Barker Bites Back
A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
Friday 27 February 2009, 5:25 PM
Microsoft rethinks SQL Server strategy
Microsoft is having a re-think about its SQL Server strategy and in particular about what it wants to do with SQL Data Services.
Part of the company’s Azure services platform, SQL Data Services, it appeared was going to produce a fairly straightforward, if not even perhaps cut-down databases services platform.
Users were not completely happy about this because if Azure was Microsoft’s cloud offering, what could it not have the functionality of a grown-up database? Reports then came out on Thursday at the MSDN Developer’s conference that Microsoft was going to do exactly that.
Microsoft officials at the conference, the reports said, had committed to come up with a fully hosted service and also said that Microsoft would deliver it before the end of the year.
There was something inevitable about all this and also something to be welcomed by users. The idea of mixing key applications like SQL Server and business intelligence and even others have been discussed for a while at Microsoft and now it is coming close.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer put a time on it this week telling the Wall Street journal that, “the next version of SQL Server will do some phenomenal things in business intelligence, and data warehousing. We’ll have a new high end version that we call Data Center some time over the next year or so" .
Part of the company’s Azure services platform, SQL Data Services, it appeared was going to produce a fairly straightforward, if not even perhaps cut-down databases services platform.
Users were not completely happy about this because if Azure was Microsoft’s cloud offering, what could it not have the functionality of a grown-up database? Reports then came out on Thursday at the MSDN Developer’s conference that Microsoft was going to do exactly that.
Microsoft officials at the conference, the reports said, had committed to come up with a fully hosted service and also said that Microsoft would deliver it before the end of the year.
There was something inevitable about all this and also something to be welcomed by users. The idea of mixing key applications like SQL Server and business intelligence and even others have been discussed for a while at Microsoft and now it is coming close.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer put a time on it this week telling the Wall Street journal that, “the next version of SQL Server will do some phenomenal things in business intelligence, and data warehousing. We’ll have a new high end version that we call Data Center some time over the next year or so" .
Tuesday 24 February 2009, 5:34 PM
Efficiency is key at Data Centre World
Power and energy savings and green IT in its own right are all by products of saving money, according to those running the biggest energy users in IT, data centre managers.
At least that was a key message to take away from the Data Centre World conference held in London on Monday and Tuesday.
In a survey, conducted before the event, only 12 percent of data centre managers cited the green issue as a driver for change. When the survey was conducted last year, a third cited the green issue.
Being green is not the issue, but efficiency and especially cost efficiency are. According to the survey, saving money is still the number one reason for lowering power consumption.
Whether the drive is being green or lowering power consumption, according to the survey more than two thirds of IT departments are pro-actively implementing policies that are intended to reduce power consumption.
Whatever the driver, if cutting the power bills means cutting power consumption means using less power, then the one leads to the other and so on.
The issue was underlined by the exhibition itself. In the garish signs that always accompany these events there was very little prominence given to the green issue. Come to that, there was very little sign of cost reduction, but perhaps it is not seemly to have these event decked out to look like your local supermarket with 50 percent off reductions.
But talking to organisers and attendees it was not difficult to get the sense that “efficiency” was the keyword, and energy efficiency was the driver as long as it meant saving money.
Other drivers which were once thought of as important points of difference are now seen as “givens”. The IT infrastructure suppliers and especially the hosting and managed service suppliers were all saying that one of the most important issues they are up against is a shortage of data centre space. Pressure on property is still increasing and especially on suitable property. Data centres from green fields are efficient and data centres from the empty office blocks are expensive, according to attendees I spoke to at the event.
33 percent of people in a Gartner survey (which was cited quite a lot at the show) said they would run out of data centre space in three years and 24 percent said they were running out now.
The problem is that there is not enough empty space in this country that people will let you build on, at least not in the south of England. So why not build the data centre in, say, the Highlands of Scotland?
Then you get a strange effect as the companies attending the event who offered such suitable services, pointed out that who that they could not offer services that placed the data centre physically too far away from home.
“Is it the case that IT managers still want to be able to drive down to their IT centre and touch the hardware? Yes, it is,” was the verdict of one services company. “I have no idea if that is a minority view, I just know that there are still market advantages of offering data centre space that is close at hand,” he said.
“Is that still going to be the case in a year or two? I don’t know but hopefully it won’t.”
One area where IT managers are showing keenness to adopt new ideas is in managed services for areas like email. “Email is very popular and getting more popular,” said one managed service supplier. “IT managers are fed up with having to manage email, Exchange and so on. It is just a cost and a drain and they don’t want to have to do it so if they can offload that as a managed service they want to do it. Not everybody is happy to do that of course, but a growing number are.”
The conference continues tomorrow at the Barbican in London.
At least that was a key message to take away from the Data Centre World conference held in London on Monday and Tuesday.
In a survey, conducted before the event, only 12 percent of data centre managers cited the green issue as a driver for change. When the survey was conducted last year, a third cited the green issue.
Being green is not the issue, but efficiency and especially cost efficiency are. According to the survey, saving money is still the number one reason for lowering power consumption.
Whether the drive is being green or lowering power consumption, according to the survey more than two thirds of IT departments are pro-actively implementing policies that are intended to reduce power consumption.
Whatever the driver, if cutting the power bills means cutting power consumption means using less power, then the one leads to the other and so on.
The issue was underlined by the exhibition itself. In the garish signs that always accompany these events there was very little prominence given to the green issue. Come to that, there was very little sign of cost reduction, but perhaps it is not seemly to have these event decked out to look like your local supermarket with 50 percent off reductions.
But talking to organisers and attendees it was not difficult to get the sense that “efficiency” was the keyword, and energy efficiency was the driver as long as it meant saving money.
Other drivers which were once thought of as important points of difference are now seen as “givens”. The IT infrastructure suppliers and especially the hosting and managed service suppliers were all saying that one of the most important issues they are up against is a shortage of data centre space. Pressure on property is still increasing and especially on suitable property. Data centres from green fields are efficient and data centres from the empty office blocks are expensive, according to attendees I spoke to at the event.
33 percent of people in a Gartner survey (which was cited quite a lot at the show) said they would run out of data centre space in three years and 24 percent said they were running out now.
The problem is that there is not enough empty space in this country that people will let you build on, at least not in the south of England. So why not build the data centre in, say, the Highlands of Scotland?
Then you get a strange effect as the companies attending the event who offered such suitable services, pointed out that who that they could not offer services that placed the data centre physically too far away from home.
“Is it the case that IT managers still want to be able to drive down to their IT centre and touch the hardware? Yes, it is,” was the verdict of one services company. “I have no idea if that is a minority view, I just know that there are still market advantages of offering data centre space that is close at hand,” he said.
“Is that still going to be the case in a year or two? I don’t know but hopefully it won’t.”
One area where IT managers are showing keenness to adopt new ideas is in managed services for areas like email. “Email is very popular and getting more popular,” said one managed service supplier. “IT managers are fed up with having to manage email, Exchange and so on. It is just a cost and a drain and they don’t want to have to do it so if they can offload that as a managed service they want to do it. Not everybody is happy to do that of course, but a growing number are.”
The conference continues tomorrow at the Barbican in London.
Monday 23 February 2009, 11:40 AM
EMC offers storage de-dupe and flash
On Monday the leader in the data storage market, EMC launched four new arrays that will include de-duplication features and flash storage.
Three of the Celerra arrays are straightforward storage devices and the fourth is a network gateway for clustering storage systems, All are blade arrays offering support for from one to eight blades on he high-end models.
All the arrays support either NAS, MPFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel while the NS-G8 gateway can support NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel.
Also announced were new tools for the arrays to work with VMware virtualisation software. Recovery Manager Automated Failback is a VMware vCenter plug-in is intended to help Celerra customers coordinate a “failback” to the original virtual infrastructure for failover.
VMware View Storage Integration is also a plug-in which can help administrators provision virtual desktops, the company said in a statement. VMware View can be used with Celerra De-duplication of both boot and user data.
Looking at the storage blades in turn, the NS-120 can carry one or two blades and from 32TB to 64TB of storage and it offers failover protection for the data rather than clustering.
The NS-480 offers support for two to four blades and 64 to 192TB of storage and the NS-960 support for two to eight blades and from 128TB to 760TB of storage. Both offer support for clustering.
The Celerra NS-G8 gateway has similar storage features to the other arrays but while the others all are based on EMC's Clariion storage, the NS-G8 supports EMC's Symmetrix high-end storage as well with capacity from 128 to 896TB.
The company is offering flash drives with these arrays, a technology it introduced to its Clariion arrays last year in the CX-4. EMC claims that it is the first to offer solid state with NAS storage. But it has been offering solid-state storage with iSCSI and Fibre Channel since August last year.
Three of the Celerra arrays are straightforward storage devices and the fourth is a network gateway for clustering storage systems, All are blade arrays offering support for from one to eight blades on he high-end models.
All the arrays support either NAS, MPFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel while the NS-G8 gateway can support NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel.
Also announced were new tools for the arrays to work with VMware virtualisation software. Recovery Manager Automated Failback is a VMware vCenter plug-in is intended to help Celerra customers coordinate a “failback” to the original virtual infrastructure for failover.
VMware View Storage Integration is also a plug-in which can help administrators provision virtual desktops, the company said in a statement. VMware View can be used with Celerra De-duplication of both boot and user data.
Looking at the storage blades in turn, the NS-120 can carry one or two blades and from 32TB to 64TB of storage and it offers failover protection for the data rather than clustering.
The NS-480 offers support for two to four blades and 64 to 192TB of storage and the NS-960 support for two to eight blades and from 128TB to 760TB of storage. Both offer support for clustering.
The Celerra NS-G8 gateway has similar storage features to the other arrays but while the others all are based on EMC's Clariion storage, the NS-G8 supports EMC's Symmetrix high-end storage as well with capacity from 128 to 896TB.
The company is offering flash drives with these arrays, a technology it introduced to its Clariion arrays last year in the CX-4. EMC claims that it is the first to offer solid state with NAS storage. But it has been offering solid-state storage with iSCSI and Fibre Channel since August last year.
Friday 20 February 2009, 3:49 PM
350,000 Linux deployment planned for Brazil
The Brazilian Government has ordered 350,000 low-cost PCs that should, if deployment proceeds as planned, be one of the largest thin-client roll-outs of Linux systems ever carried out.
Two companies, Canada-based Useful and the Brazilian company, ThinNetworks announced on Wednesday that they planned to deploy the systems to Brazilian schoolchildren using shared hardware.
The two companies claim that the Userful Multiplier tool “is the simplest, and highest performance approach to desktop virtualisation on the market”. It is a combination of software from Useful and hardware from ThinNetworks who claim their to offer lowest-cost desktop virtualisation.
The software will be the Linux Educacional 2.0 Linux distribution that has been developed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education the companies said in their joint statement.
According to the company doing the deployment, Userful, the system offers the features of “a full PC including high performance video for less than $50 per additional seat in large deployments - not including monitors and keyboards” and uses standard PC hardware including additional video cards and USB/two-way-audio hubs from.
There were few details of the actual mechanics of when this project is rolling out and the companies could not be reached for comment.
However, ThinNetworks does claim to have installed 400,000 multi-terminal workstations around the world and said that with the Brazil rollout they expect to increase this to 800,000 by 2010.
We did want to ask them when they expected to have the project completed. It is not clear from their press release, but the system they intent to use for the project is based on the idea that two workstations can share the one screen.
The companies did not reveal the cost of the project. We asked the companies for comment but have not yet received a replay.
Two companies, Canada-based Useful and the Brazilian company, ThinNetworks announced on Wednesday that they planned to deploy the systems to Brazilian schoolchildren using shared hardware.
The two companies claim that the Userful Multiplier tool “is the simplest, and highest performance approach to desktop virtualisation on the market”. It is a combination of software from Useful and hardware from ThinNetworks who claim their to offer lowest-cost desktop virtualisation.
The software will be the Linux Educacional 2.0 Linux distribution that has been developed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education the companies said in their joint statement.
According to the company doing the deployment, Userful, the system offers the features of “a full PC including high performance video for less than $50 per additional seat in large deployments - not including monitors and keyboards” and uses standard PC hardware including additional video cards and USB/two-way-audio hubs from.
There were few details of the actual mechanics of when this project is rolling out and the companies could not be reached for comment.
However, ThinNetworks does claim to have installed 400,000 multi-terminal workstations around the world and said that with the Brazil rollout they expect to increase this to 800,000 by 2010.
We did want to ask them when they expected to have the project completed. It is not clear from their press release, but the system they intent to use for the project is based on the idea that two workstations can share the one screen.
The companies did not reveal the cost of the project. We asked the companies for comment but have not yet received a replay.
Friday 20 February 2009, 12:12 PM
Intel plots the dynamic, scalable datacentre
Intel’s upcoming new chip architecture, code-named Nehalem had a design based on a straightforward principle of modern system design. To run a computer you need a microprocessor and to run a very powerful computer, you need a lot of microprocessors stuck together.
To run them efficiently you need an efficient architecture and, according to Intel, efficiency is what Nehalem, an eight-core Xeon, is all about for the chip is aimed at the datacentre and especially at the largest datacentres or mega datacentres.
Mega datacentres run by companies like Amazon and Google and others of enormous size like that account for around a quarter of all the datacentres in the world. Cloud computing is helping to fuel the growth in the size of datacentres and according to Intel, 20 to 25 percent of all server shipments will go to mega datacentres by 2012.
The issue that Nehalem is supposed to address is how to optimise the datacentres so that they work with maximum efficiency? As datacentres are getting bigger and bigger and are based on more and more microprocessors linked together, that is no small problem.
Intel is working on that crucial issue and at a briefing on Tuesday, Intel’s general manager for high density computing, Jason Waxman, outlined that plan. “We are developing a cloud architecture aimed at mega datacentres with hundreds of thousands of servers that can be balanced automatically,” he said.
The datacentre design will allow for centres that can be balanced and re-sized automatically, Waxman said.
Waxman also said that Intel will use Nehalem to spearhead a full push into mega datacentres. “We've designed a server for a Nehalem-based board that's optimised for our cloud-computing infrastructure,"
During the course of his talk, Waxman was in effect outlining a dream for anyone who is involved in running a datacentre. Provisioning datacentres is a pain for many IT managers so it would be nice if that could happen easily if not automatically and even better if the systems and the chips on it can dynamically shif priorities depending on circumstance. In a large multiprocessor (and almost all computers today are multiprocessor) dynamically re-allocation of resources are good.
The Nehalem processor will be officially launched later this year.
To run them efficiently you need an efficient architecture and, according to Intel, efficiency is what Nehalem, an eight-core Xeon, is all about for the chip is aimed at the datacentre and especially at the largest datacentres or mega datacentres.
Mega datacentres run by companies like Amazon and Google and others of enormous size like that account for around a quarter of all the datacentres in the world. Cloud computing is helping to fuel the growth in the size of datacentres and according to Intel, 20 to 25 percent of all server shipments will go to mega datacentres by 2012.
The issue that Nehalem is supposed to address is how to optimise the datacentres so that they work with maximum efficiency? As datacentres are getting bigger and bigger and are based on more and more microprocessors linked together, that is no small problem.
Intel is working on that crucial issue and at a briefing on Tuesday, Intel’s general manager for high density computing, Jason Waxman, outlined that plan. “We are developing a cloud architecture aimed at mega datacentres with hundreds of thousands of servers that can be balanced automatically,” he said.
The datacentre design will allow for centres that can be balanced and re-sized automatically, Waxman said.
Waxman also said that Intel will use Nehalem to spearhead a full push into mega datacentres. “We've designed a server for a Nehalem-based board that's optimised for our cloud-computing infrastructure,"
During the course of his talk, Waxman was in effect outlining a dream for anyone who is involved in running a datacentre. Provisioning datacentres is a pain for many IT managers so it would be nice if that could happen easily if not automatically and even better if the systems and the chips on it can dynamically shif priorities depending on circumstance. In a large multiprocessor (and almost all computers today are multiprocessor) dynamically re-allocation of resources are good.
The Nehalem processor will be officially launched later this year.
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