid cloud-based strategy, mainframes running mission-critical data, applications, and services need to move with them,” said Tim Grieser, Program Vice President, IDC. “CA Technologies Next-Generation Mainframe Management, by enabling cloud computing on the mainframe, will bridge the gap between cross-platform cloud computing and the security, speed and reliability of mainframe transaction processing and data access.”

This is very cool to see, anything the different vendors can do to make the mainframe platform more accessible, easier to manage and secure has to be a good thing, I’m off to read more about the announcement, but do check it out.

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http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1369582

CIOs Plot a Path to the Future via Smarter Use of IT in 2012, Finds Oracle and PwC Report

Research finds 2012 priorities for Communications Service Providers include striking a better balance of in-house and outsourced IT and making better use of applications such as CRM

The findings are interesting and illustrate the challenges that face the CIO today. The main drivers from my standpoint are:

1. Do more with less
2. Reduce delivery times and the time to market – why does it take so long to deploy new infrastructure or redeploy old infrastructure
3. Reduce operational costs and change the business as usual to investment spend
4. Improve capacity planning and reduce ‘unexpected’ capacity issues, be more proactive
5. Look at where we spend money and can we do this more efficiently in-house or through our partners
6. Innovate our data center requirements, and utilise the right technologies for the right business needs

How do we achieve this?

• Standard offerings to aid delivery times, to reduce support costs and complexity
• Reduce complexity and build in resilience or the ability to scale – using common platforms, less complex architecture we can scale the solution once, deploy once and spend once, rather than trying to keep the lights on
• Virtualize where possible – but turning it around to make virtualization the norm, abstracting the different infrastructure elements from the end user – why do you care what tin your application runs on, what should be key is delivery, scalability and disaster recovery functionality if applicable
• Improved processes with transparency in costs, in delivery times and engagement processes – understand who we talk to get things done, and follow set processes that work to achieve this

Do check out the article.  There are exciting and challenging times ahead, regardless the common message is doing more with less through reducing complexity and improving the agility of the infrastructure. This needs to be done not only through investment and renewal of the existing systems, but in establishing the right set of common tools, common processes and platforms to allow us to deliver common offerings that meet the cross business and cross region or market requirements, to be able to deliver on time, on budget to standards each time, every time.

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http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1356190

Oracle today announced availability of Oracle Solaris 11, the first Cloud OS.

Oracle Solaris 11 is designed to meet the security, performance and scalability requirements of cloud-based deployments allowing customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications in private, hybrid, or public clouds.

It will be interesting to see what range of innovations are brought with version 11 to prepare it for next generation solutions including the cloud. The main concepts seem to be:

There seems to have been an emphasis on scalability, virtualization and performance, I’m off to read more about Solaris 11, do check it out.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111114xa.html

HP today introduced HP ProLiant G7 servers featuring AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors, which can improve data center efficiency, scalability and performance up to 30 percent to support large-scale, virtualized and database workloads.⁽¹⁾

The server industry leader for the past 61 quarters,⁽²⁾ HP has launched five new industry-standard servers in its ProLiant x86 lineup: the HP ProLiant BL465c G7, HP ProLiant BL685c G7, HP ProLiant DL385 G7, HP ProLiant DL585 G7 and HP ProLiant DL165 G7.

With one of the world’s highest core densities, HP ProLiant G7 servers with AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors use 2,048 cores per rack and 33 percent more cores for highly concurrent high-performance computing workloads, to deliver up to 35 percent greater performance over legacy offerings.⁽³⁾

The new servers also can deliver the world’s fastest dual socket database engine with up to a 40 percent improvement in throughput over the previous generations of HP ProLiant servers based on AMD Opteron processors.⁽⁴⁾

It’s great to see further innovation of the AMD Proliant rack and blade servers using the new AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors. These new processors further the AMD offering in the virtualization and HPC space, I’m off to read more about them, you can find out more here.

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