Is 4 Cores of raw physical processing power not enough for you? Do you often find your servers bogged down from never ending number crunching?
Never fear, Intel hears your cries for extreme power. Intel is readying it’s launch of Nehalem-EX processors for this month. The new processors will boast 8-cores, 16 threads and support for up to 8 processor sockets on a single board.
The scenario: You’ve found yourself working at a company that is experiencing phenomenal growth. The employees have actually decupled in the past year and show no signs of slowing in the near future (on this note, when was the last time you saw the “decupled” in print?). You have inherited a network that is truly a Frankensteinian creation that not even the original architects understand any more. You have noticed that you neither have a working firewall nor a decent VPN system, though Cisco VPN is used by a handful of key employees to connect to a Cisco 1800 series router. The IP scheme for the organization, which spans three sites, is using the 192.x.x.x address space. You wish to straighten everything out with a minimum of downtime and as seamless as possible for the end-users. What do you do?
Well, instead of telling you what to do, allow me to tell you what not to do. Not just that, let me drill into your collective skulls what not to do. Are you ready? Here it comes:
Do not, and this is key, so write it down… do not buy a Cisco SA 500 series device.
Sprints soon to be flagship Android device may be coming to big yellow sooner then anyone expected. According to a article at Forbes.com the HTC Monster could be available by Summer of 2010. Is it coincidence that this date has been pushed up a week after Verizon announced that they are looking better then expected for the LTE rollout of 2010? Is Sprint trying to 1 up Verizon by getting their first WiMAX enabled phone out the door before Verizon gets their first LTE roll out functional?
No matter the reason I cannot wait to get my hands on this device. The rumored Snapdragon processor, slim form factor and large display should make this phone a winner among many Sprint fans. Look below for some leaked photos of the new device, these photos have been taken from EngadgetMobile.com, androidmobileos.com and youhtc.ru.
That iPhone or iPod you know and love so much, may have been built by a child.
Telegraph.co.uk reports that almost a dozen underage children were found to be working in Apple-contracted factories last year. Apple did not disclose the locations of the facilities with underage workers, but did confirm that they were found at three separate locations. Apple auditors visited facilities in a total of 9 countries which build iPhones, iPods and various Apple Computers.
Apple’s progress report (PDF) states, “Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, although the workers were no longer underage or no longer in active employment at the time of our audit.”
Today was the first day on the HP Campus and our schedule is jam packed with sessions with HP experts. We started off watching a video about how HP provided data solutions for the new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. They have over 200 concession stands and each one needed it’s own server to run properly. They run those 200 Windows 2003 servers on 16 HP blades running VMWare. They went from 500 servers in their old datacenter to 250 blades in the new stadium. This not only cut the amount of space and power that was required but also sped up some of their basic tasks 50 times what they were with the old setup.
After the video Gary Thome, Chief Architect for ISB presented an overview for the Infrastructure Software and Blades division as well as presenting his thoughts for Data Center trends for 2010. One of the key points of his presentation was virtualization of the data center, including power. After Gary’s presentation was complete we had a partner presentation from a HP Partner on their business and why they partner with HP. Before we broke for Lunch we had a great presentation on Virtual Connect and how HP views standards like FCoE and other standards.
After we broke for lunch we split up into two groups. My group went into the BladeSystem lab to discuss the HP Blades. We then visited the Insight Software group to learn about the Infrastructure Software HP is working on. After we went over the Infrastructure Software we then went back into the BladeLab to go over a competitive difference session. Stay Tuned for more in depth posts of these sessions coming in the next few days!
We ended our day at HP with a discussion from Paul Perez, CTO of Storage for HP. Paul had some very interesting views and ideas of where storage is going toward the future. One of the items he was very passionate about was something called a memristor, a new type of storage that he believes will fuel the next generation of storage products.
This trip was sponsored by HP. HP paid for the travel arrangements and most meals for 10 bloggers to visit the HP Houston campus.
After arriving in Houston for the HP Blades Tech Day 2010 I met in the lobby with the rest of the Bloggers, IVY Worldwide Staff and Calvin from HP. We had a couple of drinks at the hotel and then headed over to Fusion Pizza, right down the road.
The pizza and drinks were very good and during dinner I had some great discussions with @kevin_houston, @Knieriemen, @rbrambley, @kiwi_Si, @StorageNerve and @sfoskett. We talked about everything on how to create a good podcast (Contact Greg Knieriemen if you need to know how to create one, he loves it) to the origins of ProCurve (which we still do not have a full answer).
Dinner at Pizza Fusion – Picture taken by Stephen Foskett
After dinner we headed back to the hotel where John Obeto surprised us with some Nigerian Palm Wine. I was a little hesitant after the smell but after a couple of drinks I decided it wasn’t to bad. After a couple of glasses I decided It was probably best to call it a night before I wasn’t able to get up in the morning.
The Palm Wine – Picture taken by Rich Brambley
Stay tuned for more posts on the HP Blades Tech Day!
This trip was sponsored by HP. HP paid for the travel arrangements and most meals for 10 bloggers to visit the HP Houston campus.
I am heading to Houston today for HP Blades Tech Day 2010. It will be two action packed days of information and interaction about HP’s blade solutions and their infrastructure software. This will be the second HP Tech Day that I have attended and if this one is anything like the first it will be a incredible event.
I will be blogging and tweeting about anything that catches my eye. Here is a list of the other Expert Bloggers who will be attending the event.
Kevin Houston - @kevin_houston – http://bladesmadesimple.com
Greg Knieriemen - @Knieriemen – http://www.storagemonkeys.com
Chris M Evans – @chrismevans – http://www.thestoragearchitect.com
King John Obeto – @JohnObeto – http://absolutelywindows.com
Rich Brambley - @rbrambley – http://vmetc.com
Simon Seagrave - @kiwi_Si – http://www.techhead.co.uk
Martin McLeod - @martinmacleod – http://www.bladewatch.com
Devang Panchigar – @StorageNerve – http://www.storagenerve.com
Stephen Foskett – @sfoskett – http://blog.fosketts.net
Calvin Zito from HP will also be attending with us. His blog link is below.
http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/datastorage/default.aspx
You can follow all the action by searching for the Twitter hastag #hpbladesday. Greg Knieriemen has also put together a Twitter list of all attendees.
Updated: Added more info and someone I missed to the list!
This trip was sponsored by HP. HP paid for the travel arrangements and most meals for 10 bloggers to visit the HP Houston campus.
Today I saw a tweet from @DellServerGeek about a new technology that Intel has developed in partnership with RealVNC for the new Intel vPro 2010 series chips. This amazing technology will allow IT Support to be able to connect to a machine, even when the machine can’t boot and resolve the users issue without the need for a technician to be sent out on site. This KVM over IP technology has been around for some time in the server realm with DRAC cards from Dell or Lights-out boards from HP but I believe this is the first time it has been tried on Desktop/Laptop machines.
This new technology will not only allow the remote technician to take control of the machine but also will give the technician the option to turn the machine on or off remotely as well as rebooting the machine when it does not respond to keyboard or mouse gestures. You can also use the IDE Redirection option to remotely boot to a cd or image.
Check out the RealVNC site for videos and more detailed information!
Up until this last year, the virtualization options available from Microsoft lagged woefully behind VMWare. This is led people like me to really ignore Microsoft’s virtual offerings. However, Redmond is quickly playing catchup with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the upgrades to the integrated Hyper-V virtualization options, as well as other platforms such as MED-V, Virtual PC and App-V. This is causing a lot of other administrators to take a second look.
Over at the blog Clustering For Mere Mortals, David Bermingham has a great write up comparing the features, pros and cons of the latest version of Hyper-V vs VMWare vSphere (previously ESX)
How do I recover my virtual machines in the event of a complete site loss? The good news is that virtualization makes this process a whole lot easier since a virtual machine is just a file that can be picked up and moved to another server. While up to this point VMware and Microsoft are pretty similar in their availability features and functionality, but here is where Microsoft really shines. VMware offers Site Recovery Manager which is a fine product, but is limited in support to only SRM-certified array-based replication solutions. Also, the failover and failback process is not trivial and can take the better part of a day to do a complete round trip from the DR site back to the primary data center. It does have some nice features like DR testing, but in my experience with Microsoft’s solution for disaster recovery they have a much better solution when it comes to disaster recovery.
Head on over to his site to get the full rundown.
The number of businesses still using Internet Explorer 6 is painful to see. Coupled with the fact that all of them are on Windows XP or Windows 2000, it turns from pain into terror, especially when it comes to security.
For a lot of system administrators, the reasons to stay outweigh the reasons to upgrade. Websites that break, plugins that won’t load, old software that isn’t updated anymore. Trust me, I’ve been there. However, a lot of it boils down to lazy and poor practices of system administration.
Yes, you’re lazy and you’re bad at your job. Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. Yes, 2001, most of us don’t even drive cars that old, let alone unleash people on the “information superhighway” with a browser that old. It was designed at a time when security was not the issue it is today. It was designed to work on operating systems like Windows 98 and Windows ME. Would you let people use Windows ME on your network? No! So why are you letting them use a browser that was built for it?! (more…)
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