Bladewatch.com

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110516005667/en/Latest-Data-Center-Trends-Uncovered-Uptime-Institute

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The sixth annual Uptime Institute Symposium came to a close on Thursday, May 12, with overwhelming feedback from delegates that it was the best to date. Following the event, attendees from over 30 countries will return to their organizations to begin implementing new strategies and best practices shared at Symposium by data center industry thought leaders, innovators and practitioners. The four days of programming, tutorials and master classes at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California included over 120 presentations and sessions led by industry experts and analysts from Uptime Institute, The 451 Group and Tier1 Research, with participation from the most cutting-edge enterprises and organizations in the global data center marketplace, including AOL, Deutsche Bank, eBay, Facebook, GE Energy Services, Google and Microsoft.

It’s always interesting to read about these events and to hear what was discussed, what things that I could be implementing in my business, I hope they manage to put up some slides or content for those unable to attend, the more we share information the more we can explore ideas and innovate as a community. Their blog is here: http://blog.uptimeinstitute.com/

http://www.servicemesh.com/

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – May 10, 2011 – ServiceMesh, a provider of enterprise software and services that enable Agile IT operating models for Global 2000 clients, today unveiled version 7.2 of its Agility Platform. With this product release, ServiceMesh extends its leadership position with the industry’s only enterprise cloud governance and lifecycle management platform which now includes a powerful drag-and-drop visual policy modeler, advanced reporting engine, and a range of expanded security and asset management capabilities. These new features, combined with the platform’s workload portability across heterogeneous clouds and comprehensive policy-based governance capabilities, are critically important for successful enterprise cloud adoption by providing robust governance and management controls that can be enforced across the enterprise. The resulting benefits include significantly reduced risk, costs, complexity, cycle times, and capital spending associated with IT operations, infrastructure, and platforms.

Industry leaders in financial services and other Global 2000 firms have relied on ServiceMesh to transform the way their IT organizations acquire and deliver IT services to the business. This includes leveraging the Agility Platform to manage and govern multiple pools of internal and external “as-a-service” offerings, so that IT can be more responsive and demand-driven, and to allow internal IT resources to focus on more innovative, high value activities.  The Agility Platform uniquely addresses enterprise requirements for a unified governance and lifecycle management layer that can optimize workload placement across multiple, disparate internal and external cloud environments while ensuring transparency, security, and portability.

Enterprises that undertake cloud computing initiatives without an extensible and auditable policy-based governance system risk exposure to security compromises, service failures, inadequate performance, violated service level agreements, and costly legal and regulatory penalties. Additionally, a lack of cloud portability and end-to-end workflow automation can compromise key benefits such as vendor contestability and lock-in avoidance, time-to-market improvements, workload placement and performance optimization, and operating cost reductions.

Unlike other offerings available today, the ServiceMesh Agility Platform provides a holistic solution that addresses broad aspects of an organization’s IT operating model to achieve strategic benefits. Agility Platform capabilities span the end-to-end lifecycle, encompassing application migration planning, assembly of fully portable and policy-compliant cloud workloads, automated deployment and run-time management, self-service access to services, and comprehensive cloud security capabilities that include federated identity management.

An interesting announcement from ServiceMesh, as we move into cloud solutions, we need to be thinking more about how we use and consume that service as well as fit it around our governance and internal IT policies. Anything the service providers can do to aid customers in the analysis and reporting of their usage to better understand their requirements and utilization has to be a good thing, the more we understand about the environment, the more we can tune and adapt our platforms to fit out unique requirements. I’m off to read up more about it.

Some time ago, I put together a spreadsheet containing Compaq and HP firmware versions with the date and a link to the online firmware on the HP site. The pdf is here.

We use it on a day to day basis as a baseline, and I know it’s been popular with our readers/followers. I’ve updated it with the latest firmware and that we have tested with the servers we have, also adding a few more blades and servers that have been released or updated.

As ever, do read the release notes and check the HP site before applying to your server to avoid any unexpected issues. We continue to talk drivers and firmware simply because it remains the first thing that a vendor or service provider will ask when logging a call.

We have recently started extending the times between updates (a few months), this is to allow our readers/subscribers) and ourselves to establish a baseline to where we should be, not always running the absolute latest version, but one we know that works and has been validated in our own labs.

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22519

The fault is the latest in a series of banking outages to have struck the nation’s biggest banks as they rip out legacy technology and migrate to more modern core banking systems.

In a statement, Westpac group executive retail and business banking Rob Coombe says: “Westpac sincerely apologises to all our customers who have been impacted by today’s outage. We take systems reliability extremely seriously and are very disappointed by the inconvenience to our customers and will undertake a thorough review.”

Having been discussing data center optimization, energy efficiency and reducing operational costs, I saw this post on finextra talking about this bank’s outage as a result of a systems upgrade replacing their legacy technology. There’s more coverage here which is interesting, do check it out, the issue apparently was related to air conditioning.

It’s interesting to note that they are going through a refresh and migration project to realize service improvements and I suspect a reduction in operating costs. Regardless, well done to them communicating to their customers and apologizing for the loss of service.

http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.jsp?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/7/877/ENUSZG11-0127/index.html&breadCrum=DET001PT022&url=buttonpressed=DET002PT005&specific_index=DET001PEF502&DET015PGL002=DET001PEF011&submit.x=7&submit.y=8%E3%80%88=en_US

The next step of the road map is to incorporate select IBM System x® technologies, originally targeted for the first half of 2011. The reaction to delivering IBM System x capabilities has been very positive, with our clients also asking that we support Microsoft® Windows®. Therefore, today we are revising our road map to include planned support for Windows on System x as well as a revised schedule for IBM System x blade delivery on the IBM zEnterprise Systems.

I saw this interesting post talking about IBM zEnterprise support for Windows, it’s an interesting read and could result in a series of interesting announcements and innovations or opportunities for a high available or high capacity x86 platform I’m off to read up more.  With Windows support on the zEnterprise platform, could we see virtualization also coming on stream, an enterprise scale virtualization in a box platform?

I’ve uploaded Photos from HP Technology @ Work 2011, so you can see some of the demonstrations and the hardware that have been on display, the 3PAR solution looks very interesting and it was great to see an example of BladeSystem Matrix in action, in this case two web servers were running at maximum capacity, SiteScope detected this and powered on an additional web server to help balance the load – very cool if you’re an end user or wanting to maintain a level of service. The demonstration illustrated the management and deployment of both physical and virtual servers through the HP Orchestration tool for BladeSystem Matrix.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24561473@N00/sets/72157626644725976/

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110503c.html

HP today announced a worldwide early access program for the upcoming HP P6000 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), which is targeted for general availability this summer.

With an installed base of nearly 100,000 EVA units worldwide, the program is a significant opportunity for clients to accelerate storage consolidation projects and reduce data center costs without retraining administrative staff.

Part of the HP Converged Infrastructure portfolio, the HP P6000 EVA is the company’s fifth generation EVA and features increased capacity and performance improvements. The HP P6000 EVA, one of the easiest to manage storage arrays available today,⁽¹⁾ is typically deployed for core enterprise applications from messaging to enterprise resource planning. With the HP P6000 EVA, clients have the opportunity to modernize legacy infrastructure and increase return on investment.

If you currently own or use one of HP’s EVA storage solution, there was an announcement that they have an early access program so do check it out if it is of interest.

Chris called me up and asked if I had a pdf with the operating systems supported on each HP Proliant server, I informed him that I didn’t have one to hand and to go to the HP site,  anyway after some searching, I found it here. He was working with the architecture team to decide which systems were to remain in support for their migration to Windows 2008 and which were to be marked as ‘out of support’ and targets for decommission, it sounded quite interesting, he asked for any opinions which I have noted below. When looking at a server migration project it is important not only to consider minimum requirements but internal operating standards and constraints:

• Standardize and reduce the range of server types – for example anything older than a DL380 G5, DL580 G3 BL460c G1, reduce the varients and versions of the same platform
• Standardize components – Emulex LP11000 being the minimum for Fibre connectivity, say 72GB disks the smallest volume supported for the operating system drives
• Standardize configurations – minimum of 4GB RAM with so many PCI slots and dual power supplies or 1GB on board for example

What remains in support will be determined by a number of concepts:

• What needs to be physical and what can be virtual – what the buy in is, financially and operationally what is easier to get signed off or progressing
• Your internal standards for example how long you keep systems, if there is a set depreciation period and ongoing refresh project/workflow
• Energy efficiency standards, performance per watt or data center capacity – from an energy standpoint renewing hardware will be cheaper than upgrading or rebuilding an OS on legacy servers in terms of power and cooling – the return on investment
• The per server or marginal cost element – that file server which is a DL380 G5 with 2GB of RAM hosting the backups for a remote office might be old but it’s good enough for what it does
• Your standards when it comes to virtualization or any in house virtualization projects
• The internal drivers and your approach to delivery – is the aim to standardize everything, lower costs or is it to get everything off Windows 2000 and 2003 and fix it afterward?
• Whether you have a hardware support contract or available spare parts to keep the older servers running

http://www.bladewatch.com/2010/01/08/follow-the-moon/

I was reading an interesting article talking about virtualization of storage being the next big thing, and for many it will be. I wonder though if we should not be looking more towards the follow the moon vehicle for IT infrastructure, the concept of data center virtualization.

We need to be thinking of virtualization as an evolving path, in which we continue to further abstract the end user from the infrastructure and the application, where we move towards service down a wire or online rather than locking the user to a specific device with a client application, with all the anciliary components to deliver that service. At the same time from an IT cost and business empowerment angle virtualization of the data center allows us to transform not only how we organize and support the IT services that the business needs, it allows us to look at how we host and power these services towards a follow the moon approach.

I was having a chat with colleagues over dinner the other night about follow the moon/follow the sun, they had some great comments and got me thinking, I’ve written about it before but thought I’d publish this brief PowerPoint document that I put together sometime ago. It’s in PDF here.

It’s meant as an overview and I confess that it could be missing some concepts, but nonetheless do check it out.

Hope it helps, if you have any questions, do email me.

Regards

Martin

HP.com

HP expands upon the industry’s first mission-critical Converged Infrastructure with enhancements to the Serviceguard Solutions portfolio for Integrity and HP-UX operating environment.

Enhanced HP Serviceguard Solutions 11.20 availability software, combined with the recent release of HP-UX 11i v3 Update 7, enables clients to:

—    Reduce manual configuration efforts by approximately 93 percent⁽¹⁾ with the new HP Serviceguard Extension for Oracle e-Business Suite. It provides automated configuration services for more than 200 tightly integrated applications, including financial services, customer relationship management applications and interrelated components such as storage and networking.

—    Achieve improved database manageability with the new HP Serviceguard Toolkit for Oracle Data Guard. This solution is intended to provide robust high availability for Data Guard with zero custom coding given the need of Oracle database administrators for uninterrupted access to this critical application-management tool.

—    Simplify clustering with new graphical wizards in Serviceguard Manager. These graphical wizards can enable the creation of a complete cluster, including storage and networking, in about a minute. Additionally, the new Cluster Verification for HP Serviceguard provides confirmation that clusters are configured properly.

—    Restart multi-instance applications such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and SAP up to 90 percent⁽²⁾ faster with enhanced Serviceguard performance. In particular, Serviceguard has been designed to load cluster packages simultaneously on all nodes instead of sequentially for rapid start up of the entire Oracle RAC stack, helping to ensuring critical applications are back up and running as quickly as possible.

HP continue to make progress in the concept of converged infrastructure, a topic that I know has many CIOs talking, more from a deployment and make it work principle than anything else. Anything the vendors can do to aid with the interactivity of the different layers of the infrastructure, to make reporting, management and application or infrastructure deployments easier and faster has to be a good thing for competition within the industry and IT as an enhancement tool rather than something which ‘needs fixed’.