Virtualisation

Network World

The future of corporate IT is in private clouds, flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon yet built and managed internally for each business’s users, the analyst firm Gartner says.

Cloud computing hype centers largely around the outsourcing of IT needs to cloud services available over the Internet. While this trend is expected to accelerate, Gartner predicts it will also become standard for large companies to build their own highly automated private cloud networks in which all resources can be managed from a single point and assigned to applications or services as needed. “Our belief is the future of internal IT is very much a private cloud,” says Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman.”Our clients want to know ‘what is Google’s secret? What is Microsoft’s secret?’ There is huge interest in being able to get learnings from the cloud.”

Interesting and I can certainly see why the future might well be in cloud computing. But before we proceed, a few issues or things to note. It’s dependent on:

• Who pays for it - is that an internal IT cost or a bought in service? A shared infrastructure cloud, or a Fixed Income cloud with a shared one for all the shared infrastructure applications
• Your application being coded/in line with what the cloud/grid can deliver
• The issues of ‘owning the infrastructure’ - once it’s a cloud is my voice as loud when I complain if it doesn’t work - what level of control do I have in a cloud computing solution. Key to this is the level of ‘edge’ living that I as the business user/operator can choose to adopt, is there a form I can sign to override the default rules?
• Issues of data protection/sensitivity/control - what application data and applications can reside on the same infrastructure, do I want my HR data being processed/managed on the same servers as my Wiki, my trading applications
• Who supports the cloud and what level of support do I get if my application, my batch doesn’t work
• How will the development teams react to this and how will this be relayed to the end user - “sorry the site’s down, it’s because it’s on cloud” - with buy-in from the development teams this message can be transformed.

I’m eager at this point not to seem negative of the concept. But we need to decide on the basics, how we would deploy the technology, who owns what, and have the ‘default’ answers so that we can ‘pre-answer’ or ‘pre-resolve’ issues.

By that I mean, if the billing, if the processes aren’t in place to aid in transforming the way you provision or provide the IT infrastructure, these kind of issues can de-rail your success.

At the same time there is a hidden benefit of your own infrastructure, you own it, you define the limits of operations, you can control what is supported, what is ‘in scope’ or what can be signed off as an acceptable risk. With an external vendor/provider you have to operate in line with their processes/procedures to enable them to proivde that level of availability (the five 9s). In an internal system, I can accept the risk, say proceed, next.

DL580 G5 specifications and DL585 G5 specifications

I was having dinner with friends the evening, they’d mentioned that they were trying out DL585 G5’s and DL580G5’s for virtualization. They’ve currently got DL580G2’s and were seeking to test both as it was time to replace their older ESX servers.

The conversation went on to specifications and comparing them for virtualization, but ultimately that’s going to depend on your preference between AMD and Intel, but do check them out. I’m still a fan of blades for virtualization, the new BL495c looks particularly cool, I’m off to read up more.

The Earth Times

TORONTO, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ — Platform Computing, the global leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) management software, announces the Platform HPC Academic product bundle for universities and research institutions. Platform HPC Academic is a competitively priced end-to-end product bundle designed to deliver the world’s leading workload management solution to the academic market, making it attainable for institutions of all sizes and budgets. This complete solution supplies all the tools and functionality needed to accelerate compute and data intensive applications, and manage cluster and grid systems.

This really is great news and I hope we see more of this, particularly if we could have something that was tangible for students to use. There’s nothing more that I’d like to see than getting students energised in IT, in seeing what we can achieve, and even more importantly illustrating real world examples, empowering them in readiness for work. How cool would it be if as a student I had been taught about process, about ITIL, about how things could work, why we don’t just replace the servers, why we use grid or virtualization and what the barriers to entry are real or perceived. Well done to Platform, it might also open great opportunities for Platform in the academic field.

Eweek

Agrigcultural powerhouse Monsanto had storage requirements that were growing at an annual rate of 50 percent in a forty year old building that barely maintained its reliability and availability. Built in an era long before powerful blade servers were crammed into cabinets, the data center was forced to rebuild. This is Monsanto’s green IT story as told to Baseline magazine.

An interesting read, check out this article talking about how this company used a range of technologies to respond to a need to be more efficient with its’ IT and accommodate it’s fututre business needs, it’s always great to read how others have achieved their objectives in this space.

Greenbang

Computer company Fujitsu Siemens is going to start slapping a big, fat ‘green’ label on all its products that are more energy efficient and environmentally friendly.

Fujitsu Siemens says the ‘Green IT’ label (pictured) will help flag up the green credentials of its computer products for customers.

The new green IT label appears on products manufactured from November 2008 and uses a three-tier system – ranging from one star through to the highest, three-star accolade.

Fujitsu says the three-star label recognises products that exceed current green IT legislation around material, recycling and power consumption.

The more we talk about Green IT, in terms of not only the hardware, the software configuration, the application and the process the better. It’s great to see Fujitsu and the other vendors talking about Green IT, what they can do to improve the energy efficiency of their products and services; we need the end user to do the same.

Remember that it’s all four that contribute to the efficiency of the way you do business, the amount of energy consumed per transaction. An application not optimized for the platform might mean you buying a faster higher powered server, increasing your power and cooling requirements, that it’s running on a legacy operating system is increasing your support and development costs etc.

For example taking that process online might reduce paper work, and the amount of paper printed, toners consumed, the number of printers required. Streamline your processes, your business to streamline the IT.