For many companies, desktop management is time-consuming and expensive. Ensuring data security and regulatory compliance is complex when desktops are distributed around the globe. However, new technologies are available to help. For Citrix systems, the answer is XenDesktop.

XenDesktop is a desktop delivery solution that allows companies to virtualize Windows desktops in the data center and deliver them on-demand to office workers in any location.

According to Citrix Systems’ senior product marketing manager Calvin Hsu, desktop virtualization provides companies with an alternative to managing their desktop environment.

Check out this article about desktop virtualization. It will be interesting to see if we have more organizations adopting virtualization whether it’s a USB key type solution, or a web based Citrix solution to replace the desktop pc or for remote working instead of a laptop. The ability to free your team, to have them location independent, able to support the infrastructure on demand can be a real enabler to the way your on call, your maintenance and system support is managed.

London, Jul 03, 2008 (M2 PRESSWIRE via COMTEX) — NIPNY | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — NEC Computers, a subsidiary of NEC Corp.,announces the availability of the NEC Express5800/320Fd server, expanding NEC’s Fault Tolerant (FT) server range. This range was designed to meet the demands of businesses looking for a solid infrastructure combining high availability with true server consolidation capabilities.

The powerful new FT server is the only platform in the range to offer:

• –Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 32 and 64 bit, for enhanced management of messaging systems
• –A secure, optimised virtualised infrastructure
• –Integrated remote administration functions

The NEC Express5800/320Fd-MR server is available in mono or bi-processor versions. Thanks to the inclusion of Intel’s new quad-core processors, the 320Fd-MR model offers performance 20% greater than the previous model.

Very cool, the more innovation and competition we have in the server market, the more choice and range of solutions for the end user, which has to be a good thing for the vendors and end user community.

Advisory: (Revision) FIRMWARE UPGRADE REQUIRED to Avoid Timeouts and SCSI Downshifts on Certain HP Ultra320 SCSI Hard Drives Configured with HP ProLiant or Integrity Servers

Check out this firmware post on the HP site, it resolves some known issues with HP Proliant/Integrity servers on specific HP ULtra320 SCSI hard drives. Remember if you’re upgrading the firmware on your SCSI controller, you should be checking the disk firmware as well, particularly as out of date disk firmware can cause messages on POST.

Round Rock, Texas, July 1, 2008

• Low-Cost Solution for Blade IO Virtualization, Deployment and Reducing Downtime
• Utilizes Existing Networking Investments; No Need to ‘Switch Your Switch’
• Achieves up to 100 Percent More Networking and Storage Connectivity at Half the Cost of HP Virtual Connect

Dell has followed on the successful introduction of its PowerEdge M-Series blade server solution with Dell FlexAddress, a patent pending tool for blade chassis virtualization and persistent identity. Dell FlexAddress is a simple, low-cost way for customers to deploy and manage blade infrastructures while reducing data center downtime. Dell FlexAddress is enabled by a special SD card for the PowerEdge M1000e Chassis Management Controller (CMC) and the latest firmware. The FlexAddress SD card is now available worldwide with a starting price of $499. For more information, visit www.dell.com/blades.

“We delivered one of the greenest, most energy-efficient blade solutions on the planet with the PowerEdge M-Series and now we’re making it one of the most flexible,” said Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions, Dell Product Group. “FlexAddress frees customers from existing high-cost, proprietary tools, and enables them to utilize existing networking infrastructure and knowledge to handle predictable or even unplanned changes in their data center without affecting the network.”

Dell and Partners Declare: No Longer a Need to “Switch Your Switch” for Blades

Dell FlexAddress allows any M-Series blade enclosure to abstract the Fibre Channel World Wide Name(WWN) and Ethernet/iSCSI Media Access Control (MAC) from the blade hardware and, instead, tie it persistently to a slot in the M1000e chassis. This feature provides customers with an efficient, flexible and consistent infrastructure. Dell FlexAddress is managed by the Chassis Management Controller (CMC) in the PowerEdge M1000e, keeping it agnostic to the IO module and avoiding the need to “switch your switch.” Customers can achieve 100 percent more network and storage (LAN and SAN) connectivity at half the cost of HP Virtual Connect by enabling automated deployment configuration in advance and network stacking. This speeds network configuration and management by virtualizing the switches across up to 8 chassis (up to 128 servers), making them appear as a single virtual switch. FlexAddress also works with all Dell pass-through modules.

This is very cool, being able to allocate the MAC, the World Wide Name to slot, will improve the support process, and should reduce the delays of provisioning a new blade. By allocating the slot, the details when I swap the blade we can avoid the need for several teams to be involved, for storage to re-zone the World Wide Name, for Networks to reconfigure the Network, I just have the hardware guy/server team swap the blade and go. I also love the concept of the solid state card containing your configuration, that I can make one configuration and duplicate it/back it up, that if I need to replace parts of the enclosure, I can plug in the card to restore everything to my previous configuration.

That innovation continues across the blade platform has to be a good thing for the end user in terms of choice and functionality, but also in the industry, in illustrating the benefits of the blade platform for a range of uses.

Here’s an interesting one from CIO turned blogger Steve O’Donnell.

Now Steve’s blog is pretty new, but he knows for certain that some of the most influential CIOs in the world are reading it because they are his friends and peers.

Greenbang thinks it’s cool that he’s blogging because unlike most of the people who write about IT (me included), he actually works in the industry, living and breathing tech and data centre air.

The conversations about data center power and cooling continue, check out this post talking it, it’s an interesting read.

Hitachi is looking to beef up its blade offerings with the latest Intel Itanium processors.

The company announced June 24 that it would add Intel’s 9100 series Itanium chips to its high-end BladeSymphony 1000 systems, as well as its lower-end BladeSymphony 320 servers.

Additionally, Hitachi will begin offering the latest dual-core Intel Xeon 5200 series processors along with Intel’s quad-core Xeon 5400 chips with both sets of BladeSymphony systems.

This latest announcement from Hitachi, which has been trying to break into the North American blade market since 2006, comes just after Hewlett-Packard announced its Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem, which is also based on Itanium processors and is designed for financial, telecommunications, public sector and high-volume Web 2.0 companies.

Very cool, and good news for Hitachi, I remain a fan of their blade servers. The more choice we have, and innovation of the blade platform, the more choice for the consumer, that I’ll find the right solution for my business which is ultimately what matters. Do check it out.

Bracknell Forest Borough Council, which provides support services to over 115,000 residents in Central Berkshire, Southern England, has used VMware’s virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, to drive down operating costs, be more flexible, improve business continuity and disaster recovery, and accelerate the delivery of new applications and services to the public.

Among the new services rolled out on VMware Infrastructure are an Integrated Children Services (ICS) system, which is used in the delivery of cutting edge social services to children at risk and in care, and Pericles, a government-sector Revenues and Benefits application, which has allowed the council to streamline its council tax and benefits application and payments processes.

Following an audit of the Council’s infrastructure, which showed that its server farm was running at only around 10 percent of capacity, the management team saw an opportunity to streamline its operations and boost utilization using virtualization. The IT department built a business case for virtualization as part of the Council’s ‘Invest to Save’ initiative, which funds projects that deliver savings in the longer term. Working with technology partner Sol-Tec and Intercept-IT, Bracknell Forest began deploying VMware Infrastructure 3 in June 2007.

“VMware has had a tremendous effect on our IT infrastructure and has drastically improved our ability to deliver applications to the organization much more quickly,” said Richard Dawson, IT Services Manager, Bracknell Forest Borough Council. “On cost savings alone, the benefits are huge – we will save around £75,000 a year on our annual server hardware refresh, while our power and cooling costs have been reduced by around 20%.”

Very cool, it’s always great to see how people are benefiting from the technology, as well as the technologies they have used to achieve this, interestingly the article mentions the power and management benefits. That being able to deploy systems in shorter timescales, allowing IT to be more responsive to the end user needs, very cool. Do check it out.

It was great to speak with the guys from Supermicro about their blade servers. They’ve improved the energy efficiency of the power supply very effectively which is very impressive, as is their use of energy efficient components. Anything we can do to continue the innovation of the blade platform in an energy efficient standpoint has to be a good thing.  Do check them out.

CUPERTINO, Calif., June 23, 2008 – Parascale, a provider of cloud storage solutions for rich media content in traffic-intensive applications, today announced that it has closed a $11.37 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Parascale plans to use the funding for product development and marketing initiatives in preparation for the launch of Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS), an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols.

Parascale was founded on the premise that advances in computer hardware over the past 10 years make it possible for file storage, management, and distribution solutions to be more reliable, easier to manage, and less expensive to purchase and operate than ever before. Adopting the best technologies available, Parascale has developed a new class of storage solutions designed to support the wave of content-intensive applications, including video-on-demand, digital document archiving, scientific data analysis, video surveillance and medical image remote diagnosis among others. The company’s PCS software is patented technology which automatically and transparently migrates and replicates files among storage nodes to balance and optimize performance – without interruption in client access.

I highlighted this article as it does sound very cool, and cloud storage could bring real benefits to different user groups and organizations, I’ll need to read up more.

One of the topics at the Blade Systems Insight conference was the ‘green blade solutions’. A topic that remains of interest to me on several levels.

Firstly, I always like to see what experiences people are having with the technology, how we can illustrate blade servers as an enabler to your business, as an energy efficient platform. This is mainly because there have been a lot of statements about blades and power or cooling, about things to worry about with the technology. I’m all for talking about the issues with the platform, but at the same time we need to be logical about the platform, accentuate the positive and address those things to think about.

Secondly, in the UK we’re currently getting a bit worked up about the cost of power, you see energy costs are rising, IT therefore needs to be able to deliver the range of services that the end user (be it the trader at an investment bank or Bill shopping at Tesco and trying to pay with his credit card), to deliver different tiers of service, meet existing and new demand within the our power and cooling constraints.

We can deploy ‘green blade solutions’, how you define green, what you mean by green is going to depend on your business, your energy/power constraints.

Examples would be using blade servers with energy efficient power supplies, possibly on DC power, using fresh air cooling as part of a virtualization solution which is using SAN boot or Solid State boot, with energy efficient processors configured in a way that we can provision blades to meet the business demand and turn them off when not needed.

When I say energy efficient processors, this might not mean the ultra low voltage, it might be choosing the processors that bring us the most performance at the least acceptable power consumption, typically the low midrange processors, choosing the ultra high performance processors might only bring you 25% more performance for 50% more power and a higher additional cost per unit.