Bladewatch.com

HP have a remote access card kit (615095-B21) which gives you extra functionality and management capabilities above and beyond their standard offering. Below is a series of videos and pictures illustrating how you do this.

First step:

• Unlock the front door of the server and obtain the keyless tool

• Unplug the cables
• Unwind the screws which hold the server in place.
• Now remove the system board tray.
• Turn the server around and unclick the PCI slot holder

• Unscrew the PCI blank plate for PCI slot 2
• Plug the Remote access card into slot 2.

• Now slide the system board back in the bay and re-attach all the cables.
• You then will see the remote access card in bay two, featuring a VGA and additional network port independent of the server’s existing port.

Now we have to switch the server on, configure the card and see how it works – very, very cool!

http://www.realwire.com/releases/Disaster-Recovery-Tops-Health-IT-Priorities-Reveals-BridgeHead-Survey

ASHTEAD, UK AND WOBURN, MA – February 7, 2012 - Following the success of their 2010 survey results, BridgeHead Software’s second-annual healthcare data management survey found that disaster recovery (DR) is still the number one health IT investment priority, above other choices such as archiving, virtualization, cloud computing and digitizing paper records.

The survey asked healthcare IT professionals from all over the world about their ongoing strategies for managing their hospital’s IT systems. A majority of 55% of respondents listed DR among their top three IT investment priorities for the next year – an increase of 11 points compared to last year’s survey which saw 44% of healthcare IT professionals choose “backup/disaster recovery” as one of their top three IT investment objectives.

Jim Beagle, CEO of BridgeHead Software, said, “These survey results confirm what we expected: disaster recovery is becoming more of a priority, not less. This is largely due to the fact that hospitals continue to generate massive amounts of different types of data via a variety of information systems – from PACS and RIS to accounting and administration. Amid this technological complexity and unstoppable data growth, the first step towards a robust DR strategy is not an easy one to define.”

Beagle continued, “At BridgeHead, we believe the foundation for effective DR in hospitals is to understand data volumes as well as the type of data you are managing. If you don’t know these answers, it will be incredibly difficult – if not impossible – to implement an effective DR strategy that can reliably protect vital data in the case of a system outage, loss, corruption or disaster. I find it intriguing that over a third of our respondents, all of whom were health IT professionals, did not know or were uncertain how much data they were managing on primary storage facilities. Another third did not know whether their data volumes had increased or decreased in the last year.”

An article to remind us the importance of Disaster Recovery both in terms of the business processes as well as the underling IT and infrastructure, across not only the physical but also the virtual elements of the infrastructure, ever more important if we are using or supplying white labelled services for our clients.

Emulex.com

New Adapters Provide Cost-Effective 10GbE by Leveraging Existing Cabling Infrastructure

COSTA MESA, Calif., February 7, 2012 - Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced the availability of 10GBASE-T adapters as part of its next-generation Emulex OneConnect™ 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) Universal Converged Network Adapter (UNCA) family, providing 10GbE connectivity over twisted pair cables, reducing deployment costs, increasing deployment simplicity and delivering investment protection. The OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters are ideally suited for data centres that are using twisted pair cabling and are transitioning from 1GbE to 10GbE infrastructure. For customers deploying 10GbE in their data centres today, the ability to use existing 10GBASE-T Cat 6a cabling versus optical cabling makes 10GbE performance less cost prohibitive, yielding a 37% savings.

“By expanding our 10GbE offerings with 10GBASE-T solutions, we’re now delivering 10x the performance at a fraction of the price of ten 1GbE NICs, lowering overall cost of deployment for 10GbE networking,” said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Combined with solutions from our ecosystem partners, 10GBASE-T is now a reality and we anticipate it will contribute to the rapid acceleration of 10GbE market adoption.”

The OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters include the following benefits and features:

• Reduced Deployment Cost: With 10GBASE-T, Emulex is delivering 10GbE performance at half the cost per Gigabit of deploying 1GbE, including fewer switches, cables and adapters. Additionally, customers will receive power savings using fewer links.
• Deployment Simplicity: Using industry-standard twisted pair cables, OCe11102-NT and OCe11102-IT adapters can be used with Cat 6 and Cat 6a network cabling already deployed in data centres today, and are backwards compatible with existing 1GbE Ethernet networks.
• Optimised for Virtualised Environments: Emulex’s Universal Multi-Channel (UMC) capabilities enable IT managers to have switch independent NIC partitioning that enables multiple PCI functions for each OneConnect 10GbE adapter port, which can then be assigned to optimise virtual server deployments. A dual-port OneConnect 10GBASE-T adapter provides eight logical NICs, allowing the replacement of two quad-port 1GbE NICs with a single, lower cost 10GBASE-T card.
• iSCSI over Data Centre Bridging (DCB): Emulex’s Enterprise iSCSI technology supports IEEE DCB standards that ensure consistent iSCSI performance over a converged, lossless Ethernet network. Using DCB, Emulex iSCSI adapters support bandwidth allocation between network and storage traffic groups to optimise use of a high-performance 10GbE infrastructure. For customers still using iSCSI over 1GbE, the OCe11102-IT adapter future-proofs deployments, making them 10GbE ready at a similar cost to 1GbE iSCSI HBAs.
• Manageable I/O: By sharing a single driver model, Emulex I/O solutions can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using OneCommand™ Manager. Consolidated management capabilities enable enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the adapter management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions[1]. In addition, the OneCommand™ Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ lets users manage Emulex adapters directly from the vCenter console for reduced complexity and is the only adapter that integrates with VMware management tools.

An exciting announcement from Emulex about their new OCe11102-NT NIC and OCe11102-IT iSCSI adapters, I wonder if there will be blade equivalents to aid in consolidation projects, I’ll need to check out the Emulex site for more information. Anything Emulex and the other vendors can do to innovate their offering, and improve the accessibility of 10GbE has to be a good thing for the end user community and innovation if the infrastructure platform and it’s capabilities.

http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/clues-about-hps-gen8-servers-leaked/144826

NEW YORK — Hewlett-Packard has let slip some details on its website about its upcoming Proliant Gen8 servers ahead of their official launch.

The pages list basic details of single- and dual-socket BL, ML and DL Gen8 servers, which will be based on Intel’s upcoming Xeon E5 processors.

One system, the single-socket ProLiant BL460c, is a small-form-factor server based on Intel’s E5-2650L processor.

Some servers will have HP’s latest networking, I/O, storage and management capabilities, according to results that show up during a search of HP’s website. The pages the results are supposed to lead to have been removed from the site.

HP declined to comment about the servers or their potential launch date. The company is holding a big event in Las Vegas Feb. 13 to share news about “ground-breaking, new enterprise technology and services that redefine customer data center experiences and economics,” according to an invite. Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of HP Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and Technology Services, is expected to speak at the event.

The Gen8 servers will eventually replace the Proliant G7 family, which was introduced in March 2010 and is based on x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

As a self confessed HP Proliant fan (having been using them since 2002), it’s always interesting to hear what news we will see from the announcement and release of the Generation 8 Proliant servers, this article has some hints. Anything the vendors can do to improve the connectivity, the energy efficiency and reduce the complexity of day to day management has to be some key drivers for me.

http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3335263/government-sets-up-48bn-it-hardware-framework/

The Government Procurement Service has announced its plans to create a £4.8 billion framework contract for IT hardware and solutions.

The framework is intended for use across government, including central government, local government, UK public sector bodies and NHS bodies.

Under the two-year contract, the government expects to sign up suppliers to provide a range of hardware and solutions, including desktop devices, laptop devices, tablet devices, printer devices, server and storage hardware and services and other ICT related equipment.

Managing and delivering an IT infrastructure across government agencies, locations and lines of business or budgets and requirements is always going to be a challenge. It will be interesting to read about these plans and see where savings and service improvements can be made, ideally we want to be going for the following set of principles:

• Commodity in terms of hardware, using industry standard components and solutions to enable automation
• Common platforms, middleware and standards, a move towards standard tools and technologies to achieve common goals
• Data frameworks and common application design standards for the easy exchange of information between systems and applications, XML, database etc
• Support and rules of engagement – virtual desktop, renew and refresh rather than long term ownership to avoid the ‘dependent on’ Windows XP type scenarios.

I’m working on my application FindMyFirmware today, specifically I’ll be uploading a new xml feed file to contain the latest firmware versions. If you’ve got FindMyFirmware (we’ve had thousands of downloads in the last months) when you close the application and re-open it, it connects to the internet and automatically downloads the updated file.

If there are any servers that you want added to it, do email me – martin237@gmail.com

You can download our application free on Android, on iPhone and iPad. You can read all about it here.

HP.com

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 3, 2012 – HP today announced a portfolio of OpenFlow-enabled switches, providing customers with the broadest choice in the industry for simplifying network management while meeting a wide range of bandwidth, performance and budget needs.⁽¹⁾

The portfolio spans 16 models and includes the HP 3500, 5400 and 8200 series switches.

Additionally, HP plans to expand support for OpenFlow across all switches in the HP FlexNetwork architecture this year, making HP the only major networking vendor to offer a complete portfolio of OpenFlow-enabled solutions.

OpenFlow is an emerging network virtualization technology that provides customers flexibility and control to configure their networking environments to their specifications.

Deploying the OpenFlow standard enables enterprises to significantly reduce the complexity of network devices and automate tasks using simplified network management. By reducing the time it takes to make changes to the network, OpenFlow allows IT staff to better respond to changing needs in real time.

Customers and partners can now access a free upgrade to HP’s OpenFlow-enabled software for their HP switches here.

It’s great to see further innovation of the HP switch offering, anything they can do to further integrate and improve their offering to reduce operating costs and increase performance has to be a good thing for competition and end user choice. I’m off to read up about OpenFlow and what this means in the virtualization and orchestration/automation space.

Marketwire

ROCKVILLE, MD–(Marketwire – Feb 1, 2012) – MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of the new report “Blade Server Market in North America 2010-2014,” to their collection of Computer Equipment market reports. For more information, visit http://www.marketresearch.com/Infiniti-Research-Limited-v2680/Blade-Server-North-America-6773817/

This report forecasts the Blade Server market in North America to grow at a CAGR of 23 percent over the period 2010-2014. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the need to reduce the space of network infrastructure. The Blade Server market in North America has also been witnessing reduced power consumption of the blade servers. However, the rapid evolution of new technologies could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

Check out this post which illustrates the continued demand for blade servers this could be for a number of reasons, as we see further innovations in automation and orchestration, the blade platform becomes even more compelling especially when we integrate them with combined storage and networking, wire once and concepts such as self service or application/hosting templates. It will be interesting to see what innovations are around the corner and how we can continue to innovate blade servers for ease of deployment and energy efficiency.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dell-plans-to-expand-silicon-valley-staff-for-rd-2012-01-31

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Dell Inc. DELL +1.28% is growing its Silicon Valley staff in an effort to increase its influence in the rapidly changing tech industry hub.

The company will soon be expanding its operations in Santa Clara, Calif., after already reaching capacity with 700 employees in its research and development facility that opened in October. Dell, seeking to grow beyond its PC roots, opened the 240,000-square foot center for development of business technology such as storage, networking and cloud computing.

Dell also used the center to consolidate employees from several acquisitions in one area and hired about 200 new workers in the region. It will expand into the building next door this summer and will continue adding hundreds of workers each year through acquisitions and new hires. Dell expects to base about 1,500 employees in the Santa Clara facility within the next several years as it takes over the leases of other companies in the complex.

Anything Dell can do to continue the platform and product innovation has to be a good thing, and I wonder what new products both hardware/software as well as service we will see as a result of this announcement?

http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=69857

The LSS 200 can reduce data centre cooling costs by 80% or more and deliver a 40% or more decrease in overall electricity costs

London, UK – 31st January, 2012 – Boston Limited announced today the UK availability of the world’s first patented server with total liquid submersion technology – the LSS 200. By regulating server temperature more effectively than any existing server, the LSS 200 reduces power consumption and costs, maximises floor space and decreases a data centres’ carbon footprint. Boston is the exclusive UK reseller of LSS 200 systems, manufactured by Hardcore Computer, Inc.

This is great news both for competition and end user choice, it will be interesting to see which types of customers are deploying the Hardcore Computer offering, new start ups or people deploying new data centers, as well as existing customers seeking to deploy these new liquid powered systems alongside their legacy infrastructure in their existing data centers.