Bladewatch.com

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

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.

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.

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.

https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2010/events/discover/vienna/index.php

Your organisation’s journey to becoming an Instant-On Enterprise starts in Vienna.

Join us in November!

We’re launching our FindMyFirmware application to the iPad and Android platforms in the next few days. We’ve improved the user interface and the Android includes the ability to read PDFs natively so you don’t have to download anything complicated. Its been tested on all platforms and we remain very proud of it.

The application allows you to type in a server model and display product information on screen without having to go the vendor site or vendor support site.  The application as ever has been written without involvement of the vendor.  I’m still debating about charging for the application, we have spent over $2000 getting it developed, tested and validated for these platforms in an effort to extend it’s reach and help fellow engineers, sales guys or people that are interested in server models and specifications.

If you have any recommendations about the application do get in touch.

I’m hoping to start work on version 2.1 shortly to make it a more interactive experience, and we are looking to engage the vendors to see if they have any suggestions to help the user experience, but we need to finish our virtualization app first.

I’ve been reading up and discussing changes in the industry recently with colleagues, this has meant a bit of a break from my beloved Bladewatch blog. So what’s going on, a lot of things really, there seems to be a state of flux of parallel running across sectors and industries with common themes in two main opposing movements.

Commoditize and reduce complexity which allows us to concentrate on really adding value where it counts

Build best in class solutions based on the business need with a focus on delivery and through that illustrating value

Both can co-exist. Both are equally valid, but the commodity discussion is compelling and equally troublesome for colleagues across the technology stack. There are three main problems, ‘the business’ want to remove delays to excellence, reduce costs and are approaching technology as a service. With the technology as a service model, I’m not interested in the detail to the nth degree, I do not wish to discuss which model of server it is and what version of Windows is going to be used I want a Risk Analytics platform and I wand it next Tuesday with these operational constraints (budget/application code compatibility for example).

This results in an interesting problem. For years we have been telling technologists to be customer facing, to identify the requirements, to offer choice and therefore empower the business, an admirable concept but less so as you scale up the enterprise, with a global enterprise with operational complexity, introducing choice even with a business aligned best intention can create opportunity for debate and discussion. It also leads to that strange situation, “I want a server”, ok what would you like, “well what’s the standard, just give me a server”, ok but what OS, how much memory, how much storage? “the standard”.

Therefore the prevailing wind for the moment seems to be moving to commodity. Commodity can be perceived as an emotive subject, ‘those architect boys’ in their design studios mandating standards that might not be appropriate but what I am talking about is a rationalisation of the standard tools covering the hardware, the os, the middleware and database through to the applications.  A scenario in which packaging, and common deployment technologies can be used for automated delivery, decommission and re-deployment on demand can be defined and implemented.  A situation where as a user I can say I wanted a Tier 1 web farm and like the ever so impressive BladeSystems Matrix presentation shows us, I press submit and it knows it’s going to build me a load balanced web farm comprised of web, application and database using the capacity and standards already defined in templates.

So what do I mean when I talk about commodity and rationalisation. Colleagues differ wildly when we talk of it, but let me summarise:

Server – three platforms (Unix/Linux, Virtual and Windows) / three blade and three rack server configurations (typically dependent on complexity involved)

Operating system – a common operating system offering comprised of UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms, Windows 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise for example

Middleware – common middleware applications with specific versions per platform which change with the platform

Application – common applications for monitoring, database and solutions

Network – common defined network standards based on standard offerings, 1GB Ethernet for Virtual machines, teamed network cards for physical Windows servers, heartbeat for clusters etc

Storage – common standards combining the most effective forms of de-duplication, tiering and marginal cost – sometimes buying the cheaper storage costs the same as the expensive equivalent

Operational standards – production tiers and understood configurations for optimal resilience

Investment – this is often the emotive topic when speaking with management – this involves the concept of pre-provisioning and investing to avoid those common scenarios in which we are ‘always running out of storage’ or facing those unexpected infrastructure type issues half way through a project or as a result of a business requirement.

The fundamental principles as follows:

• The infrastructure is commodity and therefore abstracted from the underlying hardware
• The application never gets embedded and locked into the infrastructure because it is economically, operational and from a revenue/cost base inefficient to do so
• The infrastructure is funded, cross charged and operated on the basis of lowest operational cost – it is 9 times out of 10 quicker and easier to replace a desktop than it is to have an engineer sit and discuss the issue with the vendor and order new parts to do so. The same can be said of the server. Do we want to be paying £800/£1200 per server per year for hardware maintenance or increasing our spend on warranty to 24/7 4 hour response and replacing the x86 commodity servers every three years so that we do not need a hardware support contract?
• Constant analysis so that the capacity is being optimized, that I deploy a new platform on new x86 servers in six months if the utilization is remaining constant at 17%, we virtualize and re-allocate the hardware to the next project, and do the same analysis to it in six months. Two streams, one translating business needs into delivered projects and solutions, the other optimizing what we have and allocating capacity on demand in line with the business need.
• Taking a high level and low level analysis. Where is it as CIO we need to be (agile, low cost/best in class), combined with where are our core spends, what percentage of the budget is on legacy platforms, what are the quick wins, what is a standard offering and why is it set that way, what operational decisions and rules of engagement have been set. Is Nathaniel walking around the data center reclaiming and re-deploying DL380 G3′s because he’s been told that there’s no budget eating my data center space/power, my hardware support contract budget and resulting in outages for the sake of £2500?

Therefore a change of focus to:

• Delivery on time
• Delivery to budget
• Delivered once. Configured once. Templated once. and redeployable on demand.
• Right sized infrastructure with scalability, reliability and best in class out of the box.
• A change from component thinking to big picture thinking – standard offerings, common configurations, interoperability, reduced complexity resulting in best in class performance, operational cost and agility.

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/

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110927b.html

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 27, 2011 – HP today announced that Airbus, one of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers, has doubled its usable supercomputing power with containerized HP Performance Optimized Datacenters (PODs).

In the final phase of a four-year high-performance computing (HPC) deployment, Airbus has taken delivery of two HP PODs, making this the world’s largest industrial HPC system and one of the first confirmed commercial HPC container contracts. This deployment is the 29th biggest computer in the world according to the official TOP500 Supercomputer list published on June 20.

Manufactured and tested by HP, the modular HP PODs were delivered to Airbus sites in Toulouse, France, and Hamburg, Germany. Each POD contains all the elements of an HP Converged Infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking, software, management, and integrated power and cooling. A total of 2,016 clustered HP ProLiant BL280 G6 blade servers enable the two 12 meter-long containers to deliver the equivalent of nearly 1,000 square meters of data center space.

The HP PODs have enabled Airbus to quickly expand data center capacity, boosting computing performance for aircraft development while saving space and energy. Compared to an installation in a nearby customer data center, the water-cooled HP PODs consume up to 40 percent less power. With a near-optimum Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.25 from The Green Grid™ consortium (1), Airbus decreased operating expenses while delivering power capacity in excess of 15 KW/m².

It’s great to see how Airbus have benefited from using a range of HP technology including their POD containerized data centers and Converged Infrastructure to deliver double its usable supercomputing power. I’m off to read up more about the announcement.

http://dellworld.com/

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I wonder what we will see discussed at the conference, it will be interesting to hear how Dell is helping address enterprise challenges across the technologies, networks, storage and server. At the same time I want to know how Dell is going to continue innovating its products and services, how we can extend the possibilities of cloud technologies for those small businesses that ‘want service’ and provide the right range of offerings to help those that want their own internal cloud, their own infrastructure to deploy and host their services.  There are some interesting speakers from Intel, VMware and Microsoft, not to mention several members of the Dell leadership.

My key area of interest across vendors and service providers is how they can transform their offering to meet me and my business, from a marketing and a real end user empowerment standpoint, could a little bit of money spent transform your end user relationship, the service and pleasure your end users derive and not necessarily effect the dollar cost of the product or service. How can the vendor differentiate their offering, align with my needs and illustrate what as an end user, a business and an individual be thinking about going forward. So I’m buying R710s for ESX and looking at cloud in the near future, but in the next three years what should I be thinking about? Virtualization of the application, further remote working and cloud technologies both internal and external – fine but how do I achieve this, what do I need to know and what are the economic drivers for doing so? The issue so often is not a lack of interest, but a lack of understanding how to justify it, and how it can be an enabler to my business goal rather than “IT having a day out”.