Archive for Other things
April 23, 2008 at 11:30 pm · Filed under Abn Amro merger, Other things
http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/04/23/afx4924762.html
LONDON (Thomson Financial) - The Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc expects the synergy gains from the acquisition of Dutch rival ABN Amro to exceed targets, chairman Tom McKillop said.
RBS led a consortium that bought ABN Amro (nyse: ABN - news - people ) for 72 billion euros last year. Spain’s Banco Santander and Belgo-Dutch bank Fortis (other-otc: FORSY.PK - news - people ) are members of the consortium.
McKillop told shareholders at RBS’s AGM that the bank over the past six months has confirmed the financial benefits it will derive from combining the businesses of RBS and ABN Amro.
‘Indeed, we now expect these benefits to be even greater than those we originally anticipated. By 2010, when we have completed the integration process, we expect to achieve synergies totaling almost 2.3 billion euros a year,’ he said.
Very cool, business continues at RBS, that it continues to deliver revenue and return for it’s shareholders is all that matters, everything else is noise. Integrating an organization is always going to take time for the integration to occur, for time for return on investment to be realized. Do check out this interesting article.
April 23, 2008 at 11:26 pm · Filed under Other things, environment
http://www.thegreengrid.org/news/news_releases/
Portland, Ore. — April 21, 2008 — The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems, today announced Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). The Green Grid’s agreement with the EPA will first promote energy efficiency in EPA computer facilities and then broadly share results in order to impact change within both other governmental agencies and the private sector. The alliance with SNIA, formally announced by SNIA earlier this month, is designed to further networked storage best practices for energy efficiency.
The Green Grid’s Memorandums of Understanding with the EPA and SNIA highlight the organization’s continuing efforts and progress in working with government agencies and key industry players to define and promote the adoption of standards, processes, measurements and technologies for energy efficiency in the data center.
Very cool, anything we can to to improve energy efficiency in the data center and in the business world has to be a good thing, whether we’re talking about best practice, new technical standards or technology. It will be interesting to see what developments/announcements come from this announcement - very cool.
April 23, 2008 at 11:23 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2290517.html
ISLANDIA, N.Y., and TORONTO, April 16 — CA, one of the world’s largest independent software companies, and Opalis Software Inc., the market leader in IT process automation software, today announced an OEM partnership that will enhance CA’s Data Center Automation (DCA) offerings with the award-winning IT process automation technology from Opalis. The joint technology solutions will further enable enterprises to drive down IT operational costs and increase productivity, while enforcing compliant best practices aimed at improving performance and availability of critical business services.
“CA continues to deliver on its promise to provide IT management for all facets of the datacenter,” said Will Bauman, senior vice president of workload automation at CA. “Enhancing our Data Center Automation solutions with the Opalis IT process automation technology was a logical choice for CA. Combining our CA workload automation solution with the innovative and customer-proven Opalis technology will consolidate and streamline the process and workflows our customers must coordinate to deliver their production workloads.”
Very cool, the more we can enhance data center operations, the more we can do to reduce deployment costs, improve data center flexibility around the business need which has to be a good thing.
April 23, 2008 at 11:21 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.advancedtrading.com/blog/archives/2008/04/time_to_end_wal.html;jsessionid=L2OKU1UIYYCN2QSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN
With investment banks reporting layoffs and tightening their belts in light of the economic downturn, one of the major themes emerging in IT circles is sustainable cost reduction. “The industry does carry a lot of cost,” says Bob Gach, global managing director capital markets at Accenture in New York. “The industry hasn’t had the courage or need to attack these costs,” says Gach.
When the industry was generating huge profits from packaging and trading complex derivatives and needed to launch a system in 30 days, cost didn’t matter. But now that the bubble has burst, the industry is more focused on not only how to reduce costs but sustaining the operating model in good times and bad.
The concept of “sustainable cost reduction” takes a more holistic or systemic approach to cost reduction, according to Accenture’s spokesman. Instead of one department looking to reduce costs and another department working independently, all the departments work together as an enterprise to reduce costs. This makes the cost reduction more sustainable in the long run, says Accenture’s spokesman.
Check out this interesting post which is talking about IT investment within the finance sector, it’s an interesting read and does make some good points. I wonder if we don’t need to turn the way we do business around? By that I mean consider smaller leaner more expensive teams that deliver, a team of core individuals that might only perform one task, but do that task to a high standard? In the virtual or by that matter the physical server world, how many engineers should you have to run your server estate? On the basis that it’s 300-500 Windows servers per engineer, would it not be cheaper and more effective to have 5 engineers running that 2000 server estate? You might have a separate server build team, or patching team, but 5 key guys that know the server estate, that are accountable to production issues - that maintain the dialog with the application support teams, with the business sponsors?
How do we want to do IT? Do we want to lower costs long term? Is the aim to shift the capital cost to the operation costs - by reducing the capex costs does it not indirectly increase your operational costs - older servers cost more to run, typically run older operating systems which require more hands on support/maintenance. Stepping back for a second, previously we were averse to spending money, to capital cost, we’re now moving to operational costs, reducing the cost of support, the costs of deployment etc, at what point do we say stop? Where do we draw the line and state, the cost for 24/7 operations is X, for week days, 9-5 it’s Y, you choose. Are we going to move to a tier’d infrastructure, an infrastructure or data center that is designed, deployed and built for it’s target use, it’s target market - availability needs to be 80% - we’ll run the servers hotter and deploy less cooling?
April 23, 2008 at 10:59 pm · Filed under Other things, blades
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/23962.wss and the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRZyz1vXkPE&eurl
IBM today announced an entirely new category of server to address the growing Web 2.0 industry. Today, the companies behind the Internet rely on massive, sprawled out data centers that are pushing the limits of power and space available to them.
This does sound very cool, data center energy costs continue to rise becoming the most important part of your operations costs. Being able to deploy your server infrastructure in an energy efficient way has to be a good thing from a corporate social responsibility standpoint and an operational one.
This does sound interesting, could this be where the blade platform is headed long term?
It’s one step away from the concept of the data center as a service, that I might buy a data center which provides a range of services for a specific time period - where the underlying hardware and infrastructure is abstracted from the infrastructure? We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up on the iDataPlex!
April 23, 2008 at 9:06 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=18376
Top executives from Citigroup have approached Hewlett Packard (HP) for advice on how to revive the banking group’s flagging business without breaking up the company.
According to a Financial Times report, which cites “people close to the situation”, top Citi executives have been holding talks with executives at HP to learn how the IT group managed to “overcome a crisis similar to Citi’s”.
The talks between the two companies have focused on IT issues, says the FT, as well as “general strategy”.
Citi is under shareholder pressure to separate its wholesale and retail banking units in a bid to revive the business and restore profitability, says the FT.
Very interesting, this article is talking about Citi Group apparently seeking to meet with HP for advice on reviving the groups’ business. It will be interesting to see what ideas, best practices or announcements arise in the next few months.
April 21, 2008 at 10:29 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.ameinfo.com/153924.html
Dubai Bank today announced that is has implemented a state-of-the-art Business Continuity Site for its core banking systems in a record time of nine months.
The site is located 100 km away from the primary data centre, and required rigorous planning and execution to put into place.
The implementation of a Disaster Recovery Site forms an integral part of Dubai Bank’s Business Continuity plan. As business processes, systems, and networks are becoming increasingly complex, the need for a robust disaster recovery site is becoming ever more important aspect of the business. Interruption of service or loss of data can have a serious financial impact, both directly and through loss of customer confidence.
Very cool, business continuity and disaster recovery continue to be topics of interest and debate, as the IT becomes increasingly integrated into our business, ensuring that we have a fall-back, a backup alternative is not only a regulatory requirement (for some sectors), but a business necessity, and interesting read, and highly relevant since I’m visting Dubai in the next few weeks on holiday.
April 21, 2008 at 10:20 pm · Filed under Other things, virtualization, vmware
http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/04/18/the-lies-of-it.aspx
Now to the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants. When you hear these lines spoken you have two alternatives: 1) fire the consultant on the spot, and; 2) bring your smartest and most crotchety nerds into the room and make the consultant explain his or her statement to their satisfaction then back it up with some performance guarantee and penalty clause.
A great read, it’s a topic that is regularly discussed whether you’re dealing with big or small customers. It’s a mixed thing, Consultants need to keep the customer needs and issues in mind, at the same time customers need to ask the right questions and do the research on the technology or solution that they want deployed. Related to this when speaking with a vendor or consultant:
- Establish the in-scope - what’s included in the price and what’s extra
- What are the responsibilites
One small business had called me up saying that they’d got half way through a virtualization project and been told “we’ve virtualized your infrastructure” by the consultant but when they asked where the data was, were told - “that’s extra”. It’s a dual relationship, the customer should have stipulated that the data would be migrated, but then the vendor should understand that there are some things you expect as part of a solution - the data when you virtualize the server is one of these things.
April 21, 2008 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Other things
http://computerworld.com.sg/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=7893&pubid=3&tab=Home&issueid=126
SINGAPORE, 17 April 2008—The financial services industry continued to lead all vertical markets in server revenue, as it accounted for 25.3 per cent of worldwide server revenue in 2007, according to Gartner. Total world server revenue in 2007 was US$54 billion.
The finance sector includes three major subsegments: investment services, banking and insurance. Global server revenue for the sector was US$13 billion.
The communications market was a distant second at 14.4 per cent, or US$7 billion. The government market was the third vertical, with 11.5 per cent of total server revenue. This amounted to US$6 billion.
In Hong Kong, financial services accounted for 43.8 per cent of Hong Kong server revenue in 2007. This is followed by the services sector which accounted for 15.2 per cent for the same period.
I wonder how much of this is from hardware refreshing projects, virtualization and consolidation projects as well as bringing online new services for existing and new markets? Related to this with the reported downturn in the finance sector, will this change? What about those banks that haven’t had the exposure that have been reported in the press? Might they continue their spending on IT, their investment?
April 21, 2008 at 9:54 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23180
The future is one standard of connectivity for servers and storage in the data center combined with high speed networks, courtesy of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol and10Gb/s Enhanced Ethernet.
Now, in the testing stage in selected enterprise sites before they will appear in OEM products in a year from now, the vendor’s new LightPulse LP21000 family of converged network adapters combines network and storage traffic under one cabling and switching infrastructure or fabric.
“It is the same drivers and management tools; so it is a seamless extension of Fibre Channel over Ethernet if you will,” stated Joe Gervais, senior marketing director at Emulex.
The result will be reduced data center complexity, management costs and power consumption, he stated.
Very cool, check out this article talking about Emulex’s LightPulse LP21000 Fibre Channel over Ethernet cards, they do sound cool. It will be interesting to see what the response is to Fibre Channel over Ethernet, I can certainly see the benefit of convergence of network and storage. We’ll have to see, do check it out.
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