Bladewatch.com

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.

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.

http://www.loginvsi.com/en/product-overview

Performance is one of the most important aspects of a good user infrastructure. But are you able to predict the impact of necessary updates and upgrades in advance? How do you select the SBC or VDI product that offers the best performance in your environment? Do you find out the maximum capacity of your current systems? And how do you know for sure if your new system is powerful enough for your needs?

Login Virtual Session Indexer (Login VSI) is a unique benchmarking tool to measure the performance and scalability of centralized desktop environments such as Server Based Computing (SBC) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

Performance and service level agreements are an important concept and consideration in managing users expectations as we move to a more virtualized and centralized desktop offering, I came across this offering from Login VSI, I’m off to read up more, do check it out.

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.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.

A big thank you to Mike Laverick and the team at VMware Press for sending me this complimentary copy of his latest book titled “Administering VMware Site Recover 5.0″, I’m genuinely very pleased to have been sent it, I wish Mike and the team all the very best of luck with this latest publication.

http://www.amazon.com/Administering-VMware-Recovery-Manager-Technology/dp/0321799925 or http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780321799920

I got sent this through the post to read and review and have just started reading it, I’m excited to see what’s covered and read more up on VMware Recovery Manager. Do check it out if you’re looking for a book about VMware Site Recovery Manager, as I complete more pages, I will update more, there are some pictures below in the meantime.

As I write this there are only 8 left on amazon.co.uk, so you might want to pay a visit sooner rather than later to get a copy:

The back of the book is as follows:

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.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.