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.

MarketWatch

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, Nov 30, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Symantec Corp. today announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has selected the Clearwell eDiscovery Platform to streamline eDiscovery investigations. Clearwell enables FBI case agents to efficiently manage and analyze documents including the ability to search, review, tag and export documents for exchange. As a result, the agency is able to reduce the time and resources required for document review and thus benefit from a significant reduction in the costs of investigations.

Clearwell presents a solution to reduce administrative workload on agents, save money, and increase the efficiency of case investigations. Clearwell’s strengths include advanced search and analytics capabilities and the ability to automatically eliminate duplicate information, which can contribute to a significant reduction in total investigation costs. In addition, Clearwell provides the ability to review, tag and export documents to partner agencies and prosecuting attorneys, which can assist case agents in all aspects of trial.

It’s always interesting to see what different organizations are using to solve their business or operational challenges, in this case it’s the FBI selecting Clearwell eDiscovery Platformto aid in their investigations, very cool, I’m off to read more.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-nov

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for November 2011.

With the release of the security bulletins for November 2011, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued November 3, 2011. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

With many organizations trying to keep their infrastructure secure whilst working within complex operations, specific timelines, I  suspect some are just completing their patching exercises in time for December’s announcement. With that in mind, HP/Microsoft anyone, patching as a service, so that I can have my teams carry on the plethora of changes and scheduled work that needs to get done outside of standard Microsoft Patch releases.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1369582

CIOs Plot a Path to the Future via Smarter Use of IT in 2012, Finds Oracle and PwC Report

Research finds 2012 priorities for Communications Service Providers include striking a better balance of in-house and outsourced IT and making better use of applications such as CRM

The findings are interesting and illustrate the challenges that face the CIO today. The main drivers from my standpoint are:

1. Do more with less
2. Reduce delivery times and the time to market – why does it take so long to deploy new infrastructure or redeploy old infrastructure
3. Reduce operational costs and change the business as usual to investment spend
4. Improve capacity planning and reduce ‘unexpected’ capacity issues, be more proactive
5. Look at where we spend money and can we do this more efficiently in-house or through our partners
6. Innovate our data center requirements, and utilise the right technologies for the right business needs

How do we achieve this?

• Standard offerings to aid delivery times, to reduce support costs and complexity
• Reduce complexity and build in resilience or the ability to scale – using common platforms, less complex architecture we can scale the solution once, deploy once and spend once, rather than trying to keep the lights on
• Virtualize where possible – but turning it around to make virtualization the norm, abstracting the different infrastructure elements from the end user – why do you care what tin your application runs on, what should be key is delivery, scalability and disaster recovery functionality if applicable
• Improved processes with transparency in costs, in delivery times and engagement processes – understand who we talk to get things done, and follow set processes that work to achieve this

Do check out the article.  There are exciting and challenging times ahead, regardless the common message is doing more with less through reducing complexity and improving the agility of the infrastructure. This needs to be done not only through investment and renewal of the existing systems, but in establishing the right set of common tools, common processes and platforms to allow us to deliver common offerings that meet the cross business and cross region or market requirements, to be able to deliver on time, on budget to standards each time, every time.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-oakhills-netapp-11-15.11.html

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Helps Oak Hills Deliver “Anytime, Anywhere” Learning to Students and Manage Explosive Data Growth

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and PALO ALTO, Calif. —Nov. 15, 2011—Public schools today must deal with increased student enrollment, ongoing state budget cuts, and limited resources, which require them to do more with less. Additionally, they need to figure out how to manage the explosive growth in mobile device and personal laptop usage by students and faculty. Oak Hills Local School District in western Ohio was faced with these challenges and realized that smart decisions made about its IT infrastructure would enable it to deliver anytime, anywhere learning to each of its high school students in light of ongoing budget and resource constraints. As a result, Oak Hills made the transition to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to centrally manage and deliver desktops to students and educators from its data center, which is built on a NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), VMware (NYSE: VMW), and Cisco® foundation.

It’s always great to see how end users are benefiting from next the technology, not only in terms of cost (in this case approximately $1 million), it’s the agility in the end user experience and the ability to deliver services and functionality that might not previously been available due to both operational and technological barriers removed. An interesting read, do check it out.

http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20111101-787689.html

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—November 1, 2011—The exponential growth of data provides a wealth of information that, if managed and analyzed effectively, can result in innovations and discoveries that affect our world. Nowhere is this truer than in the health care field, where the right data analysis can lead to new findings that profoundly change lives in an instant. The key to unlocking this data is technology. Without it, many of today’s life-saving medical advances would not be possible. In short, technology saves lives.

For Be The Match®, which operates the world’s largest listing of potential marrow donors and donated cord blood units, data is life. Thousands of patients with life-threatening diseases like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease need a marrow transplant every year but don’t have a match in their family. Operated by the nonprofit National Marrow Donor Program®, Be The Match helps connect these patients with donors. The organization understood that to save more lives, it needed a technology foundation that would act as an enabler, not a constraint. That’s why Be The Match is built on NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP).

“The ability to make faster decisions and to analyze information in real time has a direct impact on the lives of our patients, making our storage platform a critical piece to our success,” said Michael Jones, chief information officer of Be The Match. “With NetApp, we have been able to greatly accelerate the flow of data, which has enabled us to facilitate 50% more transplants around the world. NetApp has been instrumental in helping us save more lives.”

Check out this great article illustrating how technology can be the empowerment tool to not only deliver value but change lives. In this case it’s illustrating how NetApp technology has helped this donor organisation in their objectives accelerating the flow of data, very cool, I’m off to read up more about it. I remain a fan of NetApp as a company and of their Filer platform having supported and been an end user, it’s always great to read how people are benefiting from their technology, you can read more here: http://www.netapp.com/us/campaigns/builton/

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/513469

During his keynote presentation today, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced Oracle Social Network, an enterprise collaboration and social networking tool for business.

Oracle Social Network enables business users to find and collaborate with the right people within their enterprise and across enterprises – for example, with suppliers, partners and customers – using information from the human resources system and their own private social network.

Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration tools, including personal profiles, groups, activity feeds, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, co-browsing and editing, instant messaging, email, and web conferencing.

http://www.neverfailgroup.com and http://blog.neverfailgroup.com/

Reading, UK – October 11, 2011 – Neverfail®, a leading global software company specialising in affordable continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, today announced the release of Neverfail Virtual Availability Director. This new offering harnesses Neverfail’s advanced server protection technology combined with VMware’s vSphere Client application to provide a single console from which administrators can manage and maintain the continuous availability of all business-critical applications, whether they reside on physical or virtual resources.

Server virtualization has been growing at a tremendous rate for all business applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint as well as bespoke accounting and finance tools.  VMware vSphere has been the go-to platform of choice to manage these virtual environments, and yet while server virtualization does introduce some basic availability options, the inability to manage physical servers or heterogeneous environments through virtualization solutions like vSphere has become a challenge. This has become particularly evident as end-users increasingly demand a complete business continuity solution to ensure tier-1 applications are protected, regardless of where they reside.

It’s great to see the team at Neverfail further innovate their offering to assist with virtual environments across the application and infrastructure space. I’ve been speaking with some companies and end users that have been praising their solutions featuring Neverfail technology. Regardless of where you are in the IT ecosphere, that your disaster recovery or business continuity solution works for your business is key, everything else, the underlying technology is white noise, anything software and infrastructure teams can do to make business continuity or high availability just that little bit easier has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more about their virtual offering.

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).

So I’ve been writing the blog since 2006, during that time I’ve played with nearly all of the Compaq/HP Proliant servers from the olden days Compaq Proliant 4500s (Pentium 90) through to their latest and greatest BL460 G7 blades.  The one common theme which we learned quite quickly and which I have written about was the driver and firmware thing, my interest even resulted in our infamous server firmware spreadsheet (which we love) and our FindMyFirmware iPhone application.

If you’ve never owned a server, had a fault with a server or managed servers in volume this may not be something with which you are overly familiar, however in the server world drivers and firmware are key. When you log a call to either any of the big vendors or a service provider they will ask:

1. Have you upgraded the firmware?
2. Are the drivers up to date?
3. Please supply a diagnostic report.

My pain point as a server support guy, as someone who has written about driver and firmware over the years is not so much upgrading the drivers and firmware as much as it is version management. I know that I need to have the latest and greatest, but as an engineer and working for an enterprise you quickly come to realize that you end up aiming instead for N-1, so you’re not quite the latest and greatest but not out of date, so that when you have to log a call there are not a series of updates that need to be applied to the server before we can progress through to getting the parts we need or the assistance we need to fix our problem. With this in mind I actually developed with some of my colleagues the bladewatch bundle, this was quite simply, a folder which contained firmware which I had downloaded once a month, plus a copy of the HP Diagnostic utilities (online) and ISO, as well as copies of the PSP and firmware dvd (in case it was needed), a bundle that an engineer could carry around on a USB, and know when you’ve got the downtime or if you’re doing maintenance, run this against it so we know it’s all up to date.

Anyway back to the purpose of this post, HP appear to have made further innovations in this space which is brilliant news. Their service pack includes support for Windows, Linux and VMWare:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/spp/index.html

HP Service Pack for ProLiant is an enhanced, re-packaging of ProLiant systems software and firmware and is based on the rich legacy of Windows and Linux ProLiant Support Packs (PSPs) and HP Smart Update Firmware DVD that were found in the Insight Foundation suite for ProLiant. It is comprehensive systems software and firmware release offered as a tested solution on all ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

It provides a single image for combined firmware and systems software for a single step installation instead of a two step installation of HP Windows and Linux PSPs and the HP Smart Update Firmware DVD. It repackages firmware, drivers, utilities, agents, non-agents, and other utilities that are required to keep pace in today’s rapidly expanding technology infrastructure as well as improves process for releasing these products to HP customers. Additionally, VMware drivers and offline firmware will be supported.

They had already made in roads with the work that they had done on the blade firmware bundle:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/blades/bladesystemupdate.html

• »Overview
• »The HP BladeSystem c-Class requires firmware and management tool upgrades
• »BladeSystem for ProLiant Release Set Compatibility Table
• »Release Set Downloads
• »HP BladeSystem Release Sets for Integrity
• »Additional information

NOTE: HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures properly configured with redundant Onboard Administrator and Virtual Connect modules can be updated online without disruption to production workloads. Firmware and PSP updates to blade components may require individual blades to be rebooted, which can be scheduled during an appropriate maintenance window for each server blade workload.

It’s great to see ongoing investment and effort being made in the systems management, driver and firmware space, anything HP can do to help their customers and end users maintain their systems not only empowers customers to learn and take interest in running their products, but also reduces the complexity for the customer in terms of systems management and should hopefully reduces’ HP’s support costs and time to resolution which works for everyone both sides of the sales and support space.

Some example articles about drivers and firmware that I’ve written over the years:

• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/01/20/upgrading-network-card-firmware-does-it-take-the-server-off-the-network/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/03/25/how-to-use-the-hp-smart-update-firmware-dvd/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/05/07/upgrading-firmware-on-hp-servers-a-guide/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/06/21/the-server-or-blade-bundle/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2010/08/27/ilo-is-in-a-flash-recovery-state/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/01/21/ilo-power-commands-a-few-questions/
• http://www.bladewatch.com/2011/07/10/findmyfirmware_and_dell_poweredge
• http://www.bladewatch.com/documents/firmware
• http://www.bladewatch.com/findmyfirmware
• http://www.bladewatch.com/documents/ilo/

My the innovation from HP and their competitors continue, the more we break down the barriers, make the product support information more accessible and empower the user, the more we can further empower how users use their equipment and their confidence in using it, creating opportunity for vendor and end user alike.