VMWare
Innovation of the virtual infrastructure continues
Working with VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) has upgraded its Fibre Channel SAN switches so they can provide a range of storage services to virtual computers as they are moved around data centers.
The upgrade to the MDS 9000 aims to provide the same set of storage services to virtual machines that the SAN switch provide to physical servers, according to Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product marketing for storage solutions at Cisco. The key step is to partition a physical host bus adapter into virtual HBAs so every virtual machine has its own virtual HBA and can be connected to a virtual SAN, he said.
Anything we can do to improve the possibilites with the virtual infrastructure has to be a good thing, check out this article talking about developments from VMWare and Cisco.
IBM Blade technologies an enabler to business
ARMONK, NY and DEVON, PA — (Marketwire) — 11/05/08 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Prudential Fox& Roach Realtors, the leading regional home services company in the Northeast, today announced that the realty company replaced HP and Sun technology with IBM servers and storage to support the sales efforts of over 3,000 real estate agents and securely protect the data of thousands of clients. Using IBM blade server technology, the realty company lowered power and cooling costs by nearly $60,000 annually.
Privately-held Prudential Fox & Roach is the third largest real estate,mortgage and title insurance company in the nation and the top realtor in the Northeast region. The realtor views technology as an important means of attracting and retaining talented agents, who require fast, dynamic tools to update property listings or relay contracts to the office. Leading-edge technology enables Prudential Fox & Roach’s agents to complete sales and provide insurance and mortgages to their clients in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
The realty company replaced 93 HP Proliant servers with an IBM BladeCenter solution running VMware virtualization technology to provide a secure disaster recovery solution that will allow for easier data recovery if needed. Coupling the energy efficient design of IBM BladeCenter with virtualization technology also allowed Prudential Fox & Roach to reduce its power and cooling costs by $60,000 a year — a significant savings for the mid-sized realty company.
An article talking about how this realtors has managed to reduce its cooling costs using Blade server technology, it’s great to see people benefiting from the technologies.
Using VMWare on IBM delivers real benefits
ARMONK, NY and HONOLULU, HI - 31 Oct 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawai’i have undertaken an aggressive energy reduction effort intended to cut Punahou’s data-center power consumption in half by 2016. In order to accomplish this goal, Punahou has replaced its legacy servers with high-performance, low-power System x servers from IBM, running VMWare virtualization software.
Punahou School, a private school for grades K-12 in Hawai’i, has many notable graduates, including U.S. Presidential nominee Barack Obama and America Online co-founder Steve Case. In May 2008, the school’s athletic program was named No. 1 in the nation by Sports Illustrated magazine. [1]
Punahou School has recently undertaken an initiative to reduce overall campus energy consumption 25 percent by 2010 and 50 percent by 2016. Working with IBM and IBM Business Partner, Commercial Data Systems (CDS), Hawai’i’s leading IT Consultants, Punahou has implemented a new data center solution, centering around IBM System x3850 M2 servers running VMware virtualization software. This new solution will provide the performance, space consolidation and — most importantly — the energy reduction the school needs to meet its projected goals. CDS will be providing Punahou School’s team with the necessary training to run the IBM systems and achieve their power and efficiency goals.
“Our effort to reduce energy on campus not only impacts the bottom line, but also sets an environmentally sound example for our students,” said Wendi Kamiya, Punahou School CIO. “We will also be positioned to grow our data in the future while continuing to conserve our energy use.”
An article talking about how this school has used IBM servers running VMWare to provide it’s IT in a more energy efficient configuration. It’s great to see how the technology is adding value through empowerment or in terms of reducing operational costs. That we can all realize the benefits of the technology is the aim of the end user and anything we or the vendors can do to help with this has to be good for the technology and the end user community - the faith in the product if you like.
The pay back on a virtualized infrastructure is significant and real
October 30, 2008 (Computerworld) Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.’s virtualization story starts with the numbers. The insurer says it is on track to reduce its physical count of x86 servers from about 5,000 machines several years ago to 2,500 or so through the use of VMware Inc.’s virtualization software.
Nationwide estimates that it has saved a total of about $2.2 million in server hardware costs since launching the consolidation effort. Its ratio of virtual systems per physical server is about 13-1 on average, and some boxes are hosting as many as 20 virtual machines. The company says that by reducing its need for more floor space and electrical power, it has been able to put off a data center expansion for three years.
Check out this great article illustrating how this organization has managed to consolidate the number of physical servers it has using virtualization on VMWare. The direct and indirect gains you can get in doing this can be very impressive - there is the cost of migration, virtualization, but consider the following:
- Less power and cooling in the data center - less servers to cool/power (including disks/networks)
- Less servers to include in the hardware maintenance agreement
- Let servers to manage in terms of hardware failures and bios/firmware upgrades
The small/medium business is the way ahead
ARMONK, NY — (Marketwire) — 10/28/08 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled the newestExpress Advantage offerings, which include hardware, software, and services specifically developed for midsized businesses. The portfolio of offerings provides IBM’s extensive business partner ecosystem with a broad range of applications to deliver simple, affordable, customized solutions for their customers.
Midsize companies are looking for ways to better align their IT strategy with the needs of the business, improve access to information, reduce costs associated with manual processes and securely integrate information fromdisparate sources. IBM is committed to helping midsize businesses find newand affordable ways to apply technology to provide greater value to their customers.
IBM has launched a new software offering that helps midsize companiesdeliver better quality software, improve operational efficiency andcontinuously lower risk. IBM RationalQuality Manager Express is the first centralized Web-based testmanagement solution built on IBM’s Jazz technology. The softwareprovides a Web 2.0 collaborative, customizable environment for testplanning, construction, deployment and execution. It also enables workflowcontrol and quantifiable metrics for project tracking and decision-makingto ensure that the business objectives and outcomes of a software releasehave been met. A key benefit of the software is that it provides a centralhub for business-driven software-quality delivery.
There are real opportunities in the small/medium business sectors, where we can illustrate how products and services can be deployed to bring real benefits to end users. Whether it’s energy efficiency, reducing operational costs, being able to do more with less, using technologies like virtualization of the server, the application and the infrastructure, combined with software and hardware technologies, can transform your ability to deliver. Your operating presence. That by simply deploying a blade solution with VMWare allows you to provide another ’set of infrastructure’ for that new client without powering new hardware, taking on hardware support contracts. That my business providing several trading platforms might be able to have duplicate infrastructures for each client all running on one set of hardware and still meet those business or compliance requirements.
McAfee partners with Intel and HP
McAfee has announced technology partnerships with Intel and HP as well as a sales partnership with VMware. The new alliance with HP is set around improving network security in conjunction with HP’s ProCurve division. Meanwhile, McAfee revealed plans to partner with Intel and leverage Intel’s vPro technology.
McAfee has announced a strategic alliance with HP ProCurve, Intel and VMware focusing on network, hardware and virtualization security.
The partnerships were announced at McAfee’s Focus 2008 Security Conference in Las Vegas and cover a large swath of security issues. According to McAfee, the company will work with HP ProCurve to develop network security products. The idea is to combine McAfee’s security expertise with HP ProCurve’s networking product portfolio.
Virtualization security has been something of a debate for the last few months - the concept of securing your virtual environment as you would your physical one. Anything the vendors can do to aid this has to be a good thing to stimulate discussion and recognition of the issue. That is not to panic people, but to remind them to lock down their virtual infrastructure (as you would any other technology), related to this though is your security/operating system patching etc. I wonder what developments we’ll see in the near future, in the meantime I’m off to read up more.
NHS sees virtualization as an enabler
Dorset HealthCare NHS Foundation Trust (DHFT) is looking to server and storage consolidation and virtualisation to improve infrastructure costs, with a more energy efficient data centre that meets green IT imperatives whilst future-proofing application flexibility.
The Trust has appointed healthcare IT specialist CSA Waverley to consolidate and virtualise its server and storage infrastructure after identifying a critical need to free up data centre space and power. All applications will now benefit from high availability and resilience, streamlining business continuity processes, the Trust said.
DHFT said it will enable the Trust to better serve staff and patients, and indeed in a more sustainable manner.
CSA Waverley is consolidating the Trust’s extensive Windows server estate by 67%, using HP Blade Server Infrastructure and virtualisation…[click continue reading for more on the Trust's expected energy savings]…
Check out this article which is talking about how virtualization and blade technology could reduce your physical server requirements saving power and improving delivery. It’s great to see how the technology is being used, how people are optimizing the platform for their business.
Deciding about going to VMworld Europe
From the datacenter to the desktop, virtualization is having an increasingly profound impact on information technology design and management. Now in its second year, VMworld Europe will continue to set the virtualization agenda, inspiring all IT professionals looking for actionable ideas, innovative products and best practices for virtualizing your enterprise.
I got the email for VMWare Europe which is set to be an exciting conference next year. I’ll need to see if I can arrange to go to it. My friends went last year and kept me informed about what’s going on, and they loved it. It’s a great chance to speak with people using the technology about the process and the technology, to see what’s new and find out what other people are achieving with the technology.
Key things to think about and hope are mentioned at the conference:
Disaster recovery
Administration and provisioning improvements
Product innovation
DataSynapse continues FabricServer innovation
DataSynapse Inc., a leader in dynamic application service management software for the next-generation data center, today announced integration of its FabricServer® software platform with Cisco’s VFrame data center provisioning and infrastructure orchestration product. As a result of this technology integration, enterprise data center architects can now dynamically scale a complete application service stack as virtualized application and hardware infrastructure objects. As a result, IT organizations can reduce capital and operating costs while delivering significant improvement in time to market and service levels for critical business applications.
FabricServer and VFrame treat the application and infrastructure as service components, respectively, and can dynamically apply or remove these services in unison. Customers benefit from right sized hosted infrastructures and enhanced capacity with real time utilization policies.
An article talking about innovations of FabricServer, I’m off to read up more, do check it out. Anything the vendors can do to aid infrastructure provisioning, application workload management - of on demand computing has to be a good thing for the end user in terms of efficiency and delivering capacity in line with the business need.
VMWare on Apple the powerful combination
VMware reports that its Fusion software for Macintoshes is being used by scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, creators of the Large Hadron Collider.
VMware Fusion enables Intel-based Macs to run non-Mac OS X based operating systems without having to reboot first. CERN scientists are using Fusion to share Linux-based computer code on Fusion “virtual machines” running on Macs. The software links the computers to the LHC Computing Grid — a network of about 40,000 CPUs.
I was reading up about CERN during the week, it’s great to see how the technology is being used, and pleased to read about their use of VMWare on Intel Mac’s as well as grid technology. Do check it out.
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