Posted by Brian on Aug 30, 2010 in Cloud, HP | View Comments
HP today announced HP CloudStart, the industry’s first all-in-one solution for deploying an open and flexible private cloud environment within 30 days.
Built on an HP Converged Infrastructure, HP CloudStart simplifies and speeds private cloud deployments. Consisting of hardware, software and services, HP CloudStart empowers businesses to deliver pay-per-use services reliably and securely from a common portal, and it offers the ability to scale and deploy new services automatically. Real-time access to consumption and chargeback reports allows clients to operate their private clouds in the same fashion as a public cloud.
HP is promoting that they can deliver on the following basic principles of Cloud Computing.
- Request a compute service via a portal
- Have service provided immediately
- Use the service without worrying about security, management, etc.
- Scale or cancel the service
- Get a regular report on consumption or chargeback
See full press release here.
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Posted by Brian on Aug 26, 2010 in Blade Servers, Hardware | View Comments
This is not the first time that I have heard someone take a strange approach to pitching the use of blade servers to a application owner within their own organization. The other day I was in a design meeting that I was brought into the project mid-stream. The project was for a application that was getting new servers through Life Cycle. The engineer was recommending that they use several blade servers to virtualize all of the requested servers that are currently physical. So at this everything sounds fine and the Project Manager is on the same page.
This is where things drove off the rails. The engineer was suggesting that this app owner was going to have to purchase his 3 blades that would be needed to virtualize his servers and also pay for the entire cost of the C7000 blade enclosure and necessary networking modules. He was saying this guy is going to have to buy the bus so that other can ride on it late. This confuse the project manager to no end on how she was going to explain all this added cost to the app owner. Now I have heard this phrase and tactic before and it’s always confused me to the thinking behind it. Sure some one has to pay for the chassis but there are other ways to spread the cost out.
The first thing came to mind was there are certainly other chassis in the Enterprise that might have slots available for these blades. Have you looked into that option. Also what about speaking with others in Life cycle to see what other Blade server might need to be purchase soon and plan out a method of splitting the cost of the chassis evenly over the blades in the server. Sure if you don’t fill it up soon you have spent some extra money up front but your going to recover it back once you have filled all the slots in the Blades Chassis.
To make it even worse once presented with this crazy idea the project manager said I can not try and sell all of this additional cost to this person. I might as well just get him pricing on 3 standard rack mount servers. Well this was kind of the tipping point for me after about 10 minutes of this call that I had to step in and get some more background on how they got to this point.
I know there are various arguments for and against the use of Blade Servers but the direction for this organization is use Blades for everything possible. Only use a standard rack mount server when there is valid reasoning for it. And since they are moving all of the VMware hosts over to new blade servers there has to be a pretty good reason for not virtualizing a server in the first place. The data center is also very space constrained so Blades are the smart option at this point.
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Posted by Brian on Jun 30, 2010 in Hardware | View Comments
I’ve used the previous version in small amounts in the past. But this new version I think will get used more, especially in my home lab. The update allows you to create groups of servers that you can view thumbnails of what is happening on the server from the group view. So if you were running updates, migrating data or something else that required multiple connections. It will remember your logon credentials or allow you to connect with a different ID. You can connect or disconnect from an entire group with one click. Now if I could find something like this for putty would be cool.
Get it free here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4603c621-6de7-4ccb-9f51-d53dc7e48047&displaylang=en
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Posted by Brian on Jun 29, 2010 in Cisco, Hardware | View Comments
Today Cisco announce a sweet looking Android based Tablet. The tablet will offer HD video streaming, real-time video, multi-party conferencing, plus all the regular tablet functions like messaging, email, and browsing. The expected release date should be some time in first quarter of 2011. Full press release listed below.
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