Bladewatch.com

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.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111011xa.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP Enterprise Services today announced clients across multiple industries and government agencies have selected the company to help drive innovation by delivering application flexibility.

Research conducted on behalf of HP found that 75 percent of enterprises consider it more important to add new value and be innovative in the applications delivered to meet the needs of the business compared to two years ago.⁽¹⁾ However, most enterprises struggle with maintaining unresponsive, rigid applications, which can consume up to 70 percent of IT budgets, leaving few resources to invest in innovation.

HP helps clients address these challenges and become more innovative through applications transformation, which is key to delivering an Instant-On Enterprise that embeds technology in everything it does to serve customers.

Anything the vendors can do to help their customers with their IT challenges whether it is working with IT teams to improve deployment times, extend the life of their data center, or ready applications and services for the cloud, for next generation infrastructure. That we continue to collaborate and empower businesses and customers through effective technologies, through provisioning services on time, on time and to the right target market, can be the difference between the next big sale, between white labelling services to new markets, to being able to earn more revenue and not. Being agile as a vendor, as a service provider, as IT though remains just as important as the business sponsor being able to ask the right questions, know what it is they want, what the business drivers are and be able to translate those into a request for capacity, for infrastructure or services.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-fusion-091411.html

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 14, 2011— VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced VMware Fusion® 4 – the best way to run Windows on a Mac. Available now at VMware.comfor a promotional price of $49.99, VMware Fusion 4 makes it easier than ever for users to run Windows applications with Mac simplicity.

“Enhancements to VMware Fusion® 4 make it a breeze to run Windows and Mac applications side by side on a Mac,” said Pat Lee, director, client product management, VMware. “Offering full integration into Apple OS X Lion, VMware Fusion 4 builds on our proven, award winning platform to provide an easy, fast and reliable way to run Windows applications on a Mac.”

Very cool and exciting announcement, anything they can do to enhance the end user experience of running virtual machines on the Mac has to be a good thing for the end user community and create further opportunities for revenue across the pc and Mac space, I’m off to check it out.

http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/news-events/news/2011/cmusv-launches-entrepreneurship-program.html

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — August 15, 2011 — Speaking to the growing controversy about the best path – university, incubator, or garage – to become a successful entrepreneur, Carnegie Mellon University today announced the launch of an Entrepreneurship Program at its Silicon Valley campus. Nestled in the global hub of technology discovery and innovation, Carnegie Mellon will launch its 12-month, intensive, full-time program on August 15th offering students a chance to learn entrepreneurship practices from one of the world’s most reputable educational institutions while simultaneously germinating their own projects from idea to fruition.

The Entrepreneurship Program is an accelerated one-year program that offers students a Masters of Science in Software Management degree and teaches key skills in management, metrics, product definition and strategy. By blending both technical and business skills, Carnegie Mellon is taking a cutting edge approach to higher education. In addition to traditional academic instruction, students will be encouraged and required to work in functional teams where they will collaboratively develop their own ideas for new products and services – all working toward the goal of becoming part of a global innovation ecosystem.

I had a great chat with Martin Griss about their new program which sounds very interesting, it is unique in combining learning by doing and academic training, something that I have written about on a few occasions, I even spoke to a few universities about it. You see I feel that for particularly IT degrees we need to be not only covering the theory, the academic learning, but the real world concepts and challenges, that’s not to say send students into a data center with an ESX dvd, but it is to explore current concepts and future trends. To be able to educate students for the next generation opportunities and enterprises.  I wrote about it here.

Key features include:

• Coursework blends world-class academic and “learn by doing” training: http://ow.ly/5Y5q1
• Accepting applications online for 2012: http://ow.ly/5ZMSZ
• Variety of partnership opportunities for Silicon Valley tech companies: http://ow.ly/5ZN1r

The course is bringing together sets of academic tools experience and education, with practical engagement and exposure to the right communities and networks. It aims to create an atmosphere of opportunity and empowerment to the students in  not only establishing and developing ideas, but also in being able to articulate them, to ask the right questions, developing ideas into reality. Establishing if you like a framework, combined with a series of networks within networks in which students can speak to the right people, examine the possibilities and be empowered to capitalize on the best of what Silicon Valley has to offer in the start-up community space.

I can see the opportunities for this course on multiple levels, a self fulfilling network of networks and communities, creating opportunity and empower students on their journey to self improvement and entrepreneurship.  It will be exciting to see how the course develops going forward, what ideas and start-ups develop from it, I wish both the university, it’s faculty and students all the very best for the future and offer to open any doors or create any opportunities if I can along the journey of entrepreneurship.

The course is something that would in fact appeal to me, not only to learn skills in the start-up or entrepreneurial space (to capitalize on the ideas I already have), but maybe to help me think outside the box, to meet smart people, and create opportunity or capitalize on opportunity that I hadn’t recognized within the constructs of the ‘here and now’, the “that’s not how we do things here”, or “there are reasons for that” (whether anyone knows what those are is an entirely different thing).

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-hp-virtualsystem-060811.html and http://www.hp.com/go/discover

LAS VEGAS, Nev., June 8, 2011 — Today at HP DISCOVER 2011, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced a new collaboration with HP on turnkey solutions to simplify and accelerate virtualization for customers on the journey to cloud computing. Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new HP VirtualSystem solutions will be integrated, pre-tested IT infrastructure stacks delivered as appliances that will help improve business agility, lower costs and enable cloud computing for enterprise customers of all sizes.

The new appliances will include optimized, turnkey virtual infrastructure and end-user computing solutions that deliver a full compute stack consisting of server, storage, networking and services from HP and leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure and management software from VMware. Offered in three scalable deployment options that are “right-sized” for customers, HP VirtualSystem solutions with VMware technologies will enable significant savings in deployment time for customers, helping them focus on more strategic projects for their organizations.

So it’s the HP Discover event in Las Vegas, however due to a number of reasons I wasn’t able to attend it this time, however there is some great content covering everything from their SuperDome, through to their networking, blade and Converged Infrastructure solutions, with great coverage of the different features of the event here. Do check it out, it looks like a great event!

There was the announcement above talking about the HP/VMware collaboration to improve their offering of virtualization and cloud technologies, making the technologies more accessible and scalable which has to be a good thing for their customers, the market place and competition alike, I’m off to read up more.

http://www.findmyfirmware.com/firmware/pcsupport.xls

I was having a conversation with one of my friends who works outside London for a multi-national running the desktop and help desk teams. He was asking my about FindMyFirmware and asked if there were any plans to add desktops to the application. His problem, a call might be logged for a pc, he wanted to be able to have an application or reference point at which the engineer could check to determine what to with the pc if there is a fault.

Before I continue, some background, he had been looking at the reports and found that each engineer approached the same problem first, the old school engineers might make the judgement that a 5 year old pc is good enough and rebuild it, or buy the parts needed to fix it, other engineers might take the opposite approach, if it’s out of warranty it goes in the bin. He was therefore looking for a reference point that he could issue to say if it’s out of warranty or our internal support procedures then bin it. A quick guide so to speak, I offered to put something together and sent it through by email, I’ve published it here.

It’s very simple.

• PC model
• Bios version
• Manufacture date
• Windows 7 supported – yes/no
• Specifications link
• Actions upon failure – this is the bit you can customize, I’ve put in rather vague comments.

I here from my colleague that he basically added a comment for the models IT wanted to support and not, so in the Dell space, anything older than a Dell Optiplex 745 was deemed as replace do not rebuild, do not repair, replace, another colleague said he’d replaced actions upon failure with ‘Virtualize no repair”.

Your operations will be unique to you as will be your actions/requirements. A few points of notice, Windows 7 support seems to be not that straight forward dependent on the vendor so do check it, also the manufacture date was rather complex to put together without a serial number, so we have used the information available to supply a relatively accurate date. It is supplied without support or liability and is supplied independently of the vendors listed, any issues, data inaccuracies are our fault and we apologize for any inconvenience.

My desktop/laptop knowledge tends to be great with one vendor for part of the time and not so good on others, but you get the idea and can always add your desktops/laptops following the same guidance, if you specifically want me to add any desktops or laptops, email me and I hope it’s useful, making life just that little bit easier.

So in reference to this post, we’re looking at four major products as part of the bladewatch research activities:

Veeam – backup solution for VMware

Dell PowerEdge C6100 server for cloud builders and high density environments.

VKernel vOPS Reporting and chargeback – something that I know has been a topic of interest for colleagues and our blog

HP Proliant DL980 G7 – the 8 socket server powered by AMD processors – what does this platform have to offer for today’s requirements and is there demand for the 8 socket server in the x86/x64 space?

I got asked by Chris how this would work. Well basically, we go off to the product pages, read all about them, phone a few friends and ask their views, then put together some words and analysis.

Want to feature in our weekly four products/services of the week?

Email us: martin237@gmail.com, but please put in the subject “Four products/services of the week”, Martin gets about 200 emails a day in press releases, announcements and questions.

There is no ulterior motive, it’s simply a way of keeping up to date, we don’t ask that you be a multi national but we do ask that you take a look at the blog and decide if your product or service would be relevant to our readers.

For the second time, I was talking to Chris, who continues to try and invite me over for lunch in Sunny Canary Wharf. He was having some what of a quandary. A user had phoned up and started making a series of requests before he put in his P2V dvd and pressed go, to transform the application server in this case, an IBM x3650 to a virtual machine, a virtual instance. The application manager sent him a variant of the email below, we’ve removed anything that could identify Chris, but the context, the essence remains the same.

Danny,

We’ve got the network connections ready for the ESX host, and can therefore commence virtualization of server18763 when you are ready, we’re looking to do this online due to the nature of the services and applications involved, however we can do this offline if you prefer.

Can you please confirm the date and time so that I can raise the change.

Thanks

Chris Smith

Windows Analyst

Global Technology

The Application Manager (or Danny’s response)

Chris,

That’s fine but can you please confirm the following:

When you virtualize the machine, what kind of RAID do we get, at the moment we have RAID 1+0 for the OS, and RAID 5 for the data.

What adjustments do you need to make to the backups and will this change the nature and window allocated to this task

How will virtualization of the machine affect our disaster recovery procedures and will be mirroring the instance so that if live goes down, service continues?

Cheers

Danny

Application Manager

Global Services

So the debate Chris and I were having over the phone was one of context and process. Chris was asking if high availability was part of the virtualization project, his task to plug in P2V dvd, press virtualize seemed to differ from re-architecting the global services application. Also he was not aware of the disk set up as it was on SAN or NAS storage and that was handled by the storage team, in terms of backups the backups ran as they always did, in terms of window and performance he did not anticipate change in schedules but then that was managed by the backup and storage teams.

My reply to Chris was to respond something like this – it was off the top of my head, so would end up being rewritten several times before it was sent out:

1. The nature of the machine is changed, the server is virtualized into a container which is hosted on a high availability cluster of ESX servers, with the virtual disks residing on high available disks with replication where possible and where the application or infrastructure mandated that it was required.  Further discussion regarding disk configurations would need to be discussed in partnership with the storage teams.

2. The nature of the backups remains the same, however as part of the change the team responsible for the backups will check the configuration and ensure that it conforms to our operational standards and any deviation escalated to the relevant business sponsors

3. The virtualization project aims to transform the physical server to a virtual instance which can be hosted on our new virtualization cluster with in built resilience and scalability, however in order to facilitate additional or enhanced functionality in terms of disaster recovery we need to understand the application and infrastructure requirements as well as their constraints in order to provide the right platform going forward.

If I’ve missed anything, or you have any thoughts, send me an email or post a comment.

Irrespective of cloud, of service level agreements and contracts, a simple question one which might seem strange.  Your service provider says it has full fault tolerance, disaster recovery, a series of business continuity and reliability processes to ensure that it can meet its contractual obligations and maintain service for your business and your customers.

My questions?

What do you mean? A stand alone pc which you can re-ip?

Business continuity or disaster recovery you have said that’s included but what is the actual downtime involved and what is the anticipated timeline to recovery.

It’s great to see cloud services, outsourced solutions creating opportunity for all from a customer, supplier and service provider standpoint, but I wonder if as the costs come down we don’t detract functionality, or create a gap between what users perceive to be in place so that in event of a systems failure, service continues.  To the small service provider I met many months ago who told me, “oh our DR is that we switch the production server off, re-ip the DR box, and restore data from tape”. In many respects that is providing the ability to continue service, but at what operational cost both financially and in terms of service, sorry your site is out of date but we’ll copy the pictures over soon….

http://www.finextra.com/News/Fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22579

Mizuho’s ATM network and online services were knocked out in March, leaving millions of customers unable to access their money in the wake of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

The problems were caused by a surge in donations made through Mizuho’s ATMs following the disaster and the bank’s systems then struggled over the next few days to cope with the backlog of unprocessed transactions.

Check out this article talking about organizational change in this bank in an effort to improve the reliability and scalability of it’s IT systems.