Bladewatch.com

HP.com

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 3, 2012 – HP today announced a portfolio of OpenFlow-enabled switches, providing customers with the broadest choice in the industry for simplifying network management while meeting a wide range of bandwidth, performance and budget needs.⁽¹⁾

The portfolio spans 16 models and includes the HP 3500, 5400 and 8200 series switches.

Additionally, HP plans to expand support for OpenFlow across all switches in the HP FlexNetwork architecture this year, making HP the only major networking vendor to offer a complete portfolio of OpenFlow-enabled solutions.

OpenFlow is an emerging network virtualization technology that provides customers flexibility and control to configure their networking environments to their specifications.

Deploying the OpenFlow standard enables enterprises to significantly reduce the complexity of network devices and automate tasks using simplified network management. By reducing the time it takes to make changes to the network, OpenFlow allows IT staff to better respond to changing needs in real time.

Customers and partners can now access a free upgrade to HP’s OpenFlow-enabled software for their HP switches here.

It’s great to see further innovation of the HP switch offering, anything they can do to further integrate and improve their offering to reduce operating costs and increase performance has to be a good thing for competition and end user choice. I’m off to read up about OpenFlow and what this means in the virtualization and orchestration/automation space.

Marketwire

ROCKVILLE, MD–(Marketwire – Feb 1, 2012) – MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of the new report “Blade Server Market in North America 2010-2014,” to their collection of Computer Equipment market reports. For more information, visit http://www.marketresearch.com/Infiniti-Research-Limited-v2680/Blade-Server-North-America-6773817/

This report forecasts the Blade Server market in North America to grow at a CAGR of 23 percent over the period 2010-2014. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the need to reduce the space of network infrastructure. The Blade Server market in North America has also been witnessing reduced power consumption of the blade servers. However, the rapid evolution of new technologies could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

Check out this post which illustrates the continued demand for blade servers this could be for a number of reasons, as we see further innovations in automation and orchestration, the blade platform becomes even more compelling especially when we integrate them with combined storage and networking, wire once and concepts such as self service or application/hosting templates. It will be interesting to see what innovations are around the corner and how we can continue to innovate blade servers for ease of deployment and energy efficiency.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dell-plans-to-expand-silicon-valley-staff-for-rd-2012-01-31

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Dell Inc. DELL +1.28% is growing its Silicon Valley staff in an effort to increase its influence in the rapidly changing tech industry hub.

The company will soon be expanding its operations in Santa Clara, Calif., after already reaching capacity with 700 employees in its research and development facility that opened in October. Dell, seeking to grow beyond its PC roots, opened the 240,000-square foot center for development of business technology such as storage, networking and cloud computing.

Dell also used the center to consolidate employees from several acquisitions in one area and hired about 200 new workers in the region. It will expand into the building next door this summer and will continue adding hundreds of workers each year through acquisitions and new hires. Dell expects to base about 1,500 employees in the Santa Clara facility within the next several years as it takes over the leases of other companies in the complex.

Anything Dell can do to continue the platform and product innovation has to be a good thing, and I wonder what new products both hardware/software as well as service we will see as a result of this announcement?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fusion-io-and-inframe-designs-deliver-100x-latency-reductions-in-vixen-media-servers-2012-02-01

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 1, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Fusion-io FIO +0.13% announced today that InFrame Designs, provider of custom-built media servers to accelerate playback of video at live media events, has deployed Fusion’s ioMemory technology in its appliances to reduce latency by up to 100 times when compared to InFrame’s previous architecture. The significant latency reduction and an additional six-fold application performance improvement delivered by Fusion-io VSL software and ioMemory led the company to build Fusion-io technology into upcoming Vixen media server models.

The InFrame Vixen media servers are designed for real-time, on-demand compositing of multiple raw video input sources. The technology is used in data-intensive, live media environments where the pre-rendering of imagery is simply not possible. The InFrame Vixen media servers are behind some of the largest and most complex television and live-event productions in Canada, including Battle of the Blades from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, the Canadian Juno Awards, and many others.

It’s great to see further practical examples of Fusion-io technology being deployed, the latency and performance delivered by these cards is impressive and could transform the infrastructure needed to deploy at live events for recording and streaming media. A good read, do check it out.

http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=69857

The LSS 200 can reduce data centre cooling costs by 80% or more and deliver a 40% or more decrease in overall electricity costs

London, UK – 31st January, 2012 – Boston Limited announced today the UK availability of the world’s first patented server with total liquid submersion technology – the LSS 200. By regulating server temperature more effectively than any existing server, the LSS 200 reduces power consumption and costs, maximises floor space and decreases a data centres’ carbon footprint. Boston is the exclusive UK reseller of LSS 200 systems, manufactured by Hardcore Computer, Inc.

This is great news both for competition and end user choice, it will be interesting to see which types of customers are deploying the Hardcore Computer offering, new start ups or people deploying new data centers, as well as existing customers seeking to deploy these new liquid powered systems alongside their legacy infrastructure in their existing data centers.

HP.com

BRACKNELL, UK, Jan. 18, 2012 – Britain’s small businesses grew by an average of 11 per cent over the last six months, up five per cent on the last half year according to HP’s SMB Index, an independent survey of 1000 UK small businesses (between 1 and 50 employees).

HP’s third SMB Index paints a slightly more optimistic picture for the UK economy – which relies heavily on growth in the SMB sector – than the last study in July 2011, with 63 per cent of respondents reporting that their business will grow in the next six months, at an average of 14 per cent.

While growth was up five per cent on 2011 there was however a small drop in short term confidence in the UK economy (down three per cent to 32 per cent). However, there was extremely positive news for the sole traders, who grew a total of eight per cent, coming back from negative growth of minus two per cent in July 2011. Businesses in the retail, distribution and transports sectors saw the most amount of growth. Construction and property companies grew the least.

The SMB market growing is great news for the economy in terms of economic growth but also represents new opportunity not only for physical servers and infrastructure, but also cloud and professional services where SMB customers might want to be able to scale up and down their infrastructure in line with demand, or buy in the services that they need for their business rather than host and manage their own email, file and print platforms. We’ll have to see, it’s exciting times at the moment, economically and technologically we’re in a state of flux, the old ways of doing business of provisioning and delivering IT are changing, for specific customers, specific existing offerings they remain, but the new cloud based, software and infrastructure as a service are compelling with lower start up costs and therefore greater opportunity for service providers and their customers.

http://www.nimbusdata.com/products/e-class.html

South San Francisco, CA, January 31, 2012 – Nimbus Data Systems, Inc., the leader in Sustainable Storage, today unveiled the new E-Class Flash Memory System, the industry’s first fully-redundant multiprotocol solid state storage system. With record-setting capacity and unprecedented power, cooling and rackspace efficiency, the E-Class outperforms and costs less to operate than conventional disk arrays while providing the high-availability, scalability and cost reduction that enterprises and cloud providers demand. Highlights of the new E-Class include:
•  First multiprotocol solid state system with no single point of failure and enterprise-grade flash
•  Most scalable solid state storage system ever engineered, supporting 500 TB as one logical pool
•  Highest density primary storage system ever, eclipsing 15K RPM disk arrays by over 3x
•  Lowest energy consumption of any primary storage system, consuming as little as 5 watts per TB
•  Comprehensive data management software and “unified” storage without any licensing fee

This announcement from Nimbus Data Systems does sound interesting, being able to have high density tier 1 storage for the enterprise brings new opportunities for consolidation, availability and performance. I’m off to read up more about it.

A big thank you to Mike Laverick and the team at VMware Press for sending me this complimentary copy of his latest book titled “Administering VMware Site Recover 5.0″, I’m genuinely very pleased to have been sent it, I wish Mike and the team all the very best of luck with this latest publication.

http://www.amazon.com/Administering-VMware-Recovery-Manager-Technology/dp/0321799925 or http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780321799920

I got sent this through the post to read and review and have just started reading it, I’m excited to see what’s covered and read more up on VMware Recovery Manager. Do check it out if you’re looking for a book about VMware Site Recovery Manager, as I complete more pages, I will update more, there are some pictures below in the meantime.

As I write this there are only 8 left on amazon.co.uk, so you might want to pay a visit sooner rather than later to get a copy:

The back of the book is as follows:

IDC

Western European Organizations Prepare Tougher IT Budgets for 2012, According to IDC Survey

LONDON, January 23, 2012 — Western European organizations on average are drawing up cautious budgets for IT hardware, software, and services spend in 2012, with fewer organizations this year planning to raise their spend, according to a survey of IT decision makers by International Data Corporation (IDC).

In November 2011, IDC carried out a “Pulse” survey of spending intentions among 590 organizations in six territories across Western Europe. The findings are analyzed in the report IDC European Enterprise Pulse 4Q11: Organizations Batten Down the Hatches for 2012 (IDC #Q11T, December 2011). Key findings include:

• Some 40% of organizations expect to raise external IT spend on hardware, software, and services, and about 17% expect external IT spend in 2012 to decline. The remainder expect to hold spend steady. Only a quarter of those planning to increase spend in 2012 are planning to raise spend by 5% or more.
• In 2011, some 43% of organizations raised their external IT spend over the whole year, according to survey respondents, while around 20% lowered their spend.
• Western European organizations are therefore heading into 2012 with external IT budgets that tend on average more toward stasis when compared with actual IT spend patterns in 2011.

“These spending plans may seem optimistic at first sight, given the economic environment, but in fact total external IT spend budgets for 2012 are well down on the equivalent budgets for 2011,” said report author Douglas Hayward, research director, IDC European services research.

There certainly are tough trading conditions for both consumers of IT and their suppliers, that said there are still opportunities for both in leveraging new technology to deliver enhanced functionality and capacity for revenue generation, sufficient customers that need to renew and upgrade their infrastructure. IT spending might be declining in some respects, but there are still customers with the day to day challenges, reliability and scalability, the customers that might not be getting ready for cloud or even think about, as ever, we need to keep the momentum between next generation technologies and bridge with legacy customers to see how we can help them keep the lights on and move towards empowerment and revenue generation through effective deployment and management of their existing infrastructure with the right combination of cloud services (both private and public as appropriate).

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/solutions/datacentersolutions/pod/index.html

The HP POD 20c and 40c offer can be deployed within weeks instead of months or even years. The HP POD can ship with fully integrated and tested IT from an HP factory in as little as six weeks.

It comes to you as part of a complete data center solution, with services available for strategy and site planning to innovative products and comprehensive global support. For more HP POD information, go to hp.com/go/pod.

Whether it’s the HP offering or an alternative one, I’ve often thought that for me what the data center in a container is not only extra on demand capacity, but it’s also the mobility combined with capacity. It’s that as an enterprise running legacy data centers with immediate capacity and cost reductions requirements, being able to lease or buy one and deliver it to a specific location, virtualize and migrate workloads to it, freeing my teams to do the following:

• Rework the data center from a load and layout standpoint – move servers, storage and networks kit around to extend the capacity and lifespan of the existing data center
• Rework the patching in general and the patching frames so that we can better identify network routes, and at the same point reclaim cabling without causing an outage
• Decommission legacy platforms which are now running on the POD servers, un-rack and dispose, install new cabinets and start build out of rows or individual cabinets
• Verify the air flow, cooling and energy distribution to check it meets my requirements, guidelines and is as efficient as it can be
• Re-inventory and identify assets and fix broken kvm’s or even remove them to reduce power consumption and rely on lights out and crash carts as required
• Re-rack new infrastructure comprised of new servers, network and storage as appropriate
• Migrate workloads back from POD to improved data center and replicate in other locations or ship the container to other locations to do so.