It’s Friday and Halloween so what better time to bring a little levity to the challenges IT departments face when they run the data center.
For more fun with check out these other video’s from HP that showcase all the scary monsters that haunt an IT manager’s dreams. Enjoy!
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Video
This post was written by admin on October 31, 2008
Today’s business executives are concerned not only with the growing costs of energy to run and cool data centers, but also with presenting a green corporate image in today’s era of heightened environmental awareness. The data center has become a major energy consumer on the corporate balance sheet. At the same time, many IT organizations are facing a multidimensional crisis that is the first of its kind in the history of information processing. These companies are experiencing a virtual explosion of information to process and store as energy costs soar to record levels. More energy efficient data centers can help reduce
environmental impact while curbing IT costs.
The amount of energy consumed by data centers is not to be underestimated. Information storage is one of the fastest growing technologies in today’s data center, driven by ever-expanding volumes of business information. Improving data center efficiency by 20% would save 36 billion kwh of electricity; the equivalent of 22 million tons of carbon dioxide—or the amount of CO2 emitted by 4.2 million passenger cars—according to the U.S. Climate Technology Cooperation Gateway.
In terms of energy consumption, IT managers need to look at the costs of both the physical data center and the IT infrastructure. Read More…
Posted under Data Center, Data Center Virtualization, Green IT, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies, White Paper, virtualization
This post was written by admin on October 30, 2008
The rising cost of power combined with the pressure for Green IT strategies make it imperative that IT manager and facilities designer implement strategies for a green data center. Here are seven strategies for a more energy efficient data center from the system architecture Task Force at the Green Grid.
The task force set out to investigate and provide guidance on existing and emergent cooling technologies that can improve the efficiency of data center cooling architectures. The end result is an excellent white paper that provides insight on seven strategies—identified by the Task Force—that, when properly implemented, can have a significant effect on the cooling portion of your date center which is one of the primary factors in your data center’s power consumption.
Posted under Data Center, Green IT, White Paper
This post was written by Kevin Normandeau on October 29, 2008
North Carolina State University and IBM today announced plans to provide every student in North Carolina access to advanced educational resources through NC State’s Virtual Computing Lab (VCL), a cloud computing-based technology. Through this cloud - which is a set of Internet-based resources - students at K-12 schools, colleges around the state and the University of North Carolina system campuses themselves will have access to the most advanced educational materials, select software applications and computing and storage resources. NC State also announced that the code for its VCL technology is available through the Apache open source community for free, and is in discussions with a number of universities across the globe that wish to replicate this cloud computing model.
In support of this effort, the NC State Department of Computer Science and Office of Information Technology announced the creation of a Center of Excellence in Cloud Computing, an applied research and development facility on the NC State campus that that will spearhead collaboration projects between NC State and the IBM “Blue Cloud” development team, helping improve the quality of education provided through the VCL platform and ensure reliability.
Posted under Cloud Computing, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization News
This post was written by admin on October 28, 2008
HP today introduced a high-performance thin client and blade workstation that provide virtualization customers a true workstation experience combined with the security, ease of management and lowered total cost of ownership of thin client computing.
Offering significantly more processing and graphics performance, the new HP gt7725 Thin Client and HP ProLiant xw2×220c Blade Workstation deliver a leading remote experience for 3D mechanical computer-aided (MCAD) applications, rich media, flexibility and performance.
“The maturation of virtualization technologies, in combination with the reality of today’s business environment, have made the security, manageability and flexibility benefits of adopting client virtualization increasingly attractive to business customers,” said Roberto Moctezuma, vice president and general manager, Desktop Solutions Organization, HP. “This latest technology from HP removes one of the last remaining barriers to transitioning to a virtual client infrastructure for customers who require the highest levels of processing power or high-quality multimedia capabilities.”
Posted under Desktop Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Products / Reviews
This post was written by admin on October 27, 2008
Can a leader in open source technology also become a leader in virtualization software? Red Hat already offers virtualization feature sets in it’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux Platform and it promising more more virtualization solutions ahead. Red Hat’s recent acquisition of Qumranet, (which includes Solid ICE - a fully integrated desktop virtualization product) shows they are committed to being a major force in the virtualization market.
So does this mean we can all have open sourced virtualization software for free? Well that depends. Open source companies like Red Hat do actually charge money for subscription based services, consulting and training. Yet, subscription-based model are unlike the traditional software licensing models. Proprietary software typically “locks-in” customers into paying for the license to use it. Open source customers can continue to use open source software even after they decide to discontinue subscription. Of course, you no longer have access to support services and updates afforded by the subscription.
Posted under Virtualization News, Virtualization Products / Reviews, Virtualization Software
This post was written by admin on October 22, 2008
Research company IDC today released it latest study on Green IT. For the second year in a row IDC has found IT managers’ leading reason for adopting Green IT technologies has to do with reducing energy cost. Even though recent economic issues have reduced oil prices back down to $80 a barrel, energy cost are still a major concern for data center managers.
Other interesting finding from the study are that most IT managers expect to pay more for Green IT products. This makes sense as IT managers will get a better ROI from a high capacity virtualized server, than several lost cost dedicated servers. In the end the IT manager can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs. This is good news for the IT vendor community as well because a high end virtualized blade servers has a higher margins.
Other reason IT manager are looking to “go green” with their IT planning is from pressure from upper management. This may have a lot to do with the fact that “being green” is good for a company’s reputation. More and more customers are looking for green suppliers of their goods and services. There is also a concern that governments will regulate a companies carbon foot print and use of renewable energy.
Posted under Cloud Computing, Data Center Virtualization, Green IT, Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization News, Virtualization Software, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by Kevin Normandeau on October 21, 2008
Virtualization projects have so many benefits and pilot programs are generally easy to execute. These pilot program often show great promise which can lead an IT manager (or their boss) to make the most common virtualization implementation mistake - a rushed full scale roll out. This often leads to disastrous results.
“Jumping the gun and rushing a virtualization project across IT will serve only to bombard staff with more work than necessary and fewer results,” say Nick Portolese, senior manager of data center operations at Nielsen Mobile. Portolese’s advice starts with this: Don’t rush a roll-out until you have done your homework and know your environment inside out.
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 20, 2008
HP recently launched free online classes and this one is very valuable to all business small and large. It gives a detailed over view of the benefits of virtualization, compares disaster preparedness through virtualization with other business continuity plans and provides the business benefits of deploying a virtualization IT strategy.
Virtualization Can Help Keep Your Business Running in the Case of Disaster
Virtualization, as it relates to disaster recovery, is about simplifying the disaster recovery infrastructure requirements and reducing costs through eliminating the need for redundant hardware. You can think of virtualization as making a single physical device (such as a storage device, server or operating system) appear to function as multiple logical resources or making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices and servers) appear as a single logical resource.
Without virtualization, a business continuity plan is time consuming, expensive, complex, slow and unreliable.
Posted under Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 17, 2008
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year. The x86 server market led the way with 60% year-over-year growth followed by the EPIC server market with 18% growth.
“Quarterly totals of x86 server virtualization licenses continue to experience healthy growth, although the growth rates have slowed over the last four quarters. The modest decline in growth rates indicates that the market is showing early signs of maturation,” said Brett Waldman, research analyst for System Software at IDC. “Based on our conversations with end users, IDC believes that the high-volume consolidation opportunities – the low hanging fruit in the x86 server virtualization market – is starting to dry up. This is, in turn, resulting in smaller deals overall.”
Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Software
This post was written by admin on October 17, 2008
