Bladewatch.com

Dell ARM servers illustrate the possibilities and create opportunity

martin237 — Tue, 29 May 2012 21:53:29 +0000

http://www.dell.com

Dell today announced it is responding to the demands of our customers for continued innovation in support of hyperscale environments, and enabling the ecosystem for ARM-based servers. The ARM-based server market is approaching an inflection point, marked by increasing customer interest in testing and developing applications, and Dell believes now is the right time to help foster development and testing of operating systems and applications for ARM servers.

Dell is recognized as an industry leader in both the x86 architecture and the hyperscale server market segments. Dell began testing ARM server technology internally in 2010 in response to increasing customer demands for density and power efficiency, and worked closely with select Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) hyperscale customers to understand their interest level and expectations for ARM-based servers. Today’s announcement is a natural extension of Dell’s server leadership and the company’s continued focus on delivering next generation technology innovation.

As part of this effort, Dell is enabling customers and partners to develop on ARM servers in three ways:

1.       Continuing delivery of the Dell “Copper” ARM server to select customers and partners.

2.       Delivering servers to key ecosystem partners such as Canonical and Cloudera, to support their development activities.

3.       Enabling continued software and ecosystem testing and development by providing remote-accessible Copper server clusters deployed in Dell Solution Centers, and through its deep partnership with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

The ARM based server technology brings real opportunities for cost efficient volume platforms to host a range of applications, it’s great to see Dell’s commitment to innovation on the ARM platform with their Copper offering delivering 48 ARM servers in a 3U deployment, very cool. I’m off to read up more, I think we’ll see more in the ARM server space as developers explore the possibilities, and vendors explore markets and usage scenarios for ARM servers as a platform.

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HP Discover discount – it’s not too late to register

martin237 — Mon, 28 May 2012 21:59:29 +0000

I got an email from a friend (Mike) who’s been working in the US (he was lucky enough to get transferred from the UK), “I got sign off to attend, what hotel you staying at, is it too late to attend?”

I pinged him back on BBM to answer his questions (I think he’s hoping we’ll meet to share server stories), in the meantime if you’re thinking about attending, it is by no means too late to register/book the event, you can do so here, entering the code BLOG for your $300 discount. Mike appears to be looking forward to the technical sessions and wanted to check out the training and certification, “anything about VMware and cloud, I’m there…” he wrote.

You can read all about HP Discover, the event, the schedules and the technical training/information here.

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HP Proliant MicroServer cashback offer continues

martin237 — Mon, 28 May 2012 21:59:19 +0000

http://www.hp.com/go/microserver

We’re a massive fan of the HP Proliant MicroServer and HP continue to offer cash back if you buy one by June 30th, they’re your ideal first server, VMware ESX lab, baby home server or test machine, not to mention an easy and great way to get into the server world. They retail at approximately £2o0 plus taxes in the UK, however you get £110 cash back meaning you can get your own HP Proliant MicroServer for £90!!!

Check out this link for more information, they’ve got a special virtualization bundle not to mention a NAS and media server bundle as well, it got me tempted in ordering another one for the lab. they are brilliant, small quiet, upgradeable and easy to use and live with.

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Microsoft’s innovation means CIO need to concentrate on staying up to date

martin237 — Mon, 28 May 2012 21:41:40 +0000

Computerworld UK

CIOs and IT directors tracking the barrage of major upgrades for Windows and Office also need to stay tuned to the refresh cycle for Microsoft’s servers and tools, including Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Visual Studio 11.

An interesting article talking about the range of products that Microsoft are releasing/announcing in order to deliver enhanced functionality, greater scalability and reliability. Of particular interest to me is System Center and Windows 2012 and what that might bring both in terms of the OS itself and in virtualization and System Center in terms of manageability of physical and virtual machines in parallel.

I wonder if the release of Windows Server 2012 might see further investment projects both in hardware refresh, role consolidation and system virtualization as organizations and development teams opt for the new features and scalability offered by Microsoft’s new OS.

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Reading up about Rackmount servers

martin237 — Mon, 28 May 2012 21:32:02 +0000

I got sent an email to introduce Rackmount servers from JAF International, it’s always great to see what the different vendors have to offer in the server space, whether it’s in terms of choice or platform innovation to meet specific markets and solutions, do be sure to check them out, if only to be better informed on the possibilities and the competition.

I was interested to see their military grade products, not to mention their kiosk style integrated solutions, it created some interesting thoughts for opportunities and deployments.

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Dell next generation PowerEdge server innovation continues

martin237 — Sun, 27 May 2012 23:10:41 +0000

http://www.dell.com

Dell debuts nine servers optimized for workloads in traditional, virtual, public cloud, and private cloud environments

The new PowerEdge M420 is the world’s only quarter height 2-socket blade server, enabling unmatched blade server density and customers to deploy 32 independent, individually serviceable blades servers in a single chassis, and is complemented by the industry’s first 40GbE-enabled blade server switch for high performance computing environments.

The world’s only 4-socket, 2U Intel Xeon E5-4600 rack server, the PowerEdge R820, shipped early amidst heavy customer demand

Dell today announced additions to the PowerEdge portfolio with new blade, rack and tower servers designed to deliver value and performance in demanding enterprise and mainstream environments. The new blade servers offer strong performance gains and improved efficiencies from the shared power, cooling and network infrastructure, and professional IT services. The new tower and rack servers are built to enhance customer IT infrastructures with enterprise-class capabilities and tailored chassis designs for small and midsize businesses.  Dell introduced industry-leading innovations in the PowerEdge 12th generation servers based on input gathered from more than 7,700 customer interactions in 17 countries across four continents. The company was the first-to-ship servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family with the first wave of PowerEdge 12th generation servers in March 2012.

I’m genuinely excited to hear about Dell’s continued innovation of their PowerEdge server offering, in this case both their blade and rack servers. They have been making great progress with the innovation of their PowerEdge servers both in systems management, energy efficiency and ease of deployment, extending their server platform to meet more target markets, meet more customers’ needs has to be a good thing for the market place and consumers alike, I’m off to read up more about the announcement.

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HP Discover Voucher code (Las Vegas 2012)

martin237 — Sun, 27 May 2012 22:54:20 +0000

I got asked by a colleague if I knew if there were any discount vouchers for HP Discover, there are I suspect many, the one that I know works gets you a $300 discount when entering ‘BLOG’ (just the word blog) and then using this url.

The discount still lets you register for the full package and select all the options as you usually would when booking HP Discover, if you have any problems, do get in touch, it’s set to be a great event with some great keynote sessions as well as the technical sessions and the chance to explore the partner offerings.

I put together a post ‘how to justify HP Discover’, you can check it out here.

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Microsoft and Skolkovo open up Microsoft R&D centre

martin237 — Sun, 27 May 2012 22:52:40 +0000

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4373472/Microsoft-and-Skolkovo-Foundation-cooperate-on-cloud

Moscow, May 22, 2012 — Today, Skolkovo Fund Vice President for international partnership development Conor Lenihan and the President of Microsoft Business Solutions Kirill Tatarinov signed an agreement for opening the Microsoft R&D centre at Skolkovo.

“Microsoft is one of the strategic partners of Skolkovo. The huge international experience and expertise of the company makes a significant contribution to the development of the Russian IT industry and the country’s economy as a whole,” stated Skolkovo Fund President Viktor Vekselberg. “Today, we are happy to announce the opening of the Microsoft research and development centre at the Skolkovo innovations centre and the extension of co-operation in joint applied research activities.”

As a part of the activities at the Microsoft R&D centre at Skolkovo, specialists will be engaged in development of software solutions for Microsoft Dynamics that will be supplied throughout the world. Development of technologies for the Cloud platform in addition to classical products will be one of the top priorities for the Microsoft R&D centre at Skolkovo. One of the key principles of development of these products will be the creation of new architecture and the design of a flexible structure and functionality of products, to meet requirements and demands of different countries around the world.

It will be interesting to see what announcements and innovations arise from this partnership both in a regional and a global sense, anything we can do to extend the possibilities, open up new markets and create opportunity, has to be a good thing, I’m off to check it out.

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Bladewatch goes to #HPDiscover

martin237 — Sun, 27 May 2012 22:30:44 +0000

We’re off to HP Discover which is happening June 4th- 7th and is set to be an exciting event, as ever I’ll be walking around talking to people about technology, about business and the market place. I’ll be covering the keynotes, the sessions and walking around the booths to see what’s up.

You can follow me on twitter – martinmacleod
You can ping me on bbm – I’ll publish it once I’ve got my roaming Blackberry working when I arrive in the US
You can follow our flickr pages – again I’ll set up stream/rss feed so you can see what’s going on
You can follow our youtube coverage – again, I’ll publish it nearer the event.

So what’s key to my attendance at HP Discover:

See what is going on in the world of HP
Explore their cloud offering – which goes live to attendees with 3750 hours of free use
Participate in the sessions – anything on cloud, systems management, storage and convergence will be of real interest (not to forget the G8 series servers)
Chat with partners and see how we can leverage both the best of HP and their partners to deliver my business goals, the HP Enterprise Warehouse Appliance being an example or Fusion-IO on Proliants etc
Check out the free training and certification opportunities
Meet fellow attendees and maybe check out the meet the expert options, the HP Executives and Architects etc

Anyway, I’ll be covering all this and more on my travels (as well as the other news), so do keep in touch and let me know if you have any questions or areas of interest.

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Reading up about Nutanix – you should be as well

martin237 — Sun, 27 May 2012 22:20:57 +0000

http://www.nutanix.com/_press/Nutanix-04-26-2012.html

SAN JOSE, CA, Apr 26, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Nutanix, the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage building block for virtualizing datacenters without the need for shared storage, today announced it has achieved record growth across federal agencies, closing millions of dollars worth of Nutanix Complete Cluster sales. US Federal Government customers, including branches of the military, are flocking to Nutanix’s SAN-less datacenter platform for its sleek, compact, secure, highly-scalable, and cost-effective characteristics for building private clouds.

Federal agencies across the board have embraced Nutanix’s groundbreaking SAN-less platform in an effort to build private cloud infrastructure at 40% lower cost than traditional on-premise approaches, without compromising on strict service level and information security governance. Nutanix Complete Cluster empowers government agencies to combat the encroachment of public cloud platforms that fail to deliver Congress mandated controls.

Nutanix harnesses the same distributed system techniques that power Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix clouds and packages it into an enterprise-friendly, 2U rack-mount enclosure. State-of-the-art private cloud infrastructure is fast becoming an essential requirement for government agencies that face compliance mandates for improved datacenter efficiency and data protection.

One of my colleagues has been on at me about a number of things ‘you need to get a VCP or even a VCDX’, I know, I have been thinking about it, I haven’t got around to it, he’s also been illustrating the benefits of virtual desktop, talking about new things he’s working on in his latest VMware deployment at work. One of the things he asked me about was Nutanix, ‘have I heard of them?’, answer yes, have I spoken with them? Not really but that’s mainly because I’ve been busy at home and at work, it’s on my to do list. With that in mind, I went off to the Nutanix web site to remind myself about what they might offer me and found this press release, do check it out. It’s always great to check out the options in the virtualization space, understand the competition and see what options might work for me and my business.

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