Bladewatch.com

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Networking/HP-Cisco-Partner-on-Network-Switches-for-Joint-HP-Blade-Server-Users-704250/

Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard, despite an increasingly strained relationship, apparently can still put aside their differences for the sake of their joint customers who are using HPservers and Cisco switches.

The two companies, once longtime partners that have since become fierce rivals in the data center, have jointly developed the Cisco Fabric Extender for HP BladeSystem—or the Cisco Nexus B22 Fabric Extender (FEX) for HP. The new product, which was co-engineered by both vendors, is aimed at businesses running HP’s c-Class BladeSystem blade servers who want to leverage the Cisco United Fabric.

The offering, which is available now from HP and its channel partners, is designed to help businesses that already are running HP blades in Cisco switch environments to expand the technology they have rather than having to make major investments in new products.

It’s great to see announcements like this as the two vendors deliver solutions for the HP BladeSystem platform, anything they can do to improve the connectivity of the HP Blade platform and extend it’s interoperability with Cisco switches has to be a good thing. I’ll need to read up more.

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http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20111101-787689.html

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—November 1, 2011—The exponential growth of data provides a wealth of information that, if managed and analyzed effectively, can result in innovations and discoveries that affect our world. Nowhere is this truer than in the health care field, where the right data analysis can lead to new findings that profoundly change lives in an instant. The key to unlocking this data is technology. Without it, many of today’s life-saving medical advances would not be possible. In short, technology saves lives.

For Be The Match®, which operates the world’s largest listing of potential marrow donors and donated cord blood units, data is life. Thousands of patients with life-threatening diseases like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease need a marrow transplant every year but don’t have a match in their family. Operated by the nonprofit National Marrow Donor Program®, Be The Match helps connect these patients with donors. The organization understood that to save more lives, it needed a technology foundation that would act as an enabler, not a constraint. That’s why Be The Match is built on NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP).

“The ability to make faster decisions and to analyze information in real time has a direct impact on the lives of our patients, making our storage platform a critical piece to our success,” said Michael Jones, chief information officer of Be The Match. “With NetApp, we have been able to greatly accelerate the flow of data, which has enabled us to facilitate 50% more transplants around the world. NetApp has been instrumental in helping us save more lives.”

Check out this great article illustrating how technology can be the empowerment tool to not only deliver value but change lives. In this case it’s illustrating how NetApp technology has helped this donor organisation in their objectives accelerating the flow of data, very cool, I’m off to read up more about it. I remain a fan of NetApp as a company and of their Filer platform having supported and been an end user, it’s always great to read how people are benefiting from their technology, you can read more here: http://www.netapp.com/us/campaigns/builton/

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http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/review/2119468/dell-poweredge-r210-ii-server-review

A well built, capable and affordable server that can be used to host the majority of small business applications. Support for Xeon processors, remote management options and Lifecycle Controller make it hard to beat.

I was doing some reading up about the Dell R210 server and found this review, do check it out. Dell’s R210 is a great small business rack server and this review was quite compelling.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111101xa.html

HP today announced a new industry program comprising a new server development platform, customer discovery lab and partner ecosystem to help customers significantly reduce complexity, energy use and costs.

HP’s new program, dubbed Project Moonshot, combines with HP Converged Infrastructure technology to allow the sharing of resources – including storage, networking, management, power and cooling – across thousands of servers. It paves the way to the future of low-energy computing for emerging web, cloud and massive scale environments.

Project Moonshot is designed to fuel the advancement of low-energy server technology, while promoting industry collaboration to break new ground in “hyperscale” computing environments such as cloud services and on-demand computing.

Through these efforts, data center efficiencies are expected to reach new heights for select workloads and applications, consuming up to 89 percent less energy and 94 percent less space, while reducing overall costs up to 63 percent compared to traditional server systems.⁽¹⁾

Anything the vendors can do to improve energy efficiency, reduce the operational costs and extend the possibilities across platforms from the network to the server and the data center has to be a good thing. Being able to do more with less, deploy more powerful systems in the same footprint can not only aid deal with todays’ performance or reliability issues but prepare us for tomorrow’s requirements. Right size the technology for tomorrow’s business and beyond.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111027xa.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP today announced that it has completed its evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and has decided the unit will remain part of the company.

“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”

The strategic review involved subject matter experts from across the businesses and functions. The data-driven evaluation revealed the depth of the integration that has occurred across key operations such as supply chain, IT and procurement. It also detailed the significant extent to which PSG contributes to HP’s solutions portfolio and overall brand value. Finally, it also showed that the cost to recreate these in a standalone company outweighed any benefits of separation.

The outcome of this exercise reaffirms HP’s model and the value for its customers and shareholders. PSG is a key component of HP’s strategy to deliver higher value, lasting relationships with consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and enterprise customers. The HP board of directors is confident that PSG can drive profitable growth as part of the larger entity and accelerate solutions from other parts of HP’s business.

I genuinely think that HP keeping their pc business is good for the company and the industry alike, it maintains competition in the market place in terms of vendors that are able to offer complete end to end desktop to data center and enterprise change services. It also strengthens HP’s business opportunities and recognition in the marketplace particularly as we recognise that today’s one pc business could be tomorrow’s cloud, tomorrow’s virtual or physical enterprise.

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HP have updated their MicroServer with additional memory as standard as well as a more powerful Dual Core AMD processor. The price remains the same which is great news and the extra performance from the more powerful processor and extra memory is a welcome update.  I’m a great fan of the HP MicroServer, I’ve got both the Fujitsu MX130 S1 (the Fujitsu equivalent) and the MicroServer, there really is something about the design of the MicroServer that I love, fitting an additional drive is effortless and the specs are impressive enough for a lab or small business configuration.

In the UK they continue to offer £100 cash back on the HP MicroServer to provide further incentives and increase the affordability of it as your first server, this becomes more so if you include the cashback when buying the Microsoft Windows bundles that are available.

The specs of the updated MicroServer are here: HP.com

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