Other Recent Articles
Desktop consolidation is the way ahead
KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa., Nov 13, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Devon IT, Inc., a leading alternative desktop solution company, today announced that Tony Falsone, president of Devon IT’s integration arm, CentriServ, presented desktop consolidation trends, including growing adoption of virtualization and hosted client solutions, at the IBM UK Blade Technology Symposium 2008 held November 11-12.
This exclusive symposium brought together technology companies, end-users, and stakeholders to provide a look into the future of innovation that will optimize data center performance.
“The UK Blade Technology Symposium is a rich collaborative environment in which various IT thought leaders can discuss the latest breakthroughs in virtualization, storage, security, hosted client computing, power and cooling, and energy savings,” says Joe Makoid, president, Devon IT. “This event and our presentation will help companies of all sizes understand the top trends that are shaping the way hosted desktops are utilized, and the way IT teams think about their infrastructures. Server-desktop computing is an integral part of the future of the data center, and we are excited to share our knowledge.”
Check out this article talking about Devon IT’s desktop solution offering a hosted desktop solution, it’s an interesting read and always great to see what the vendors are talking about in the desktop virtualization space.
Talking about blade servers in Asia
HP has successfully consolidated its lead in the Asian Pacific x86 blade server market.
According to IDC, HP led in x86 blade server shipments for the sixth consecutive quarter (since CY Q2, 2007). The company also managed to secure a 48.3 per cent unit share with a year-on-year growth rate of 66.5 per cent in Q2 08. In addition, HP maintained its lead position in factory revenues for the blade server segment and captured a 46 per cent market share.
An article talking about server sales including HP’s market share which is very impressive, that the innovation and competition continues is equally important as end user empowerment from these technologies.
Rackable continues to innovate the platform using AMD
FREMONT, Calif., Nov 13, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — RACK | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK), a leading provider of servers and storage products for large-scale data centers, today announced the immediate availability of servers based on the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors (codenamed “Shanghai”). Rackable Systems will offer a wide selection of server models that will use the new 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors to help increase energy efficiency and further improve performance on server and workstation application workloads that matter most to customers.
Great news that Rackable is offering servers based on the new AMD servers. It will be great to see what these new systems are like in terms of efficiency and performance. I’ll need to check them out.
The IT and the carbon footprint
Which of the following data centre approaches better helps your company demonstrate a smaller greenhouse gas (GHG - CO2 and CO2 equivalent) footprint?
This is something that is set to be the next topic of debate in the near future. Two key issues:
- How we measure data center or IT carbon footprint
- Who pays the cost of this? IT or the end user - but what about the out sourced IT - who declares the carbon footprint, by supplying the IT is it my cost or the end users?
Maersk Line signs agreement with IBM
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK - 03 Nov 2008: Maersk Line, a division of the A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new agreement for IBM to provide IT services from India and Denmark.
Maersk Line is one of the leading liner shipping companies in the world, serving customers all over the globe with a fleet of more than 470 container vessels and nearly 2 million containers.
This new agreement covers infrastructure platform services implementing new servers, consolidating and updating of existing server platforms and upgrading of middleware software to new releases. The contract with IBM is another significant step for Maersk Line in standardizing processes and reducing operating costs by increased use of global provisioning of services and of global centers of competence.
Out sourcing elements of the IT can be a great way of provisioning and paying for your IT infrastructure/services, it can also be an effective way of transforming the way your IT is structured or paid for. Do check it out.
Can I have a support blog please?
Dell has launched the “Simplify and Save” blog to help businesses engage and exchange best-practices with Dell, experts and each other on how to win in today’s tough times with smart, simple IT strategies.
At Dell IdeaStorm, customers are also encouraged to share their ideas for how they are simplifying IT and saving in their businesses or how else they would like to see Dell help.
I remain a fan of the Dell blog, it is very cool. It’s always great to see the vendors talking about what they’re doing, and discussing real issues the end user faces. I just wish they’d do this in the support arena - how could would it be if I could have an engineer blog about the server, or the desktop. It’s the real world experience that makes all the difference to the experienced and the new guy to the technology - just being able to ‘google’ blue screen on DL380 or R905 ASR and get a real world answer would be so cool and such a great way of reducing pre-resolving your support calls.
Anyway well done to Dell, may the innovation, the adoption of community and dialogue continue.
Sun continues to innovate
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. October 31, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the latest version of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) - Solaris 10 10/08. The new version builds on the core strengths of the Solaris 10 OS to help customers maximize asset usage and systems performance, manage datacenter complexity, preserve business continuity and reduce costs. Solaris 10 10/08 includes numerous product updates and enhancements, several of which were done through the OpenSolaris community. Solaris 10 10/08 is available now on Sun systems and will be available for download in early November at: http://www.sun.com/solaris.
“Now more than ever, companies are under pressure to do more with less - from deploying new services faster and complying with new regulations, to adding more servers within their same datacenter space - all while their budgets are shrinking and headcount is frozen,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Datacenter marketing at Sun. “With the latest virtualization enhancements, updates to ZFS file system and Intel system optimization, Solaris 10 10/08 is an ideal platform to help customers with consolidation and datacenter simplification.”
The more innovation we have of the different platforms, the more choice and competition in the market place, which has to be a good thing for the market and the end user community. I’ll need to read up more.
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.
Secure your virtual platform as you would the physical one
Server virtualisation is exposing business IT networks to attack because many IT directors are unaware of the security risks, a survey has revealed.
More than 40% of IT directors who have implemented server virtualisation mistakenly believe security is built in, the YouGov survey of 200-plus IT directors shows.
Server virtualisation, which reduces the need for physical servers, is becoming increasingly popular because of the environmental and cost benefits.
Virtualisation also enables companies to use existing servers to full capacity by enabling a single server to run multiple operating systems.
This is a good article. Simply virtualization of the infrastructure does not limit your liability, your exposure to risk. You should be treating the virtual layer, your ESX/xVM/Xen server as an operating system, a platform. You should be restricting access, locking down the security and applying patches/fixes as you would your Windows or Unix/Linux platforms.
Where is it you want to be? What is it you want from IT?
CIOs should prepare themselves for searching questions on what they intended to do to increase IT productivity, the analyst firm warned.
Gartner analyst Jorge Lopez said CEOs and CIOs were reluctant to admit they were cutting costs, because they feared this would hurt their share price or reduce their ability to attract IT talent.
“But once we’ve signed non-dislosure agreements, they all ask us how to cut costs, and what are the others doing to cut costs,” he said.
Lopez said IT spending lagged events by a year. This was because 80% of the budget was devoted to maintaining existing systems, to “keeping the lights on”, he said.
It’s a two way thing. From IT we as an end user need more pro-activity, more analysis of the infrastructure where the bottlenecks are, what ‘high maintenance’ systems there are - in essence where to spend the money the most efficiently. At the same time, the development teams, ‘the business’, need to maintain the momentum, to move off those legacy platforms and agree an IT strategy. A life strategy - where we are today and where we need to be - what technologies, processes and tools we’re going to use to get there.
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