Blade Watch

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/servers/356029/hp-proliant-dl4×170h-g6

Blade servers have always been the best solution for maximising rack space, but they could be about to lose their monopoly. HP’s latest DL1000 rack server series delivers four server nodes in a 2U rack chassis, and in this exclusive review we take a closer look at the new DL4×170h G6 quad-node model.

The DL4×170h offers a good range of storage options, with the review system providing eight hot-swap drive bays. Options are available for two eight-drive SFF bays that slot in at each end of the front panel. A glance at the back shows each node comes complete with its own power button plus monitor, network, serial and pair of external USB ports.

An interesting review of the HP Proliant DL4×170h-G, a server which has four nodes in the one 2u form factor. I do love the concept for example in a small compute farm or even as a small scale virtualization solution? I am off to read up more about them, but do check out the review, a mini blade solution in a 2u form factor if you like.

A quick reminder about security patching your estate whether it’s updating your laptops or desktops with Windows Update or deploying patches to your server estate, ensuring everything is patched to the latest revisions protects your estate and will be the first thing that a vendor or service provider will ask when logging a call.

The details are below:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-mar.mspx

Bulletin ID	Bulletin Title and Executive Summary	Maximum Severity Rating and Vulnerability Impact	Restart Requirement	Affected Software
MS10-016	Vulnerability in Windows Movie Maker Could Allow Remote Code Execution (975561) This security update addresses a privately reported vulnerability in Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Producer 2003. Windows Live Movie Maker, which is available for Windows Vista and Windows 7, is not affected by this vulnerability. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if an attacker sent a specially crafted Movie Maker or Microsoft Producer project file and convinced the user to open the specially crafted file. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.	Important Remote Code Execution	May require restart	Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office
MS10-017	Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (980150) This security update resolves seven privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Excel. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Excel file. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.	Important Remote Code Execution	May require restart

Microsoft Office

One of the conversations I have been having with colleagues and CIOs is a question that’s been on my mind for some time. What I am about to say is in no way negative and is not to be taken as criticism of the way ahead. There are exciting times ahead for the end user community, for vendors and investors alike. The question is as follows.

As we virtualize and commoditize the infrastructure, the individual components become less significant in a way, whether it’s a server from vendor1 or vendor 11, does the actual underlying tin matter?

1. Absolutely – I have a specific price point that I seek to achieve, that can only be done through our purchasing agreement with vendor8, or absolutely because we want the management software, the extra bits which you just don’t get from any other vendor (real or perceived).
2. No – it will be replaced every few years and besides my servers, my applications are abstracted from it, I want the cheapest hardware financially and operationally.

The problem is that we’re for the time being going forward. (The time being between now and when the data center is virtualized and floats around the enterprise, the cloud or whatever device can power and host it at the lowest cost, a Mac Mini perhaps).  Between now and the future then, data center 3.0 I’ll call it, how do we differentiate ourselves? How do we isolate our servers, our software from the competition?

• Price – but dear me, many a business has gone down that route and volume is key at this point else margins eat your profits – and what about concepts like support costs and service delivery?
• Functionality – great, but dear me reader, functionality is expensive and requires real investment and do our beloved users want to pay for said functionality, everyone says yes until the invoice arrives for approval and sign off
• Apple-ness – by this I mean belief in the product, belief in the service that only Apple seem to be able to achieve in the notebook/pc world – you mean you haven’t got one of these, oh well, maybe next year

I wonder then, going forward as the industry changes, both inside IT and outside the IT industry where the lines are drawn and where go, going forward, is branding enough? Is price or feature competition effective enough as a vehicle to protect revenues. Is Apple’s benefit that regardless of the perceived limitations not that the fans just sit and go wow, look at the design and buy it anyway? How do we then do this in the IT industry? Where commoditization, where hierarchical structures are changing, it used to be that server guy Mike made the recommendations on servers, but Fred who runs trading now wants to know what can be done about this data center space problem, IT is crossing the boundaries that we spent years creating, how then do we change the marketing, the lines of communication and support frameworks to meet this new target audience?

How do we sell servers or software, or a concept to a business unit, a CEO or CFO when concepts of MegaHertz, memory support, or number of PCI slots don’t quite raise the excitement that Mike has when the nice account manager says take a look at this, 5 pci slots and a redundant power supply!

We could go down the services route, indeed, fantastic, would you like  a 2u server or a virtualization product as part of a service? No capex, I repeat No capex, but as the world gets smaller, that poses the old problem, fine I’d love to have my virtual desktops powered by your service, but just one thing, I’ll have it hosted in India, at India prices, not at your UK prices, no they’re too much, and can I have that free mouse mat. I like mouse mats.

We need change, we need progress and development, a move to a scenario where the IT and business merge to create a unified platform for revenue generation, I just wonder if combined the two business units, are ready for this new world as are the vendors. Does this mean a rebrand of IT, a convergence where we offer a range of solutions mixing software and hardware with services and service delivery an overall solution comprising of everything you need, and does that mean the user gets closer or further away from the vendor? We’ll have to see,

I was having a chat with one of my friends who has recently started as a Project Manager for one of the funds companies in West London. Anyway he called me up, he has to organize and prioritize virtualization of servers and asked me three key questions:

1. What is 1GB ready? By that he meant which servers already have a network card capable of 1GB?
2. How can I tell how old a server is?
3. Where can I get an overview of the server specs?

What vendor I asked and was told Compaq/HP, they were upgrading and virtualizing their servers onto a nice new environment as part of a consolidation and data center migration exercise. His issue, he has 237 servers to look at and the project is in three phases:

1. Move all servers on to the new network (except those judge too old to be moved, they should be virtualized)
2. Consolidate infrastructure and application services where possible
3. Virtualize the non production application and where possible production infrastructure servers

So his key requirements for phase one:

• Servers that are 1GB capable without a lot of work
• Anything that might go bang when they touched it

My reply, and it was rather vague, anything pre-G3 (except the DL580 G2) is likely to have an integrated or separate PCI network card rated at 10MB/100MB and will need a separate network card fitted. I pointed him at the HP quickspecs sites and emailed him the spreadsheet that we’ve got published for all to download which states averaged age of Compaq/HP servers.

With this in mind, to make life a bit easier, I have summarized a few of the Compaq/HP servers that we have used and tested over the years here at Bladewatch. The summary contains an overview, the what it has, how big it is and the key parts that we have tested in it for improving performance or management.

I’ve done the DL380 G1 and the DL380 G2 so far and will add more shortly. I’ll do the DL360 / DL380 / DL580 /DL760, and then move on to the Dell and IBM equivalents. Do please check the specifications with the original HP quickspecs as they are the official reference guide or contact your service provider/HP direct.

http://gestaltit.com/all/tech/networking/stephen/innocence-fairness-technology-benchmarks/

HP recently commissioned Tolly Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry:

Check out this analysis of the BladeSystem C7000 and Cisco UCS 5100. It’s a report comparing network  benchmarks on the two platforms. These kind of benchmarks can be useful, but as with anything the performance you achieve from your infrastructure is dependent on many aspects of the infrastructure, the network, the operating system configuration, layered components and hardware configuration, not to mention the configuration of your application, there is nothing to comparing the technology in your environment. Benchmarks, testing will always have relevance and always be useful, but as with anything is to be taken at face value and understood that how the infrastructure performs for you is going to depend on your IT, your infrastructure and your business. Little things like system firmware, operating system hot fixes, network configuration and the application or middleware being optimized for the platform all affect such tests, and ultimately any  decisions tend to be influenced more by purchasing agreements, discounts and that old thing of comfort zones, buying a platform that we are comfortable with. We’ll see, it’s worth a read, do check out the report and the analysis on the blog.

It was great visiting Texas, I confess that I hadn’t been there before and it re-affirmed my love of the US on many levels. I enjoyed meeting fellow bloggers who were writing about storage, servers virtualization amongst other things, to see what they were interested in and talking about. The days over at HP’s site in Texas were useful and gave me some interesting topics to write up and hopefully they should follow in the next few days. In the meantime, normal service resumes and might I just thank HP for their hospitality, for the invitation and the chance to meet fellow bloggers, experiencing Texas and their facility in the process. Do check out some further analysis and pictures here.

Day 2 was great, it had some great topics, discussion and a chance to be shown around their factory, to see a blade being built, very, very cool.  The day started with an overview of desktop virtualization, something we have covered many a time at Bladewatch. We saw a demonstration of the work is doing in this area, including in their lab, and some interesting conversations about desktop virtualization admittedly I commented on this quite a bit. There is still a degree of perception for and against, to some up, against it is the cost, is the fact that our desktop infrastructure might actually work ok. The benefits though, of abstracting the user from their individual desktop, of breaking down the end user requirements to the core applications and services that they actually need, rather than providing a one size fits all approach, combined with the savings and distractions around the desktop support, not always about direct or indirect cost, but more to a disposable reliable desktop solution that meets user requirements. Is it a desktop I actually need or just the ability to check the online phonebook, check my email and book meeting rooms, is it therefore a pc I need, or a thin client with a web browser and everything stored online.

We then got a tour of the HP Factory Express and HP POD facilities. I’ve published pictures, apologies they were all taken with my iPhone, but nonetheless you’ll get the idea. On the POD it was great to see the two demo units that they had and discuss the opportunities and uses for the different form factor (sizes) of POD, there is the smaller more portable and the standard larger one, both could have specific benefits dependent on their size and scale. I remain a fan of the POD concept and remember writing about it being a perfect solution for those data center virtualization projects, deliver one, virtualize on to it, then once you’ve decommissioned and removed the legacy estate, P2V migrate back into your existing data center – virtualization in a can if you like.

Back to the HP Factory Express center which was great, walking around seeing how the servers were built to customers specifications, then tested, verified and packaged ready for shipment was very cool. Check out the pictures on flickr.

My first day was spent at the HP Campus speaking with the team and learning about a number of things including Data Center trends for 2010, HP servers being used in the production in the film Avatar, and an interesting presentation from Nth Generation Computing. Following that was a presentation about HP Virtual Connect, something that I have been interested in amongst other things.  The BladeSystem sessions in the lab was very cool, we went over the different HP blade offerings and there was a demonstration of HP’s Insight software, in particular their Dynamic Power Control. Dynamic Power Control is part of their Systems Management technologies which allows you to adjust the power utilization of the server by adjusting the clock speed of the processor, so for example in the event of a power or air conditioning failure, you could select to reduce the power consumption of the non production or non client facing systems to reduce your power load and therefore cooling requirements. System administrators can create groups of servers by platform, location or specific values and then apply rules to those groups, furthering the ability to manage remote sites or plan for specific events, like a data center power down.

Over lunch I had a conversation with some of the guys from HP about their support, about making things easier, it was great to hear their feedback. We then had a walk through discussion about BladeSystems Matrix which is an innovative solution for improving deployment times something many a CIO speaks about, and then the competitive discussion, discussing the features of each of the blade vendors and how HP is different, or what their competitive advantage is, it’s an interesting topic – though I have always wondered about comparing features, it can do one of two things, turn off your audience, or preach to the converted, but then that could be me being emotional. It was interesting nonetheless and reminded me about the different features and concepts around blade technology.

I’ve published more photos on flickr.

An email from Bill about a problem he had with his Compaq DL580 G1, a midrange server that he uses for his PeopleSoft application.

Hi Martin,

I wondered if you could help me with our DL580 G1. I know the server has an onboard array controller, the Smart Integrated Array controller, however we use a Smart Array 5300 to host the array, the onboard controller is disabled.

Anyway, the 5300 controller has failed, any ideas how I can get the server back up? It boots doesn’t load the 5300 controller and goes to a blank dos screen.

Can I just swap the controller and would I need to reload the drivers, will I loose the configuration?

Regards

Bill”

Hi Bill,

Great to hear from you. We’ll answer each issue separately to keep thing simple, and hopefully I will cover everything.

1. You could try using a floppy disk with the array controller firmware on it, or the HP Firmware disk to see if the array controller will work after a firmware refresh – though it does sound like it might have failed.
2. Enable the onboard array controller – providing the existing driver is loaded in the operating system you should be able to boot from that controller and that should be able to read your existing configuration (it depends what the disk configuration is like a disk shelf etc)
3. Replace the existing controller with another Smart Array 5300  is easy, just switch off the server, remove the SCSI cable and the controller, plug in the replacement controller, connect the cable and power on the server. You would not need to reload the drivers. Pressing F8 when the controller is loading will allow you to view the configuration.
4. Replacing the controller with another one, or using the onboard controller should not result in any data loss as the configuration is retained on the controller and the disks.

Let me know how you get on, my number is below in the email signature.

Regards

Martin

There’s an article about an array failure on the Compaq Proliant DL580 here.

Had an interesting day so far at HP’s facility in Houston, Texas, will be posting some content later today including some pictures of their blades. It was great meeting some of the HP team and asking them a few questions and comments.

My photos are here – all taken on my iPhone.