Evergreen Systems announced a new product offer that combines Evergreen’s process improvement consulting with HP’s Data Center Automation enterprise software offering. The integrated, solution-oriented offer guarantees prospects a return on their technology investment through operations cost savings.
Evergreen’s announcement comes one day after HP announced major product upgrades to its Predictive Service Operations software, designed, according to HP, to “help CIOs adapt to new business directives in today’s challenging economic environment and help customers leverage the economic downturn into a strategic opportunity by modernizing and driving more efficiency into their IT organization.”
Evergreen’s CEO Don Casson commented, “This offer will allow clients to apply ITIL® best practices to data center operations, specifically server automation, and transform the data center using HP automation technology.
Ingram Micro has expanded their onsite professional BC/DR services. This makes it easier to meet the growing demands for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services.
Ingram Micro Inc. has expanded its professional services offerings to include business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) services.
Available to solution providers in the U.S. and Canada via the Ingram Micro Services Network (IMSN), these new offerings enable partners to quickly build or expand a BC/DR practice without any significant investments in their current infrastructure or engineering and sales staff. Ingram Micro solution providers can also call upon Ingram Micro to secure these new BC/DR services for their own businesses, as well as their clients.
In time for Halloween, HP has launched “What Haunts Your Data Center?” – a Halloween-focused education campaign. HP is featuring six animated data center characters that attempt to bring to life the scary monsters that haunt IT managers’ dreams.
Photo by Brain Hancock
The cast of data center monsters include:
- Dracula, The Data Center Energy Sucking Vampire
- Frankenstein, The Multi-Vendor Environment Monster
- The Blob, The Virtualized Data Center…Gone Wrong
- Skeletons, Legacy, Unknown Server and Storage Hardware
- Ghosts, The Spooks Haunting Unsecured Data Centers
- Werewolf, The Untrained Custodian
With the initiative, HP is trying to bring a little levity to the challenges IT departments face while educating and engaging with its audience in a fun, creative way.
EMC Corporation has announced two new software solutions aimed at helping customers automate configuration and compliance management across their physical and virtual information infrastructures.
Announced today, EMC Server Configuration Manager and EMC Configuration Analytics Manager provide customers with a unified approach for managing their IT infrastructures – including servers, networks, storage and applications – driving IT operational efficiencies, full compliance oversight, reduced business risk and continuous improvement.
In Server Configuration Manager, users can automatically discover and maintain detailed server configuration data. The solution includes pre-packaged compliance analysis tools and is able to automate remediation through its “right-click fix” capability.
In Configuration Analytics Manager, users can turn raw data into useful business information by tracking configuration changes over time and measuring key performance indicators to assist in continuous IT improvement.
Network Device Compliance with Server Configuration Manager
TrendPoint Systems, a leader in data center energy management solutions announced a four-point plan aimed at dramatically reducing energy costs and carbon emissions at data centers.
A recent study by McKinsey & Co. predicted that data centers will surpass the airline industry as the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and called for data centers to double their energy efficiency by 2012. TrendPoint projects that by implementing only a part of its plan — focused on managing cooling costs — data centers can reduce energy cooling costs by a third or more.
TrendPoint’s Four Point Plan
The four point plan from TrendPoint provides a comprehensive approach for actively monitoring and managing energy use in data centers in order to help companies tackle this urgent problem. The plan will enable companies to set and manage energy budgets at the user and departmental level, allowing them to comply with proposed regulations on energy emissions, such as those slated for enforcement in the Western United States and Canadian Provinces by 2012. This group has established the Western Climate Initiative to follow the lead of the U.K. and other European countries in establishing “cap and trade” regulations on energy use. Businesses that comply will be able to trade their energy savings on the open market in an “energy exchange.”
The Technical Specialist (TS) exam, Exam 70-652: TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring, is in development. The expected release date is August 2008.
When you pass Exam 70-652: TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring, you complete the requirements for the following certification: Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Windows Server Virtualization, Configuration
There currently are no Microsoft Press books available for 70-652, however classroom course 6411, and E-Learning clinics 5935 and 6536 are offered.
Skills measured by Exam 70-652
Installing Hyper-V (14 percent)
- Select and configure hardware to meet Hyper-V prerequisites.
This objective may include but is not limited to: evaluate the existing environment, disk/logical unit number (LUN), memory requirements, correct CPU/BIOS, networking/Network Interface Card (NIC) - Configure Windows Server 2008 for Hyper-V.
This objective may include but is not limited to: identify requirements, deploy Hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool, install on Full, install on Core - Configure Hyper-V to be highly available.
This objective may include but is not limited to: fail over clustering, disk structure (RAID, quorum, shared storage), network
Microsoft’s answer to VMware’s systems-management product will be released commercially in September according to Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer.
These remarks are in contrast to those made by Diane Prescott, product manager for System Center. She said on the team blog that Virtual Machine Manager 2008 would be released in the fourth quarter of 2008. This however contradicted what Microsoft said back in April, that VMM would ship 30-60 days after Hyper-V, which was released on June 26th.
Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is Microsoft’s long-awaited answer to VMware’s systems management product. VMM is the management companion piece to Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. Not only will VMM support Hyper-V, but also hypervisor technology from VMware and Xen.
Accenture has released the Accenture Green Technology Suite. It is a set of tools to help an organization assess its environmental standing and provide some recommendations to reduce its carbon footprint by improving the way IT is managed.
The flash based tool gives a view across the entire IT organization. It provides detailed assessments of where the company is within a maturity spectrum and suggests IT initiatives to address the company’s carbon footprint.
The tools also help calculate the impact of specific initiatives in terms of workplace environmental efficiency and data center energy savings.
The Accenture Green Technology Suite includes:
The Accenture Green Maturity Model – assesses the environmental efficiency of IT, suggesting actions to improve the organization’s overall environmental standing.
Based on the responses to 300 questions across five key areas – working practice, office environment, data center, procurement, and corporate citizenship – on topics ranging from commitment to reducing CO2 emissions, to type of enterprise network, the maturity model produces a comprehensive scorecard that rates where the organization sits on the green maturity spectrum on a scale from zero to five.
Aternity Inc. announced today the results of its survey, “IT Management: Key Drivers and Challenges in 2008.” More than 70 senior IT and Line-of-Business (LOB) professionals participated in the survey, ranking their key IT priorities for 2008 and sharing their perspective on end user experience management strategies and best practices.
The top five priorities and key IT challenges for 2008 according to survey respondents in order of importance:
Proactive Problem Detection (35.6 percent)
Gaining a more proactive handle on IT problems before the impact is felt by end users or upon business productivity and performance. This is a key function of proactive management and one of the most beneficial aspects to it. Investment in monitoring software and services is expected to grow 45 percent between 2005 and 2011.
Server Virtualization (21.9 percent)
With a constant need to increase do more with less; server virtualization is a growing industry. With server virtualization, you can consolidate workloads of underutilized server machines onto a smaller number of fully utilized machines. Fewer physical machines can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.
HP today announced the world’s first two-in-one server blade. The HP ProLiant BL2×220c G5 combines two independent servers in a single blade. This offers customers with scale-out environments improved data center performance, reduced floor space and lower power usage.
The HP ProLiant BL2×220c G5 offers three times the density of traditional 1U rack-mount servers. This addresses the data growth facing companies with cloud computing, Web 2.0 and HPC deployments. It also delivers a 60 percent better performance per watt than similar configurations which minimizes cooling and power costs.
Pricing starts at $6,349 and can go up to more than $20,000. The HP ProLiant BL2×220c G5 comes with either dual or quad-core Intel Xeon processors. It archives speeds up to 12.3 teraflops for a 42U rack.
With up to 32 server nodes in a single 10U blade chassis, the new BladeSystem can scale up to 128 servers, 1,024 CPU cores and 2TB of RAM in one standard-sized rack consisting of four enclosures.
Key features
- Supplying up to 1,024 central processing unit (CPU) cores in a single 42U rack, the BL2×220c is the industry’s first server blade to offer more than three times the density of traditional 1U rack-mount servers. Additionally, the new server blade leverages HP’s award-winning management and configuration tools that help drive down costs and mitigate risk.
