Archive for Other things
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.
April 20, 2008 at 10:03 pm · Filed under Other things, environment
http://hardware.silicon.com/servers/0,39024647,39183832,00.htm
Despite their best intentions, many organisations are overlooking the real environmental impact of IT operations. That’s down to a major break-down in communications between the board and IT management, argues Dennis Szubert.
The aviation industry is public enemy number one for many environmentalists. Aircrafts pump out more than 600 million tons of carbon dioxide every year - nearly as much as the whole of Africa.
Pressured by the environmentalists, the aircraft manufacturers and operators are pursuing new technologies and approaches to improve fuel consumption.
Check out this article which is talking about the impact of IT on an organizations’ environmental impact, an interesting read and raises some important issues.
Is the issue not one of corporate and business alignment? That the needs of the business need to be linked to the ability of IT to deliver? That at the same time IT can take the initiative to make the changes it needs to improve service delivery, to reduce operation costs? That by applying that rule to virtualize the server estate we might reduce our energy consumption, abstract the end user/the business activity from the underlying hardware, get the benefit of a virtualized infrastructure? There might be a cost of doing this, but the benefits should be greater than the costs, not only might I reduce the hardware support contract, I might reduce the ‘time to live’, the time it takes to increase capacity, to allocate capacity/performance between applications or business units, that I might with the right investment, business buy in and configuration have a fluid type infrastructure - where the workload moves around the business need. During 9-5 business hours the virtualization infrastructure is at 100% capacity, as the business day ends, we might have automated processes to reduce this capacity, the number of physical assets to what’s needed to provide the infrastructure overnight - the overnight batch runs/reports etc.
April 18, 2008 at 4:31 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.primenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=139676
ORLANDO, Fla., April 8, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) — Storage Networking World — QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), a leader in networking for storage and high performance computing (HPC), today announced that NetApp and QLogic are demonstrating the industry’s first end-to-end 8Gb Fibre Channel network to include native 8Gb Fibre Channel storage. For the first time, customers can see the full power of 8Gb Fibre Channel networks powered by QLogic(r) SANbox(r) 5800 Series switches, 2500 Series host bus adapters (HBAs) and 8Gb storage from NetApp. The two companies are also demonstrating the benefits of unified data and storage networks, showcasing the new QLogic 8000 Series converged network adapters (CNAs) and native Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage from NetApp. Both demonstrations will provide customers with a glimpse at each network’s ability to enhance data center IT flexibility and efficiency in virtualized environments.
“Data center managers need flexible solutions tailored to their specific application environment,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “At SNW, we’re teaming with QLogic to demonstrate NetApp’s ongoing leadership in advanced storage networking by delivering the only unified platform that supports 8Gb Fibre Channel solutions for customers expanding their current SAN architecture, and demonstrating native FCoE solutions to leverage the economics and simplicity of Ethernet fabrics.”
Great news, the more solutions around the Fibre over Ethernet platform, the more solutions and buy in we have to present to the end user community. The key thing with this is that Fibre Channel over Ethernet allows us to unify the storage and network connectivity without threatening ‘the way we do things’, I can still have a storage team, I can still have a networks team. The difference will be storage focus on storage, on carving up and allocating storage, on availability, capacity and meeting the business needs, the actual port allocation, the patching etc can be handled by the networks guy. The key concept being that instead of having two separate functions to patch the server to the network, to patch the server to the storage, I can have one task, one accountable unit, to patch in the server, the rest is up to networks allocating the right ports and linking that port into the SAN storage. Very cool. Do check it out.
April 18, 2008 at 4:27 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=18356
Information technology budgets at Citigroup are set to be slashed under a massive cost-reduction programme ordered by new CEO Vikram Pandit.
Pandit, who took over the helm of the listing US financial conglomerate in December, is preparing to cut up to 25,000 jobs and undertake a major re-alignment of the firm’s information technology and operations with the objective of excising 20% of the group’s cost base.
“It is clearly feasible for us to take 10, 15, 20 per cent off our cost base, especially in information technology and operations,” Pandit told the Financial Times.
We have to be careful with these kind of announcements in the respect of what is actually being cut, is it investment in new technologies? A reduction in operational costs? We’ll have to see, managing costs and maintaining service delivery can be a time consuming activity, an interesting read, do check it out.
April 17, 2008 at 9:32 pm · Filed under Abn Amro merger, Other things
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/AFX-0013-24582093.htm
AMSTERDAM, Apr. 17, 2008 (Thomson Financial delivered by Newstex) — Dutch shareholders association VEB called on Thursday for a takeover code to be introduced in the Netherlands after an Amsterdam commercial court rejected its request for an inquiry into ABN Amro (NYSE:ABN) Holding NV’s management.
The VEB said takeover situations should be made more transparent, more predictable and fairer, adding it will unveil concrete proposals for a takeover code next week.
The association was responding after the Enterprise Chamber of the Amsterdam Court of Appeals rejected on Thursday a request from the VEB and Dutch unions to conduct an investigation into ABN Amro’s management and its actions last year in the takeover battle for the Dutch bank.
In a separate statement after the Amsterdam court’s ruling, trade union FNV Bondgenoten said it will consider lodging an appeal against the ruling.
An article with updates relating to a request for an invesitgation relating to the merger/acquistion of ABN Amro. It’s an interesting read, do check it out.
April 17, 2008 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/desktop/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207200480
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) on Monday introduced two workstations powered by multiple quad-core processors targeted at digital content professionals.
HP presented the xw8600 and xw9400 workstations at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas. The xw8600 includes up to two Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Xeon X5482 processors, which have a 1,600-MHz front side bus and 800-MHz memory. The xw9400 offers up to three quad-core Opteron 2300 processors from Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD). Both machines are targeted at professionals in film/video post-production, animation, and the graphics arts industries.
Both machines comply with the highest environmental standards defined by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers through the organization’s Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool. HP workstation customers in the entertainment industry include animation company DreamWorks and A&E Television Networks.
As much as I love the blade desktop, the blade workstation, it’s always interesting to read how the workstation platforms evolve (the trader workstation remains a focus of interest to some of my colleagues in support). Anyway, HP have released their new workstations, they do look cool - as the workstation itself gets more powerful, I wonder how these would work in a development grid setup from an energy standpoint?
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
