Prime Newswire

COSTA MESA, Calif., July 21, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) — Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX) today announced that its LightPulse(r) Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), available from Sun as the Sun StorageTek(tm) Enterprise Class 4Gb/s PCI Express HBA, now offer Virtual HBA technology within Solaris(tm) 10 Operating System (OS) environments. Enhanced capabilities such as virtual port management, available via Emulex’s next generation HBAnyware management suite, are designed to enhance the overall functionality of Solaris(tm) Containers.

“Once again, Emulex is demonstrating leadership in the area of virtualization by providing enhanced capabilities for virtualized servers within Solaris environments,” said Scott McIntyre, vice president of customer marketing, Emulex Corp. “Emulex pioneered Virtual HBA technology and is the only HBA vendor to support Sun’s Solaris Containers for virtualized server environments.”

Emulex’s family of 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s HBAs support Virtual HBA technology, which allows users to effectively virtualize the HBA functionality so each virtual machine running on a server can independently access its own protected storage. Coupled with Solaris Containers, Emulex Virtual HBA technology, which leverages the NPIV standard, also allows customers to maintain usage of SAN management tools and best practices, such as fabric zoning and LUN mapping/masking.

Very cool, bringing extra functionality to Solaris 10 has to be a good thing, and should bring new opportunities for Sun, as well as the end user community. Do check it out.

Hifn

LOS GATOS, Calif., August 18, 2008 – Hifn™ (NASDAQ: HIFN), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, today announced it has earned certified status in Microsoft’s Partner Program, which recognizes Hifn’s expertise and impact in the technology marketplace. As a Certified Partner, Hifn has demonstrated expertise with Microsoft technologies and proven ability to meet customer needs. Microsoft Certified Partners receive a rich set of benefits, including access, training and support that give them a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Hifn delivers the market-leading Express family of data reduction and data security card products and the award-winning Swarm™ storage software.  The Swarm software features unified iSCSI SAN and NAS storage and built-in data protection features, including point-in-time snapshots and local and remote data replication.  The Express family of data reduction cards delivers the industry’s most powerful and proven capacity optimized solutions while the data security cards provide the strongest encryption available in a production optimized form factor.

“Only companies that have demonstrated high levels of customer service, proved their experience and attained advanced certification receive the designation of Microsoft Certified Partner,” said Allison Watson, corporate vice president of Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “Today, Microsoft recognizes Hifn for its skills and expertise in providing customer satisfaction with Microsoft products and technology.

Very cool, with data security becoming an ever important concept, having solutions that can improve the management and security of data has to be a good thing. I’ll need to read up about their products.

IT Week

Chief information officers (CIO’s) are split on whether outsourced IT operations should count towards an organisation’s total carbon footprint, according to a Fujitsu Services survey.

While the majority of the CIOs preferred to count outsourced IT operations as part of their carbon footprint, almost a quarter believed the opposite and wanted the contracting company to become responsible. The survey was of 100 CIOs in UK companies employing more than 1000 people.

Fujitsu Services, as a provider of outsourcing services, said industry leaders should work together to agree common standards for calculating carbon footprints.

It’s a debate that is set to continue, in the meantime, focus on how efficient operationally (and in terms of power) you are being with your data center space and power. Are their small changes that you could make to your infrastructure to reduce power and cooling? Reducing those legacy disk shelves? Switching the screensaver to blank? Removing the second power adaptor to the development machines?

Hp.com and the datasheet

HP BL495c G5

The BL495c G5 virtualization blade eliminates the performance bottlenecks of a virtual machine host. Engineered with more memory and I/O than any other 2-processor blade server, this world’s first virtualization blade maximizes the number and performance of VMs that you can deploy per blade.

HP’s new blade is an interesting development and a welcome offering to the blade market. The blade brings enhanced functionality in terms of memory and I/O, two key issues with virtualization on the blade platform., it also uses solid state drives which is very cool.

It has impressive memory and storage possibilities, that you can have 128GB of RAM in a blade is fantastic for virtualization particularly as you scale up the systems that you’re virtualizing. That you abstract the end user, the application from the infrastructure can be empowerment in itself, that we can have a blade that might only host a few more demanding virtual instances. I’ll need to read up more about it.

webitpr

As the economic slowdown continues, business confidence amongst finance professionals in the IT sector declines to a record low of -18.2, down from -17.5 last quarter, according to the latest Business Confidence Monitor (BCM) from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), published today Monday 18 August. The BCM Confidence Index declined from -19.7 in the previous quarter to -25.7.

Commenting on the results, Robin Fieth, the ICAEW’s Executive Director of Operations and Finance, said:

“The survey paints a stark picture of the challenging business environment that has emerged in the UK over the past year, with the economy facing its most difficult period since the early 1990s.  This is now compounded by high and uncertain oil and commodity prices creating inflationary pressures and fall out from the UK housing market downturn which has continued to gather pace. At the same time we are seeing a new realism among businesses about the need to weather the current economic conditions with projected staff and capital investment both significantly down on this time last year.”

He added: “As an increased number of businesses express concern over late payment, effective cash flow management is now more essential than ever for those sectors with rising input costs, such as Manufacturing and Transport & Storage.”

There are some challenging trading conditions for many, but let’s not forget that as one market closes, others open up. Opportunities exist in projects that can return real return on investment, such as virtualization/data center consolidation, even hardware refresh projects. At the same time, markets in the BRICK regions are opening up with new consumers coming online to the global market, all of this needs infrastructure, needs experience, and that’s where the service providers and manufacturers can continue their focus. There might not be money in selling equipment short term, but what about recycling? About selling those spare components, offering support contracts - recognize your market place, your core business and how you can operate to earn revenue for you and your business. Check it out.