Infrastructure 2.What?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Cloud, Enterprise, Business, Hardware, Storage, HP on
We live in an industry driven by the Darwinian evolution of buzzwords. Many start down the memestream to mainstream acceptance, but most die along the way. Some are weeded out early, others struggle to survive in the fringes of the blogosphere. It’s interesting to watch evolution in process.
One of the terms that’s making its way through that great filter is Infrastructure 2.0. It’s still struggling to drive the agenda, but it managed to make its way onto the schedule for last week’s Future In Review conference in San Diego. The question was still “Just what is it?”, and there were interesting definitions from all parts of the industry.
Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, was quite clear in his thinking, noting that POCs, servers, storage and network hardware were all converging on the same basic set of components. The only thing that would differentiate them was the software, saving money and making it easier to maintain an infrastructure. That’s certainly an important piece of the Infrastructure 2.0 jigsaw, but it’s still only a small part of the picture.
Amazon’s AWS, VMware’s VSphere and Microsoft’s Azure are another piece. They’re attempts to build a univeral operating system for cloud and virtualised workloads, where workload migrates to and from on premise datacenters - making them what Amazon CTO Werner Vogel calls “more elastic”. The mix of in-cloud and on-premise is key to the flexibility that businesses need, but it’s also a new complexity that needs a lot of management, and deeper consideration of just where your data is at all times.
Here’s a scary thought: Infrastructure 2.0: it’s 12 am. Do you know where your data is?
Data protection regulations aren’t ready for data that flows to where the workload is - and those workloads need to be geolocked, able to keep information inside the appropriate data protection regime.
Then there’s the thorny question of user interface.
Is a PC screen what the next generation of applications and services need? There’s a lot to be said for the traditional application, mixing rich data and rich display. Tom Malloy’s research group at Adobe is looking at next generation run times that can speed up cross platform rich internet applications. Tools like Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft Silverlight simplify user interface development, and bring Web 2.0 user experiences to the desktop.
Perhaps the most telling piece of the puzzle was one simple phrase: “We need to stop treating IT pros like Victorian file clerks”. It’s a statement that hit home - we do treat our IT pros as glorified clerks, waiting for them to do things by rote. What we really need is an automated infrastructure that flexibly configures itself to deal with the tools, applications and workloads we need to use every day.
Pull apart all the different definitions from all the vendors out there and that’s what Infrastructure 2.0 boils down to. It’s a world we really need to build - if only to show the world just what value IT really brings to business.
–Simon
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Eee PC 1000HE; the netbook with a real battery
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Power, Hardware, Laptop, Intel, HP on
How do you get a full day’s work out of a netbook? Make it bigger (and turn everything off).
The latest Eee PC, the 1000HE, has a hefty 8700mAh battery but because the Eee is quite chunky itself that doesn’t stick out much at the bottom. If you want a thinner netbook, the HP Mini and Mini-Note models are far slimmer than the Eee (and they weight rather less too, even with HP’s 6-cell extended battery); in fact, the 17″ MacBook Pro is thinner than the Eee 100HE, although the MacBook is obvious far less portable in other ways (I’d have to switch from the natty Cirque du Soleil handbag that my beloved HP EliteBook 2730p tablet fits in perfectly to a messenger bag, albeit a slim one).
But if you can put up with the less than slim casing of the 1000He, you get a very portable machine that you can take more seriously than many netbooks, although there are still compromises. Forget 16GB SSDs; you get 160GB of hard drive, which puts many 12″ notebooks to shame. The keyboard is a significant improvement over most netbooks; with a separate frame to avoid the bouncing and flexing that previous Eees were prone to, it’s more comfortable to type on, and while the keys are small they’re widely spaced apart, as on some Sony VAIOs and MacBooks, so you”re much less likely to hit the wrong key even if your finger is too big to hit just the key you’re aiming at. Even so, the HP Mini-Note keyboard remains the one to beat - the Eee keyboard is good, but not that good.
The trackpad is the ElanTech SmartPad that Dell uses on the Mini 12, which has more multi-touch options than you can shake a fist at; two finger scroll, pinch zoom and rotation, drag and drop that you can’t drop by accident, a double-tap gesture for opening a magnifying glass window, and three-finger swipe (sideways for page up and page down, up and down for launching My Computer and opening Alt-Tab and switching windows by waggling your fingers around on the touchpad). You have to get used to the gestures, but they can speed you up, especially on a small keyboard like this.
Talking of speeding up, the 1.66GHz Atom N280 ought to be faster than the 1.6GHz N270 in most netbooks; frankly we didn’t notice and when a Web site script went beserk and opened over 20 tabs while Word and Windows Media Player were running, things ground to a halt. Once you step down the processor speed to improve the battery life, it doesn’t matter what the top speed is.
No Atom system is going to be a patch on a Centrino 2 and they don’t pretend to be. But then the only way to get a 9 hour battery life on a Centrino 2 machine is to add an extended battery. The Samsung NC10 had the best battery life of last year’s netbooks with a battery that didn’t bulge out of the case and that was up to 7 hours 30 minutes without Wi-Fi and with a dim screen, or 6 hours 30 with Wi-Fi on and the screen comfortably bright. The HP Mini-Note 2140 has an optional 6-cell battery that does stick out (you may find it gives you a better typing angle because it lifts up the keyboard); that manages five hours in heavy use (streaming video and music) and well over seven hours for general use with Wi-Fi and good screen brightness.
The sticker on the Eee actually claims 9.5 hours; that’s if you’re in power-saving mode (and the button for that is now a tiny button above the keyboard, next to options for turning off the screen altogether, switching resolution and - oddly - launching Skype), with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Web cam turned off and the screen set to 40% brightness. The screen is noticeably dimmer than other netbooks and notebooks even at full brightness and 40% isn’t particularly comfortable for viewing. Advertising 9.5 hours most users will never see made me expect that the Eee 100HE would leave me disappointed (and hunting for a power socket), but it delivers very respectable battery life in normal use.
Turn on the Wi-Fi and the power icon promises 7 hours 15 minutes; this fluctuates up and down depending on what you’re using the PC for but after 5 hours of downloading software, browsing Web pages, streaming music and editing documents the battery still promised almost two more hours of use and we did indeed get just over 7 hours. You can play over 6 hours of video (which drives the processor and the screen harder than many apps) before the battery runs down.
In the real world, that really is a full working day. Combined with a keyboard normal adults can actually use, this makes the new Eee a significant advance on the recent stream of me-too netbooks and the kind of machine we hoped for when the first Eee came out. It finally gives the Mini-Note 2140 a competitor and because Asus has much better distribution than HP you can expect to find the 1000HE at increasingly low prices.
- Mary
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Servers
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Enterprise, virtualisation, operating systems, linux, Intel, HP, Server, Windows, Microsoft on
Server sales went down 3.8% and up 4.9% this summer. That’s up if you’re counting how many servers companies have been buying in EMEA in Q3, by nearly 5% and down by just under 4% if you’re counting how much they cost. It’s the biggest fall in the amount spent on servers since the end of 2005, and la the news is much worse in Western Europe, at least for server vendors. Revenue went down 7.6% compared to last year, although unit sales are only down by 0.6%; that means you can buy almost as many servers as you did last year and pay rather less for them.
Dig into the IDC figures and there are some other interesting trends. Central and Eastern Europe are using more and more IT and it’s not just commodity x86 servers (up by 15/9%); pricier Itanium, mainframe and other non x86 servers went up by 22% and IBM saw almost 50% increase in revenue for z OS here. Windows didn’t lose any revenue this year either, all though all other server operating systems did, including Linux (although only what IDC calls a ‘very minor drop’); in fact Windows gained another 2% of server OS market share across EMEA.
It’s still the year of blades: up by 37.5% in sales compared to last year, and now 12% of all server sales by revenue. IBM lost as much on falling sales of x86 servers as it made on System z mainframes. Sun’s SPARC Enterprise systems sold well but Sun still lost share in the server market. Like IBM, it’s losing out to Dell and HP: HP was the number one server vendor with 2.4% growth, mainly because of ProLiant sales. Dell had a small increase in revenue and a 4% increase in shipments: more than HP but much less than the double-digit growth it had been seeing in previous quarters.
So, yes, servers sales are down overall and manufacturers will be hurting; but so far it seems to be canny buying that’s affecting the market as much as buying fewer servers. And that makes me think that while some companies may be skipping new servers in favour of SaaS and the cloud, more are just tightening their belts. The credit crunch has led to plenty of mergers and acquisitions (some more voluntary than others); that’s a lot of heterogenous IT systems to integrate, which means less time to go building new systems that need new servers - and more servers in a business that might get better economies of scale.
And then there’s virtualization. The server vendors have been supporting virtualization to the point of putting hypervisors in flash on new servers to get you running 20 servers’-worth of VMs on your new box more quickly. I’ve been asking vendors if this isn’t storing up trouble and lost sales for the future. You might never have bought the other 19 servers, but how about just another two or three? Answers have ranged from blank looks to assurances that it wouldn’t be a problem for long enough to let them find a way around it (often followed by ‘people will always need new servers’) to the very honest ‘yes, but we have to do it these days’. VMware revenue was up 32% for Q3 2008 compared to the year before; growth for 2008 might “only” be 42% rather than 45%. Microsoft has only just got into the serious hypervisor market with Hyper-V but it’s free with Server 2008 so you can expect it grow fast; Citrix and Red Hat have been chalking up the numbers for a few years too. Maybe the credit crunch will be the point at which virtualising servers also comes to mean not buying as many new ones
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We have 7,000 servers. No wait, 13,000. What do they all do again?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Power, Enterprise, Business, Server, Hardware, HP on
Server sprawl. It’s only human nature. I mean, not everything in my freezer is labeled because how could I possibly mistake frozen sliced pineapple for frozen sliced mango or frozen sliced polenta? And it’s obvious that KINGEX is the Exchange server for the Kingston branch and KINGXEX is the Exchange server from the Kings Cross branch and SERVER 111 is either the 111th server we put in or the server we put in on either the eleventh of January or the first of November
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Credit crunch doesn
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Enterprise, Business, HP on
It’s still about adding value according to HP’s software and services VP Tom Hogan. He was presenting to a group of 30 IT executives in London the other day and he thought he’d respect the mood of the moment. “I was very intentionally talking about cost reduction and efficiency because of all the uncertainty in the world economy. I wanted to pound the point on how IT can help save money,” he told us. But he’d read the mood wrong for the UK.
“It was interesting how many people said ‘Great, but we really don’t care about that. What we care about is how can we add more value in our line of business, because senior executives are still willing to spend more if they get the value from IT.’ It makes a point in this time of uncertainty. Ten years ago when the world was so unstable, IT would have been in shutdown. Now IT is so key that they’re still thinking about what to do next.”
Will what they do next include buying HP software? Take Mercury and Opsware and the ‘business technology optimisation’ tools that HP has built with them. They’re not tools for doing business with IT; they’re tools for turning IT into a business, for giving the IT department KPIs and scorecards they can track the way other business units do. Investing in IT that does IT might not be top of the shopping list tactically, but a real CIO does strategy these days.
Salesforce recently commissioned a survey of UK CIOs at small companies; Ian Parkes who conducted the research calls CIOs an endangered species. “They’re going to be rebranded as the chief operating officer or even removed. They’ve got to show value add, but they are not able to articulate it from the point view of looking for investment. Too often they do not have sufficient power to do what you would imagine a CIO would do, they are not board members and they don’t have that level of power or credibility within the organization.”
If you want to spend money on IT at the moment, you’re going to have to be able to explain the value and explain it in business terms.
-Mary
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Put a price on IT - and a value
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, People, Applications, Enterprise, Server, Business, HP on
It’s time for IT to have its own ERP and CRM, according to HP. That’s what the business technology optimization tools it’s developed are for. Today that’s the product name, but it’s such a good phrase that Tom Hogan, the senior VP and global manager of HP software (and, since he bought EDS, services), is thinking of coming up with some other name so he can keep it as a description. It’s meant to make you think of business process optimization, where you discover the way your company does everything has been wrong all along and it’s going to take an expensive stint of consultancy to fix it.
The way most companies do IT is hand to mouth, piecemeal and manually intensive. Imagine a car assembly plant that hand-wrote scripts to control the robots every time a new part had to be made. If IT departments really were the cobbler’s children they’re often compared to, they’d have been barefoot so long they’d be placed in foster care. Most IT departments can’t add as much value to the business as the technology companies tell us their technology can deliver and that’s not just the gap between hype and reality. In a survey that the Economist Intelligence Unit just carried out for HP, an “overwhelming majority of both CEOs and CIOs” believe that “technology is integral to the success of their company” and 88% of CEOs and 90% of CIOs say they “share similar visions for how technology can deliver business outcomes at their company” - which is close enough that they must be at least on the same page. So what’s the problem? As usual, money.
The 70-80% of the budget most IT departments have been spending on maintenance rather than innovation has only just gone down to 60% according to a new survey in CIO magazine. If you’re doing really, really
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HP delivering technology optimization and luggage too
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
We are no longer the people who are keeping the lights - now we are running the company, says Fadil El-Houssine, HP
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24 hours of battery life; now that
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Power, Laptop, HP, Mobile on
When your battery runs out, your laptop is nothing more than a paperweight. More portable devices like the recent rash of
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The LHC isn
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Intel, Networking, HP, Internet on
Simulating the big bang and colliding particles at the speed of light takes a lot of space, makes a lot of data - and it isn’t going to blow up the planet.
The Large Hadron Collider has been running quietly for a week and no tiny black holes have made their way out through the giant concrete end caps yet, so the world is probably safe.
The collider itself is a vast confection of superconducting magnets and we were lucky enough to go down into the caverns last year while it was still being constructed. The scale of the shaft and the cavern are impressive enough; ATLAS is just one of the detectors on the ring and the structure dwarfs the engineers putting to together.
We’ve put together a look at the detector using Microsoft’s Silverlight DeepZoom technology.
An experiment like the Large Hadron Collider also produces a lot of data: 15 million gigabytes a year, streaming out of CERN to a worldwide computing grid at 2GB/second through an HP ProCurve infrastructure. The mainframes and supercomputers that processed the data in decades past have been replaced by rows of PCs. The cavernous computing centre looks like an old school gym; half of it is full of familiar tower cases, the other half is filling up with racks and blades and tape library robots as CERN builds its own mega-data centre.
You need a special invitation - or a research project - to get into the caverns at CERN, now that the LHC is switched on. But you can book a tour to see one of the other particle accelerators, decelerators and colliders where researchers try to recreate the first seconds after the Big Bang - or you can head down to the basement to see the Tim Berners-Lee’s first Web server.
A slightly battered NexT cube with a hand-written label peeling off from the front of the case, the memo of the original World Wide Web proposal lying over the keyboard; if there was a coffee cup in the display case, you’d expect Sir Tim to come back and sit down at any minute. Also behind glass is one of the first Cisco routers to make it to Europe; it’s a hefty beige box that cost $10,000 back in 1984.
Tours start in the dramatic wooden Globe of Science and Innovation, but take a minute to stand in the main reception area across the road. The coloured lights shooting through the concrete floor flash every time cosmic rays are detected; that bright blue could be a solar flare or a supernova.
-Mary
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The case of the disappearing disk space
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, Storage, Laptop, HP, Microsoft on
Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
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