Remove Storage Complexities with HP Storage Essentials 6.2

Recently, HPlaunched HP Storage Essentials Storage Resource Manager (SRM) software 6.2, a new enhancement to the Business Service Automation (BSA) portfolio. HP designed HP Storage Essentials 6.2 to help organisations increase performance monitoring, reduce management costs in heterogeneous environments and ultimately manage storage more efficiently.

Dataplex being heavily focused on storage see the following three components as key:

Storage Resource Management and Disaster-Recovery Environments

Storage networks have grown rapidly in recent years, increasing the critical need for proper management processes. A well executed strategy gives administrators better visibility into their infrastructure, optimised capacity planning and overall stronger performance.  While many enterprises have multiple management tools from myriad of vendors, HP Storage Essentials 6.2 is a single SRM solution for heterogeneous environments. It improves resource utilisation, lowers management costs and increases the quality of services to help drive goals for the business.

With the HP Storage Essentials 6.2 release organisations can now manage storage in a disaster-recovery environment.  It is well known that the availability of key application services and information is critical to maintaining business process in today's environment, and any outage has far reaching consequences on the business operation as a whole.

More often than not, organisations have multiple replication technologies within the environment. This leads to poor visibility and lack of capacity management, ultimately limiting efficiency and impeding SLA compliance. HP Storage Essentials 6.2 helps organisations reach a resolution, enabling auto-discovery, mapping capabilities, reporting and management of replication environments.

Architecture Options

Organisations used to have to choose a tool based on their requirement for an agent-rich or agent-less architectures, but now they are no longer limited to one option over the other. The new release of HP Storage Essentials lets organisations pick their architecture (agent-less, agent-rich or hybrid). An agent less deployment delivers quicker time to value and requires less people cycles due to lack of agent life cycle management. An agent rich deployment delivers reports, forecasts and analysis in the context of applications and host volumes. So depending on the situation HP Storage Essentials 6.2 can be deployed in a agent less mode or agent rich mode or just a perfect blend of it.

Storage Automation

Are you intrigued by the idea of an internal storage cloud but wary of the potential disruption to your data centre? HP Storage Essentials 6.2 is your platform to build a simple, internal storage cloud using your existing SAN to automate storage service delivery without any changes to your existing IT infrastructure. HP Storage Essentials 6.2 allows you to quickly and easily set up a simple service catalogue to provide fully automated, on-demand access to a range of IT services to efficiently manage your SAN and virtual hosts. 

You can leverage HP Business Service Automation (BSA) Server Automation, HP Storage Essentials and HP Operations Orchestration to order and provision a VM with operating system, application, and SAN storage in a fully heterogeneous environment.     

Welcome Google Buzz

I guess this should have been the first blog, but now the information has been digested here it is…

Google's belief is that organising the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organising information can help solve.

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to establish an entirely new set social networks from scratch — it just works.

Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. Google focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately.  Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the information that matters most as it happens in real time.

On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: geolocation. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much.

Google have relied on other services' openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Google’s goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations.

SAP on Hyper-V

If you have a look around the web for virtualising SAP, you’ll find a lot of links for virtualising that workload on VMware, but what about Hyper-V?  Do SAP support Hyper-V as a platform?  Are there any recommendations if they do?  Yes, and yes, and with the latest announcement, they now support Hyper-V R2 as the virtualisation platform, which brings in significant advantages around Live Migration, Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) support, and improved networking capabilities to name but a few.

If you head on over to the SAP Community, and look at the Virtualisation on Windows page, you’ll see the statement of support front and centre, however one thing to be aware of, is that SAP will support Hyper-V R2 as the platform, but the guest OS that SAP runs on has to be Windows Server 2008, or 2003.

After all we virtualise the application with RDS and ICA why not the backend too?

System Center DPM 2010 is now RC

You’ll be pleased to learn that the Release Candidate build has been declared, and released to the web, on the Microsoft Connect website for System Center 2010 DPM.

If you’re interested in downloading and evaluating this release (which I’d strongly recommend!), you can grab all the bits here.

There are some great tie ins to Hyper-V which we blogged about last year here.

HP Opens a 100% Air Cooled Data Centre

Data centres are starting to get a lot attention when it comes to making them more efficient.  Roughly 60% of the electricity used at a data centre goes to keeping the servers cool.  HP has just opened the world's first wind-cooled data centre, and it's the company's most efficient data centre to date.

The data centre is located in northeast England, and is 100% air cooled with eight 2.1-meter stainless steel and plastic fans that suck cold air from outside into the building, where it then runs through filters and into the data centre through the floors.

A few other tricks HP has utilised includes using light colour server racks that better reflect light and drop the need for additional lighting by 40%, and the building has tanks for harvesting rainwater, which can be used to humidify the air cycling into the building when needed.

With this system the data centre are kept at about 75 degrees. Even running at full load.

It's no wonder companies are competing so fiercely for the most efficient data center - coming this summer Energy Star will start auditing and certifying the top 25% of data centres with the best efficiency levels.

How will Google impact Twitter?

There has been quite a buzz (excuse the pun) since Tuesdays launch of Google Buzz, and we have started to get the questions about the impact this will have on organisations Twitter strategies.  Not heard about Buzz, then look here.

What is interesting is that a lot of people I talk to have hung their hat on an individual social network for their strategy, a strategy that I feel is risky.  We believe that your social media strategy should be an aggregation of content to maximise your exposure to the outside world, and this should be unshackled from any single social technology.

The main reason why aligning to a single venture is the rate at which these services come and go either through competition or acquisition.

And it is this single social strategy that Google and all its might has made people question their approach, the ultimate question that you as an organisation need to ask is what are you trying to achieve from Social Media?  If you haven’t got a strategy for Social Media then it will be difficult for you to assess the impact that Buzz will have on your vision.

Assess your strategy and see which sites offer the integration and exposure you require.

Is Buzz going to be a Twitter killer, unlikely but should be interesting to see the dent it makes!

Google Stirs up a Buzz!

Follow Dataplex Systems Buzz here:

http://www.google.com/profiles/dataplexsystems

Google Buzz launched on Tuesday, but it looks like it’s already made a big hit with Gmail users. Now Google are busy improving the service based upon tonnes of positive feedback.

According to Google, its Buzz service already has over 9 million posts and comments. Remember, this is a service that launched on Tuesday, meaning that it’s getting over 160,000 comments and posts per hour.

Mobile usage is also gaining in popularity — over 200 posts per minute by mobile phone according to the search giant.

One of the features that is missing is tight integration between Twitter and Facebook, your tweets can go from Twitter to Buzz but not the other way round, I guess this is due to the fact that your Buzz’s can be longer than the 140 character limit on Twitter, but anything that is less than 140 characters would be nice to pull out to twitter.

Be interesting to see where this is going especially with Wave launching last year, but none the less a good move for consumers and ultimately corporates alike.

Missed the launch of Google Buzz, then you can watch it here:

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Google creates a Buzz by going Social

As blogged about earlier today, it is now official  Google has announced today Google Buzz, its latest steps into social media.

Google’s Bradley Horowitz introduced the new product and how humans share their information and the social media phenomenon of wanting to share information as the two key areas the were core to Google Buzz.

GMail, one of the most popular Google products now has some new features:

• Auto-following
• Rich sharing experience
• Public and private sharing
• Inbox integration

When you log into GMail you will have a tab called Buzz and will provide services such as:

• Links to Picasa, Twitter, Flickr, and other sites
• Thumbnails when linked to photos from sites like Picasa and Flickr.
• It uses the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail.
• It has a system to send you an email letting you know about updates.
• @replies are supported, just like Twitter.
• Google buzz will be accessible via mobile in three ways: from Google Mobile’s website, from Buzz.Google.com
• Buzz knows where you are. It will figure out what building you are and ask you if it’s right.
• Buzz has voice recognition and posts it right onto your buzz in real-time. It also geotags your buzz posts.
• In the mobile interface, you can click “nearby” and see what people are saying nearby.

Thats all we know for now, but when we learn more we will let you know!

What are you doing on…

Dataplex have a couple of events coming up in February, are you free?  To show that we are agnostic to vendor we are running two events one with VMware and one with Citrix.

VMware is on 23rd Feb in Manchester, and reviews Virtualisation 1.0 through to Virtualisation 3.0 and how you can leverage your investment further to benefit users and the business – interested then register here and see the complete agenda

Our Citrix event is on XenDesktop, and covers Citrix architecture, Desktop Virtualisation Assessment and Strategy, Microsoft Windows 7 and Profile Management from AppSense, if you are considering VDI then you really should attend this event in Manchester, interested then register here and see the complete agenda.

Google to enhance GMail with Social Features

It looks like Google is to enhance GMail (possibly today) with new social status’.  Although the information is thin on the ground at present sources are suggesting that a new GMail module could be about to be released that aggregates status and content from Youtube, Picasa and possibly other social sources.

Google are hosting an event in their headquarters today to unveil some product innovations within GMail.  GMail is one of Google’s most popular products for consumers and corporate alike.

As for what the other product getting new features may be, we can’t say for certain. Picasa, YouTube, Google Friend Connect and Google Accounts all seem like potential candidates.

Microsoft May Launch New Office Cloud License

Microsoft may be about to launch a new licensing framework for Office applications in the cloud

Under a new license called "union, Microsoft would charge enterprises the same for software whether it is hosted on-premises or in the cloud.

The new license would help reduce complexity for organisations with Microsoft licensing still one of the hardest areas for businesses to track and leverage. There could come a time where heavy application users run Office locally and light touch users run in the cloud similar to the BPOS hybrid approach.

Sources have said that the union license would either apply to Microsoft Office run locally and hosted on Windows Azure, or to Exchange and SharePoint, which Microsoft offers in software and hosted form.

Paul DeGroot, an analyst with the independent research firm, Directions on Microsoft, said "union" could be a new bundle that combines Office 2010 (on-premise) with Office Web Apps and, to store the data from the latter, SharePoint Online.

Its going to be interesting to see where this one ends up, there is no doubt they have to tackle Google Apps and the new Zimbra acquisition from VMware.

How many VM's can I .....?

The question of VM density has been around for eons, and before then it was how many users can I get on a Terminal Server/Citrix server, sadly it comes down to the age old answer of - "It depends". Well to continue their crusade to put a dent into the VMware market share Citrix have come out with stats that show they have greater desktop density on XenServer than VMware.

At the end of January VMware revealed that it was working to increase its virtual machines density up to 16 VMs per core, mostly for VDI environments. That is twice the average amount of VMs that customers seems able to accommodate today. Anyway there were no stats around at the time and Citrix took the bait and did some of their own assessments.

Windows Azure may host virtual desktops in March

In January of this year Microsoft launched its PaaS cloud offering: Windows Azure which also hosts SQL too, and Microsoft stated that Azure would complete with Amazon EC2 and other similar IaaS clouds, but this has yet to emerge.

According to techtarget Microsoft will host desktops in Azure as of March 2010:

…Microsoft has announced plans to add support for Remote Desktops and virtual machines (VMs) to Windows Azure, and the company also says that prices for Azure, now a baseline $0.12 per hour, will be subject to change every so often.

Google Apps adds Enterprise Policies for mobile devices

With the rising adoption of Internet-enabled devices, employees increasingly seek access to their email, documents, and other corporate data from their mobile phone.

Last year, Google addressed this need with a number of enhancements focused on mobile productivity. For BlackBerry users, they launched the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. For Android phones, they announced new web versions of Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as updates to Google Docs. They also launched Google Sync for iPhone, Nokia E series, and Windows Mobile devices, enabling Google Apps users to access and sync mail, calendar, and contacts from their mobile device to the Google cloud.

Google are now expanding these capabilities further by launching new measures that enable administrators to help ensure corporate policy enforcement across a range of mobile devices.

With this change, Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators will be able to manage their users' iPhone, Nokia E series and Windows Mobile devices right from the Google Apps administrative control panel, without deploying any additional software or having to manage dedicated enterprise mobile servers.

These new mobile device management capabilities will allow administrators to:

Remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen mobile devices

Lock idle devices after a period of inactivity

Require a device password on each phone

Set minimum lengths for more secure passwords

Require passwords to include letters, numbers and punctuation.

Hyper-V to get memory over commitment with the next Service Pack?

The capability to over commit memory is an evident advantage that VMware has over competition.

Marketing departments, partners, and even customers engage endless debates about its value and usefulness in every scenario.

Microsoft actually equipped its hypervisor with memory over commitment capability and that was ready to appear in Hyper-V 2008 R2.

For some reasons anyway the company pulled the feature during the beta phase without disclosing when customers would finally get it.

Microsoft is already working on Windows Server 2008 R2 post-RTM builds and Internet abounds of leaked screenshots about those.  One of them, published by Softpedia and related to the build 7700.winmain.100122-1900, reveals that Microsoft has reintroduced Dynamic Memory controls in the Hyper-V control panel:

This doesn’t really mean that the feature will appear in the next Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack or in Windows Server codename 8, but its presence in this build confirms that Microsoft is getting ready to reintroduce it.

HP Converged Infrastructure

HP have recently released a bundle of their technologies (server, storage, networking and management under a “converged infrastructure” umbrella.

HP's intention to make its converged infrastructure the centerpiece of its enterprise push was emphasized on January 13, when HP CEO Mark Hurd and Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer held a joint press conference. The three-year deal announced by the two companies, around what they call an "infrastructure-to-applications model" translates as, we're going to drive customers to Microsoft software and HP enterprise infrastructure.

One of the key areas under this umbrella is power and cooling, not typically the most exciting conversations but when you have the HP spin on it suddenly they become talking points.

Power and Cooling are two key areas that are targeted by virtualisation assessments, desktop virtualisation assessments, consolidation exercise and features heavy on any IT Efficiency strategy and there are some heavy stats to substantiate this interest.

According to perhaps the most authoritative estimate around, by Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working off of IDC-compiled numbers, server electricity use doubled between 2000 and 2005. (Those are the most recent figures.) On the bright side, there's some evidence that the shift to cloud computing is pushing overall consumption down.

This is where HP BladeSystem comes in, and has the the ability to throttle pretty much every resource. It can throttle CPUs, voltage-regulator modules, memory, fans, power supplies, all the way down to trying to keep the power consumed as low as possible at any given time. It's not just power supplies. HP have variable-speed fans. Plus, the fans are set up in a zone, so if one part of the chassis is running hot, those fans will run faster, and on another part of the chassis, the fans will run slower.

Interestingly enough CPU draws less power than memory, and the advent of multi core servers coupled with virtualisation is starting to see larger memory configurations in standard server chassis’.

Off-the-shelf servers are ready to rise to the memory challenge. For example, HP's ProLiant BL-490c server can support up to 18 DIMMs and 288 GB of RAM in a half-height blade form-factor. Sixteen of these blades can fit into a single enclosure.

Converged Infrastructure

The architecture merges not only servers, storage, and networking, but in HP's taxonomy it also includes power and cooling, and management software.

HP BladeSystem Matrix is their first step into the converged infrastructure vision HP Virtual Connect is the second key component of the overall architecture.  Virtual Connect is a key piece of the architecture, negotiating the connection between the servers and networking. It's intended to make the server component appear as one system to the external LAN and SAN.

We are excited by this shift from HP and think there are compelling reasons to consider this in your 3 to 5 year strategy from a single vendor, with multi touch products with a clear vision and focus.  Want more information please feel free to contact us.

Microsoft Windows and SQL Azure Cloud gets to General Availability

Microsoft’s public cloud platform – Windows Azure and SQL Azure became generally available on Monday 1^st February across 21 countries.

Windows Azure provides features such as:

• Compute Power
• Storage
• Hosting
• Management.

Since January Microsoft has reported that thousands of customers have moved from CTP to production and are building/deploying solutions to Azure.

How do you assess Cloud Computing Performance?

Does cloud computing perform well? That depends on who you ask. Those using SaaS systems and dealing with standard Web latency can't tell you much about performance.

You need to consider the following performance models, which you can break into three very basic categories:

• Client-oriented
• Cloud-oriented
• Hybrid.

Client-oriented typically SaaS (software as a service), interact with users constantly over the Internet. The issue here is not that the cloud provider is slow, but that there is latency with the constant back-end machine-to-machine conversation that occurs between the SaaS provider and the browser.

Apart from implement an expensive connection between yourself and your SaaS there is very little you can do about this, and doing this would dilute the value and story of SaaS.  Client Orientated (SaaS) will not be as quick as on premise solutions but most of the time the end user will nit experience any latency.

Cloud-oriented processing occurs within the cloud. Most infrastructure-as-a-service providers (IaaS) fit into this category.  These systems can provide better performance than on-premise solutions because they have access to many more virtualised resources and can allocate those resources dynamically.

Hybrid, The concept is that you can mix and match user interactions with highly scalable and on-demand back-end processing. The trade-off is the more you communicate with the browser, the more latency that's brought into the model. Thus, the approach to the architecture here is to optimize the chatter between the back-end cloud-based servers and the browser. You accomplish this with some old-fashioned distributed application architecture.