http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/fujitsu-primergy-tx300-s4-server/story.aspx?guid=%
7B878CDA4C-0DB4-4703-81A8-840C2E361509%7D&dist=hppr

SUNNYVALE, CA, Jul 22, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) — Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation today announced that as of the date of this release, the PRIMERGY(R) TX300 S4 server has delivered the best price/performance in a benchmark developed by TPC. The PRIMERGY TX300 S4 server has also achieved top performance for a dual-processor system in the same test. Complete results are available at http://www.tpc.org/tpce/tpce_price_perf_results.asp. The full disclosure report is available at http://www.tpc.org/results/FDR/tpce/fujitsu-siemens.TX300S4.080530.02.fdr.pdf.

Very cool, do check out the reports, I’m off to check them out.

The performance you achieve from your server will be dependent on optimizing the system configuration and the application code for the platform, often things such as the driver pack, the relevant hot fixes and application calls can make the difference.

http://servervirtualization.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/07/14/when-not-to-treat-vms-like-physical-servers/

A general rule of thumb in virtual environments is to always treat virtual machines the same as you would physical servers. While this rule holds true in many cases, IT administrators should be aware of some exceptions to this rule. Let’s go over some reasons that you would not treat your virtual machines like physical servers:

An excellent article, do check it out.  I wonder if for this reason (and for one of being more efficient), we need a decommissioning team from an asset management, data center and server management standpoint. A team that can approach the decommissioning activity from three points:

• Data center - energy efficiency/performance per watt - legacy systems/ghost servers
• Asset management - servers that have no asset value, that are over a set number of years old, that run a specific operating system or have reached their marginal operating cost
• Server side - the servers that are contributing to the support costs most, the servers that are of a specific configuration/operating system that represent a risk to production/known issues - those legacy Proliant servers which lack on board lights out, have one network port etc.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=2008072
2005178&newsLang=en

RICHARDSON, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CommScope Enterprise Solutions, a division of CommScope, Inc. (NYSE:CTV), has joined The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. As a general member of The Green Grid, CommScope will collaborate with other member companies and gain access to a wealth of information about energy efficiency advancements within data centers.

Over the last decade, CommScope has taken the initiative to significantly reduce its carbon footprint when manufacturing its premier network infrastructure solutions. Its award-winning ReelSmart® cable reel recycling program, EcoPower™ cabinets and continued use of renewable material are a few ways CommScope is helping to safeguard the environment through its own best practices. In addition, CommScope voluntarily reports its greenhouse gas emissions, numbers that have steadily decreased since 2002.

CommScope’s green efforts also include passing energy-efficient and energy-saving practices on to its customers. For example, CommScope’s Intelligent Building Infrastructure Solutions (IBIS) employs a single backbone that supports building systems such as security, lighting, HVAC and communications in order to supply greater efficiency and higher productivity with increased comfort.

“At CommScope, we advocate and support The Green Grid’s efforts to unite and work toward energy-efficient, eco-friendly solutions,” said Luc Adriaenssens, senior vice president, Research and Development and Technology, CommScope Enterprise Solutions. “We understand the importance of safeguarding the environment and are committed to making a difference while setting a strong example for others. While we continually focus our efforts on superior product manufacturing, outstanding customer service, employee excellence and company value, environmental stewardship has been and will continue to be a top priority.”

Very cool, the more we discuss the issues, establish best practices and communicate ideas, the more we can innovate, share knowledge and empower people to deploy energy efficient IT solutions which has to be a good thing for the industry and the end users.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080721005340&newsLang=en

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–VMware, Inc., (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that VMware Infrastructure 3, the industry-leading virtualization and management suite, was named the winner of the Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Award in the virtualization category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. The winners were announced at the Tech Ed 2008 IT Professionals Conference in Orlando, Florida last month. More information is available at www.WindowsITPro.com/awards.

The Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Awards recognize companies who offer the most innovative products in the industry and who are leading the charge in their category. Entrants were judged based on strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage, and value to customers. The judges reviewed more than 220 products and services submitted for the contest and chose 29 finalists, from which one winner was selected for each of the 10 categories.

“Choosing from such a wide variety of outstanding entries is a challenge every year, and the quality of this year’s entries was particularly high,” said Karen Forster, group editorial and strategy director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. “The winners clearly reflect our judging criteria: innovation, strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage and exceptional value to customers.”

Well done to VMWare, virtualization of the desktop and the server continues to bring new opportunities for business, for platform innovation as well as enabling and empowering the end user to have a more adaptive infrastructure. Whether you choose VMWare, x-VM, Hyper-V, Xen or the others, that you realize the objectives you set out to, that technology can act as an enabler to your business is key.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1321416,00.html

Hewlett-Packard Co. has announced plans to offer container-based data centers similar to those offered by Sun Microsystems Inc., Rackable Systems, Inc. American Power Conversion and IBM.
Interest in containerized data centers stems from companies with significant data center footprints that have run out of space and/or power capacity.

“As we talk to customers, we hear more and more concerns over power and space limitations, and [the time it takes] to build out brick-and-mortar space — it is costly and can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to complete,” said Steve Cummings, the director of scalable computing infrastructure at HP.

Very cool, do check out this interesting article talking about HP’s data center container solution. I can certainly see the reasons why this might be something of interest to different user groups. It will be interesting to see the different solutions, uses and organizations that adopt these solutions, what configurations will they use?

Could the data center in a container be the ultimate virtualization platform for the enterprise or consultancy? Want your data center virtualized, we just need to plug in our container, get the virtualization disk out and press go.