May 13, 2008 at 10:47 pm · Filed under Other things, environment
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=
/www/story/04-22-2008/0004797293&EDATE=
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 22 /PRNewswire/ — Nearly two-thirds of IT and facilities personnel consider their data center energy efficiency “average” or worse — and their development and test environments might be the biggest cause of that, according to a survey conducted by Cassatt(R) Corporation, a leader in providing software to make data centers more efficient.
More than a quarter of survey respondents said that greater than 60 percent of their development and test servers are idle during off-peak hours. There is some good news, though: 62 percent are working on a data center energy-efficiency project now or expect to within the next year, according to the “Cassatt 2008 Data Center Energy Efficiency Survey.” And, contrary to conventional wisdom, 59 percent would consider turning off computers that are idle.
This article is a little old, but I was just doing some research on server utilization and came across it and thought it was relevant nonetheless. Thinking about your server utilization, about what systems (desktop/server/printer) need to be on for business to continue, and which ones can be shut down, can not only reduce your operational support costs, but reduce your energy costs. We can’t make big changes overnight, but examining what we can do within our operational/business constraints can still deliver/savings and (or) empowerment to the end user. That the desktops are rebooted should mean less calls, “my mouse is broken, my account’s locked out, Internet Explorer/Office freezes”, without necessarily causing that much disruption.
May 13, 2008 at 10:42 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=1845
Less than a month after reporting the thefts of four laptops containing unencrypted customer data, Bank of Ireland (BoI) says it is investigating claims that another computer containing confidential information was stolen back in 2001.
According to local press, the theft from the bank’s Newbridge branch in County Kildare in 2001 was reported to senior officials but customers were not notified of the incident.
The unencrypted computer is thought to have contained the dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, bank account numbers, medical histories and investment details of 4000 life assurance customers.
In a statement BoI says it is “investigating an allegation of a stolen laptop computer dating back to 2001″. The bank says the risk level of any data from seven years ago being used for fraudulent purposes is “extremely remote”.
Liability/risk as a result of data loss (real or perceived) continues to be an issue, how your organization deals with this, how it secures data will depend on your internal processes, the data and any regulations that apply to it. Ultimately managing risk and the ability to do your work is the challenge, particularly as data loss can reflect on your organizational reputation and revenues.
May 13, 2008 at 10:01 pm · Filed under Bladesystems_insight_conference, environment
http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com and http://www.intel.com
The Intel presentation was quite interesting in the respect that it highlighted the developments in energy efficient IT and how progress is being made in this area.
There was a mention of the power usage of a typical user, I’ve summarized this:
- 1015w - standard configuration pc with CRT screen
- 938w - if we swap the CRT for a TFT
- 655w - if we switch to a newer more energy efficiency processors
- 229w - if we use the newer more processors and enable power management
It illustrates how much of a difference can be made with small changes to system configuration, for example enabling power management, or even switching the pc off.
There was a great example showing two configurations:
2004
2007
As a result we have:
- Reduced floor space by 83%
- Reduced the energy cost by $53,000
- Uses 87% less power
There was also a presentation from Easystreet which talked about PUE, a very interesting concept which I hadn’t heard about. It’s a way of establishing how efficient your data center is. In summary, it’s:
- Total facility power/IT Equipment power=PUE
- The objective should e 1.0, the typical data center is 2.0
May 13, 2008 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.pr-inside.com/survey
-shows-tortuous-links-between-server-r583982.htm
Boston, May 9 2008 – Seanodes, the inventor and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today released the results of a third-party survey of IT professionals that shows that the transition from direct attached storage to networked storage is increasingly dictated by needs that come with server virtualization, such as VM migration, elevating costs and complexity, while taxing performance and management.
The survey, with respondents including network and systems administrators and other IT personnel from organizations of all sizes, sheds light on how virtualized infrastructures raise the levels of stress and demand on networked storage, creating a tenuous situation of economic sustainability against the high costs of improved storage performance.
Check out this article, it’s an interesting read and talks about how users switching to network attached storage is being driven by different factors. Do check it out, it has some interesting analysis.
May 13, 2008 at 9:38 pm · Filed under blades
http://ideasint.eval.com/mblades/
This Collaborative Product Evaluation compares the functional capabilities of two leading blade server platforms targeting the requirements of midsize environments, such as small and medium businesses (SMB) and branch offices. The studied products include:
 |
IBM BladeCenter S, IBM’s first blade server chassis built specifically for the office and distributed enterprise environment |
The chart above shows summary ratings for the evaluated products, based on an average of their ratings in the five key functional areas below.
Check out this comparison of the IBM and HP Blade servers, it’s always good to read comparison reports/studies, was an interesting read, do check it out.
May 13, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Bladesystems_insight_conference
http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com/
The power panel was interesting in the respect that the panel talking about the drivers for energy efficient with some dialog with the end users to illustrate this. Are we not looking at energy efficiency due to energy/cooling constraints rather than to be ‘green’ or to aid corporate social responsibility.
There was also discussion that IT needs to communicate more with the facilities, to understand the current power/cooling constraints, so that we can act accordingly.
The key challenge is cooling, that we can’t get the cooling in the volume we need to the systems that need it - the pockets of hot air issue. At the same time the best practices, the tools need to be used to enable better data center management and energy efficiency, a thermal assesment of the data center, the air flow etc.
May 13, 2008 at 8:57 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080513a.html
HP and EDS today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase EDS at a price of $25.00 per share, or an enterprise value of approximately $13.9 billion. The terms of the transaction have been unanimously approved by the HP and EDS boards of directors.
The transaction is expected to close in the second half of calendar year 2008 and to more than double HP’s services revenue, which amounted to $16.6 billion in fiscal 2007. The companies’ collective services businesses, as of the end of each company’s 2007 fiscal year, had annual revenues of more than $38 billion and 210,000 employees, doing business in more than 80 countries.
HP intends to establish a new business group, to be branded EDS - an HP company, which will be headquartered at EDS’s existing executive offices in Plano, Texas. HP plans that EDS will continue to be led after the deal closes by EDS Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Ronald A. Rittenmeyer, who will join HP’s executive council and report to Mark Hurd, HP’s chairman and chief executive officer.
Very cool, this should bring HP further revenue and exposure in the services market, it will be interesting to see what new opportunities, services and products arise from this news.
May 13, 2008 at 7:46 pm · Filed under Grid
http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/shane/2008/04/
22/five-ways-of-defining-cloud-computing/
As with nearly every IT trend, including service-oriented architectures and Web services, just because we’re all talking about cloud computing doesn’t mean we’re talking about the same thing.
I recently joined a LinkedIn/Google group on cloud computing, a member of which posted what should have been an innocent question: Is there a difference between cloud computing and what we know as grid computing? I was ready with my own answer, but overnight about a dozen responses had already flooded in, creating an e-mail chain that offered some interesting nuances on the terminology.
Check out this interesting article talking about the differences between grid and cloud computing, it was interesting to read what different people think about the two concepts.
May 13, 2008 at 7:44 pm · Filed under Other things
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7397370.stm
Hewlett-Packard (HP) has confirmed that it is in talks to buy the information technology provider Electronic Data Systems (EDS).
It followed a report in the Wall Street Journal, which said that HP was close to a deal to buy EDS for between $12bn (£6.1bn) and $13bn.
EDS is a Texas-based information technology services company, of which HP is among the biggest customers.
EDS shares closed up 27.9% while HP shares ended the day down 4.7%.
Very cool, I wonder if this is related to the increase in outsourcing of the IT infrastructure? Regardless the purchase of EDS could bring new opportunities and added revenue generation/shareholder value for HP. We’ll have to see what this news or changes brings.
May 13, 2008 at 7:42 pm · Filed under Bladesystems_insight_conference
http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com/
The blade server vendor panel was an interesting conversation where there was talk about the need for more energy efficiency in the data center. It was interesting to hear the different vendors’ viewpoint on what technologies they’re developing, what tools and best practices they are using to help customers with their power and cooling requirements. I wont go into the vendor specific comments as each vendor have their own solution or way to help with this.
The general agreement seemed to be that there is a need to focus on power in the data center as a whole, to focus on not just the server, but the network, the SAN and everything else which is absolutely right. Attacking power and cooling from the data center viewpoint, of looking at the big or small changes you can take to improve efficiency or reduce utilization has to be the way forward. For example, using SAN storage to replace those disk shelf arrays, looking consolidating server/application roles where possible and even hardware refresh to replace those legacy systems that might be providing a very poor performance per watt ratio.
There was also a general agreement that virtualization can be a real enabler to achieving the business need as well as assisting with the constraints in terms of data center power and cooling. That we can use virtualization as a platform to deliver service, to deliver that virtual machine for accounts, rather than deploying more physical machines. An interesting panel with interesting conversations and questions, very cool.
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