Archive for martin

TechWorld

IT professionals don’t have the right tools in place to manage their data centres effectively and many fail to monitor all their equipment, according to research from the (ARI) Aperture Research Institute.

The institute, which is funded by data centre specialist Aperture, found that under a third of all data centre professionals monitored more than 90 percent of their equipment while, rather alarmingly, 12 percent of those surveyed had no sort of monitoring system at all.

Tom Waun, Aperture’s president said that managers who were failing to look at all the equipment were leaving themselves open to vulnerability. “The problem is that any item of equipment could fail; it could be a UPS or an aircon unit as well as a server.”

It’s a mixture of things. There are many individual systems which carry out different functions, the hardware monitoring tools (like Insight Manager or IBM Director), the software monitoring tools (like HP OpenView or CA NSM). We have the information, we know therefore the servers we have, we know that Server97 is a DL380, but getting an overview, linking all the individual databases and knowledge bases is the problem. Just ask any large enterprise for the following:

• A list of all servers - ok that’s not too bade
• A list of all servers with Internet explorer 6 including customer facing ones
• A list of servers which are Compaq DL380’s, which have Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000 SP4

The ability to do on demand reports for business specific, IT and licensing specific reasons is the thing that we need to be able to do. With an understanding of what we have, who owns it and what it’s doing, we can then decide where we want to go, what we need to achieve to do so and which systems and business lines are impacted. Anything the vendors can do to achieve this has to be a good thing.

Finextra

US banking giant Citi has opened an environmentally friendly data centre in Georgetown, Texas.
Around 50 employees work in the 305,000-square-foot facility, which houses Citi computer systems and components.

The bank says the centre includes programmes that alert operators if mechanical and electrical systems are not at their optimal efficiency to reduce energy waste.

It also uses pollution controls on its generators that remove 90% of the nitrogen oxides from the exhaust and native landscaping and irrigation systems designed to reduce irrigation water consumption by 50%.

The US Green Building Council has awarded the facility Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (Leed) gold certification.

Marty Lippert, chief technology and operations officer, Citi, says: “Ensuring that our facilities are as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible benefits not only Citi, but also our customers and the community at large.”

It’s great to read how Citi are using a range of technologies to achieve an effective and efficient data center, it als highlights how sometimes small changes can make a large difference to the impact we have on our environment and our business costs. Well done to Citi. The more we talk about the possibilities, the more we can discuss how we can implement this in our IT, the more we can all make small or big steps to reduce our environmental impact and maintain service to the end users.

Computerworld

November 17, 2008 (Computerworld) A month after OpenOffice.org released its first-ever free application suite written for Mac OS X, Sun Microsystems Inc. today unveiled a native Mac edition of StarOffice, the commercial version of the bundle.

StarOffice 9, which Sun officially unveiled today, shares code with OpenOffice.org 3.0, the free suite that launched in mid-October to strong demand; the OpenOffice.org servers were knocked offline for several hours the first day. According to an official with OpenOffice.org, users downloaded 3 million copies of the suite the first week it was available.

Great news, another office suite has to be good news for the Apple platform and bring more choice to Apple users. I’ll need to check it out, I didn’t know that OpenOffice was out for the Mac!

The Earth Times

TORONTO, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ — Platform Computing, the global leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) management software, announces the Platform HPC Academic product bundle for universities and research institutions. Platform HPC Academic is a competitively priced end-to-end product bundle designed to deliver the world’s leading workload management solution to the academic market, making it attainable for institutions of all sizes and budgets. This complete solution supplies all the tools and functionality needed to accelerate compute and data intensive applications, and manage cluster and grid systems.

This really is great news and I hope we see more of this, particularly if we could have something that was tangible for students to use. There’s nothing more that I’d like to see than getting students energised in IT, in seeing what we can achieve, and even more importantly illustrating real world examples, empowering them in readiness for work. How cool would it be if as a student I had been taught about process, about ITIL, about how things could work, why we don’t just replace the servers, why we use grid or virtualization and what the barriers to entry are real or perceived. Well done to Platform, it might also open great opportunities for Platform in the academic field.

FreeBSDish

I recently decided to virtualize my computers here at home using VMware’s ESXi.  When I moved I realized I had a little too much computer equipment.  Not to mention when all of them were running my electric bill would get a little ridiculous while these machines mostly idled.  I ended up purchasing an HP Proliant ML115 G5 which is HP’s entry level tower server.

An interesting article about virtualizing systems on to one of HP’s Proliant servers, it’s mentions a few work arounds, do check it out.