Bladewatch.com

HP have announced their continued efforts to request Oracle continue with their support and commitment to the Itanium platform, with the press release below:

HP today issued the following statement:

HP believes that Oracle’s March 22 statement to discontinue all future software development on the Itanium platform violates legally binding commitments Oracle has made to HP and the more than 140,000 shared HP-Oracle customers. Further, we believe that this is an unlawful attempt to force customers from HP Itanium platforms to Oracle’s own platforms.

As a result, on June 15, HP filed a civil lawsuit in the Superior Court of the State of California, for the County of Santa Clara, seeking Oracle to reverse its decision. HP believes that Oracle is legally obligated to continue to offer its software product suite on the Itanium platform and we will take whatever legal actions are available to us necessary to protect our customers’ best interests and the significant investments they have made.

HP remains committed to a long-term mission-critical server roadmap, including Intel’s Itanium processor. Similarly, Intel has repeatedly reinforced its ongoing commitment to the Itanium roadmap.

It will be interesting to see what response we receive from Oracle and if this can stem the tide with regards to their existing statements about their commitment and ongoing development of their products for Itanium as a platform. We’ll have to see.

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.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/401816

Insurers struggle with business agility and see their legacy IT systems as a hurdle to optimizing customer service and faster time to market for new products and channels, according to a study released today by Oracle Insurance and Insurance Networking News.

The study of 421 insurance industry professionals – including C-level and senior executives, IT professionals and line of business managers – looked at organizational priorities for insurers, their effectiveness in priority areas, and the role that IT plays in helping and hindering their initiatives.

An article from Oracle talking about their research into what insurance executives want from their IT and how IT can be perceived as being a hindrance to achieving these goals. It is and it isn’t. Firstly IT as an individual and a department needs to understand the rules of engagement and discover how it can add value, in some cases that may be doing the support, the architecture or the vendor/service provider negotiation and management, once it understands it’s roll only then can it act as an empowerment tool, “you’ve asked for this, have you considered…”

Change can be uncomfortable but it’s part of life, and it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and pass judgment or make comments, IT and service delivery really is a two way street. The business need to manage and explain their expectations whilst understanding that there is a cost of doing business, can we run your department on a desktop with a an inkjet printer, yes, will it have the same resilience and performance as an enterprise solution no, so on that basis where is the middle ground, where can I identify savings and offset the right costs to deliver what you want on time, on budget and quite possibly with the flexibility in the solution to deliver on demand, real or perceived.

I got asked by a friend what major issues I would think about in the security patching space, as he was looking at introducing a new process for each region to ensure parity across the server estate, below are a few ideas:

• Reboot the server to verify that the server is in a known state before patching it
• Verify there is sufficient space to deploy and install the patches and layered products
• Determine servers in scope what schedules and operational requirements there are around the patch deployment and reboot process
• For servers not in scope (For example Windows 2000 where support agreements are not in place), do we reboot them anyway to clear down memory, or carry out maintenance during that time anyway, for example clearing down disk space or updating anti virus definitions
• Reporting – to what level do you report, for example patches outstanding before and after, individual application or services impacted as a result of patching or related activity.
• Clean up – how do we account for machines that were not in a state to be patched and what remediation plans are there to schedule the patching of those machines, or cleanse the inventory.

Key issues resulting in patch failure:

• Firewall or connectivity issues
• Insufficient disk space
• Patch dependencies incorrectly defined – .Net patch which needs another patch before it can be installed, or the install needs the original media like the Office CD to install
• Server was in an unknown state, out of memory/non paged pool or virtual memory errors, hanging or being generally unresponsive
• Component failures such as a disk failure or memory failure which results in the server not returning to service without user intervention

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/

Some time ago, I put together a spreadsheet containing Dell firmware versions with the date and a link to the firmware on the Dell 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 Dell 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.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms11-may.mspx

Version: 1.0

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for May 2011.

With the release of the security bulletins for May 2011, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued May 5, 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.

Microsoft is hosting a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on May 11, 2011, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the May Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

Microsoft also provides information to help customers prioritize monthly security updates with any non-security updates that are being released on the same day as the monthly security updates. Please see the section, Other Information.

Microsoft have released their patches for May which include one patch for Windows 2003 / 2008 as well as one patch for their Office suite, do check out the Microsoft site for more information and valid if your systems are in scope, as ever we say this to remind you that applying all the patches is what your service provider or vendor will expect before logging a call. For those of you running virtual machines in Hyper-V or VMware you might want to consider how and in what volume you apply the patches to reduce any overhead from patching virtual machines in volume at the same or similar times from a hypervisor/disk performance or virtual machine performance standpoint.

I’ve updated the feed file for FindMyFirmware, so it now has updated and (Bladewatch) tested firmware for a range of servers, additionally the specifications links have been updated adding a few servers to the list.

If you have any comments or suggestions do check it out. For those of you that haven’t had a look at FindMyFirmware, it’s $0.59 (prices in each region vary due , and it’s designed so when you’re in a meeting you can look up a server and get the following information displayed:

• Current firmware – Bladewatch tested and regularly updated
• Manufacture date – Bladewatch averaged, basically the date of release up until the last vendor specification update
• Link to the manufacturers specification html or pdf pages

The idea is it gives you the information you might need to hand in a meeting or walking around the data center, as the iPhone application downloads the firmware information from the Bladewatch server for offline viewing.

The url to see the application in use and find out more information is www.bladewatch.com/findmyfirmware or here on iTunes.