Bladewatch.com

HP.com

BRACKNELL, UK, Jan. 18, 2012 – Britain’s small businesses grew by an average of 11 per cent over the last six months, up five per cent on the last half year according to HP’s SMB Index, an independent survey of 1000 UK small businesses (between 1 and 50 employees).

HP’s third SMB Index paints a slightly more optimistic picture for the UK economy – which relies heavily on growth in the SMB sector – than the last study in July 2011, with 63 per cent of respondents reporting that their business will grow in the next six months, at an average of 14 per cent.

While growth was up five per cent on 2011 there was however a small drop in short term confidence in the UK economy (down three per cent to 32 per cent). However, there was extremely positive news for the sole traders, who grew a total of eight per cent, coming back from negative growth of minus two per cent in July 2011. Businesses in the retail, distribution and transports sectors saw the most amount of growth. Construction and property companies grew the least.

The SMB market growing is great news for the economy in terms of economic growth but also represents new opportunity not only for physical servers and infrastructure, but also cloud and professional services where SMB customers might want to be able to scale up and down their infrastructure in line with demand, or buy in the services that they need for their business rather than host and manage their own email, file and print platforms. We’ll have to see, it’s exciting times at the moment, economically and technologically we’re in a state of flux, the old ways of doing business of provisioning and delivering IT are changing, for specific customers, specific existing offerings they remain, but the new cloud based, software and infrastructure as a service are compelling with lower start up costs and therefore greater opportunity for service providers and their customers.

http://www.nimbusdata.com/products/e-class.html

South San Francisco, CA, January 31, 2012 – Nimbus Data Systems, Inc., the leader in Sustainable Storage, today unveiled the new E-Class Flash Memory System, the industry’s first fully-redundant multiprotocol solid state storage system. With record-setting capacity and unprecedented power, cooling and rackspace efficiency, the E-Class outperforms and costs less to operate than conventional disk arrays while providing the high-availability, scalability and cost reduction that enterprises and cloud providers demand. Highlights of the new E-Class include:
•  First multiprotocol solid state system with no single point of failure and enterprise-grade flash
•  Most scalable solid state storage system ever engineered, supporting 500 TB as one logical pool
•  Highest density primary storage system ever, eclipsing 15K RPM disk arrays by over 3x
•  Lowest energy consumption of any primary storage system, consuming as little as 5 watts per TB
•  Comprehensive data management software and “unified” storage without any licensing fee

This announcement from Nimbus Data Systems does sound interesting, being able to have high density tier 1 storage for the enterprise brings new opportunities for consolidation, availability and performance. I’m off to read up more about it.

I have been looking at another server for Bladewatch after HP kindly sent us a new style HP Proliant MicroServer to play with (the N40L G7 edition to be precise).  During this research for a new server I was comparing features of the HP Proliant MicroServer and their entry level HP Proliant ML series server.  The ML is their tower based server, and is designed with expansion in mind, their MicroServer has expansion features but is also referred to as the Just Right First Server. With this in mind, I thought I’d dig deeper, the major differences are below, I’ve quoted the quickspecs but sometimes you find things like memory support change as different configurations become available so do check out the HP site.

The ML110 G6 features:

Selection of Celeron to Xeon processor

Smart Array for striping data over disks

Integrated HP ProLiant 100 G6 Lights Out 100i Remote Management standard

4 expansion slots

DVD ROM drive standad

Memory support is 16GB

The MicroServer

AMD Turion II Model Neo N40L processor only

RAID controller for RAiD 1,0

Remote Access Card is optional

Two expansion slots

Memory support is 8GB

The main difference then?  The HP Proliant MicroServer will be more than good enough as a small business server, a starter device which I can use for file and print, as well as an ESXi test lab or even a mini application server dependent on the requirements.  The Proliant ML110 G6 or G7 brings further scalability, further upgrade potential when it comes to expansion slots, memory and the inbuilt lights out card makes it that little bit more manageable out of the box as it’s standard, where as the MicroServer you need to fit it or order it with it fitted.  That said both are ideal starter servers and which one you choose will depend on you and your requirements, I’ve got colleagues running both as media servers, VMware or virtualization test labs to name a few scenarios.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/refs-ntfs-file-system-windows-8-server,14501.html

ReFS, short for Resilient File System, will initially debut with Windows 8 Server, but is expected to make its way through to Windows 8 client system to support the full feature set of Storage Spaces, which will allow users to create storage pools from multiple physical and virtual storage devices.

According to Microsoft, ReFS will be an always-online file system “for the next decade or more” that is architected for “extreme scale” with large volume, file and directory sizes, as well as data verification and auto-correction via checksums while maintaining compatibility with a “wide subset of widely adopted” NTFS features.

Interesting, there were meant to be improvements to the file system in Windows many years ago with Vista if I recall, I wonder what ReFS will bring, I’m off to read up more about it, do check it out.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/sme-servers/2012/01/20/fujitsu-primergy-rx100-s7-40094873/

Check out this review of Fujitsu’s Primergy RX100 S7, one of their rack servers, it does look like an interesting review and offering from Fujitsu, I’m off to check out more on the Fujitsu site.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/servers/372277/ibm-system-x3100-m4

Check out this review from PC Pro for the IBM System X3100-M4, it’s always great to see what other people think about the different vendors servers, an interesting read, I’m off to read up more about IBM’s server through their excellent Redbooks here.

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/fusion-io-punches-through-one-billion-iops-barrier-53263

Storage specialist Fusion-io continues to improve the latency of flash storage devices after it achieved one billion input and output operations per second (IOPS) in a demonstration.

The company made the announcement just one month after a test involving its solid-state memory storage subsystems, showed how a single server test system reached 1.11 million transactions per second (tps).

In the most recent demonstration however, the company used eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers, each equipped with eight ioDrive2 Duos, to break the one billion IOP barrier when transferring 64 byte data packets.

A great article talking about Fusion-io’s impressive announcement and achievements in their IOPS demonstration, with the right system configuration and an optimized application can create an impressive platform for revenue generation especially in low latency and high performance platforms. I’m off to read more about it.

The standard MicroServer comes with a hard drive, memory, network port and USB so that you can connect your USB DVD drive to load the operating system or run FreeNAS or ESXi, none of the options I have listed below are necessary to get started, though I did find having the DVD drive that bit easier to load Windows 2008.

The options I would look at:

• Internal DVD Writer (624192-B21)  – this is to allow you to install software as normal (for example Windows/Linux or to install any applications that you might have rather than use the network connection) – if you’re deploying remotely you might not want the DVD Writer for security – http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06c/A1-329290-329233-72841-72841-3626683-4275665.html

•  HP External backup device (AJ766A) – this is to allow you to backup your server, you might choose an online back up tool, or already have a backup solution in place (even using Windows Backup to disk/DVD might do initially) – http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/disk-backup/product-detail.html?oid=3741010

• HP MicroServer Remote Access Card (615095-B21) – this allows you to manage the MicroServer remotely, this could be ideal if you’re planning to use them in remote sites or have them stored under the desk rather than in an easy to access location – http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06c/A1-329290-439740-241590-241590-4275610-4275612.html

• There are of course extra disks dependent on your storage requirements and thoughts for future growth going forward, you might for example choose to have one disk for Windows and another for your network shares, so that someone copying all their files to the ‘share drive’ need not affect the stability of the server.

HP very kindly shipped us (658553-421) for us to test and see what we thought of it.  This is the G7 edition featuring the updated AMD N40L processor, it comes with 2GB

The specs are here:

So what’s in the box?

• HP Proliant MicroServer
• European power cable
• US power cable
• Documentation and DVD with documentation

So what is included inside the MicroServer:

• 1x 2GB memory chip
• 1x 250GB 7200RPM hard drive
• Extra screws so that you can install an additional hard drive
• Key to allow you to use screws for additional disk, also to remove the system board

So what upgrades could I fit to the existing server?

• An additional RAM chip to improve performance and available memory
• An additional three hard drives (SATA non hot plug hard disk drives) – currently therefore you could install 12TB (4x3TB hard drives)
• DVD Writer/DVD ROM drive or HP tape drive
• Remote Access Card (in one of the slots)
• Network card (in the other slot)

So what’s the first server specification for file and print going to be? What OS is it going to run?

Option one – Desktop pc with Windows or Linux operating system with enough memory to run the operating system and hard disk that can store enough of your file

• Benefits – low cost, you could possibly use one of the pcs that users find slow as file and print services do not require much capacit
• Potential issues – using a recycled pc might limit capacity, how many disks that you can have, or how large a disk it can hold.

Option two – Entry level server running Windows Server 2008 Foundation / Windows Server 2008 Small Business Edition  / Linux

• Benefits – you can pick up these entry level servers for a reasonable cost.  Easy to support as they tend to be similar in design and compatible with desktop hardware – there is not a steep learning curve or transition from a desktop pc doing the same thing.  The operating systems are not necessarily much more expensive than a desktop operating system and will have additional features to enhance collaborative working or host applications. They can be as quiet as a desktop pc and therefore be hidden under someone’s desk or in the corner next to the printer with no screen as you can manage them remotely.
• Potential issues – they are not a desktop and therefore some additional set up and maintenance might be needed which you might not have previously done.  There could be some additional license costs dependent on the operating system chosen.

Some considerations:

• Component resilience – this option is where we add extra levels of resilience at a hardware level.  So with a server or with upgraded components in your desktop pc above we can introduce RAID, which is a more resilient way of configuring the hard drives, common configurations being RAID 1 and RAID 5.  You can read more here. Each has its own benefits in performance or reliability.
• Data resilience – what backup options are you going to use – a few could include backing up to a file on another disk in the server, or to a network location independent of the server, backing up to tape or to a managed service over the internet for example.
• Operating system – remember to check any license implications, there might be a low cost for the server operating system but a client license cost, that is the cost of allowing a user to connect and use services on that server. Check out the OEM edition bundles of the operating systems that you can buy preinstalled with your first server.
• Warranty and support – how important is your server and therefore what level of support do you have on site and what would you require from a service provider, reseller or the vendor to recover the server.  If it’s file and print the chances are it being down for a few hours is inconvenient and you could therefore live with hours of downtime but not days – this is where your backups come into play.

Print server considerations:

• When you install the printers – what drivers do you need to install and store on the server for the computers on your network  – Windows 7 and Windows XP? Any Windows 2000 or MAC users?
• What to call the printers and how to permission which users can map to them, you might not want to allow everyone to print colour to save on paper
• Will you need this feature with the next generation printers where I can email the document to the printer and it prints using the internet and cloud printing services?