Posted on: February 10th, 2012 by John Humphreys
A few weeks ago, Cisco posted a field notice to customers of its UCS server blades, saying that failures on the blade can “cause the component to overheat and emit a short flash which could lead to complete board failure.” Cisco also warned that the defect could affect the other blades in the chassis by disrupting power flow. They informed their customers that they are replacing currently deployed UCS B440 Blade Servers, are making hardware modifications and are launching a hardware replacement program. It stands true that any recall, especially when dealing with expensive hardware, will impact the company’s bottom line. This is further proof that designing reliable hardware is difficult and underscores why high-profile companies such as HP spend billions on development. The Cisco recall also highlights the need for industry standards. Associations like the Open Data Center Alliance are working to bring interoperability and standards to the data… continue reading
Posted on: January 30th, 2012 by John Humphreys
Recently, the Royal Pingdom blog released a huge variety of data from various sources. This data paints a picture of the state of the Internet this past year. As I read these data I was struck by how, from a systems view, there is an inverse relationship between size and simplicity. That is, the larger a system, the more important simplicity becomes to that system – both for the adoption of the service and to the ongoing operations and management. In short, complexity breeds uncertainty and drives up failure risks. This is true for business and as well as for the infrastructure upon which a business is built. Too much complexity in IT translates into a brittle foundation to the business. With a fragile foundation to IT, the infrastructure must be constantly monitored and nurtured to meet the minimum needs of the business. In short, complexity drives up costs and… continue reading
Posted on: January 18th, 2012 by John Humphreys
Can your business afford to lose $110,000 an hour? According to research firm Aberdeen Group that is the estimated loss for every hour of downtime suffered by the average business when disaster strikes. There is little doubt that a hurricane or flood could bring your data center to a sudden halt, but according to a global study conducted by Forrester Research, over 40 percent of the IT executives surveyed indicated that it was a simple power failure and not a violent storm that caused their most recent data center outage. How likely is it that your enterprise will experience a significant disruption in data center operations? Forrester reports that during the five-year period beginning in 2003, as many as 27 percent of the businesses surveyed declared they suffered the effects of a disaster and invoked recovery procedures. Regardless of the reason for the disruption or the frequency, what matters most… continue reading
Posted on: December 20th, 2011 by Chris Cleary
According to a recent Tech Target poll, virtualization is marching forward along the fronts of desktop, disaster recovery and cloud. Two-thirds of those surveyed plan to expand virtualization efforts in 2012 with disaster recovery (DR) topping the identified use case for the technology; interest in VDI jumping 10 points; and plans for private cloud more then tripling. From these kinds of numbers its clear virtualization is the ‘go to’ tool for cost reduction, consolidation and data center modernization. All-in-all, great news for those of us in the business of virtualizing the data center. But is there more going on behind the scenes? Dig a little deeper on the TechTarget site and you’ll see another insight gleaned from the same survey: Physical servers live on longer than IT pros predict. In a nutshell, Tech Target also finds that apps installed on bare metal workloads are “sticking around, even as virtualization becomes… continue reading
Posted on: October 13th, 2011 by admin
Everyone wants to provide a service. We are all too familiar with Software as a Service (SaaS). But in the beginning there was IaaS (infrastructure as a service), platform as a service (PaaS) and, more recently, Desktop as a Service and Storage as a Service. And now, in the ever-expanding world of “IT as a Service (ITaaS?),” Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is upon us. While attending Interop in NYC last week, I ran across BlackCloud Edge (BCE) – a new entrant into the DRaaS space that, at first blush, has cracked both platform heterogeneity needs as well as storage bandwidth challenges.BlackCloud Edge provides vaulting and recovery services for all different platforms. It leverages storage from Amazon S3 along with a shared pool of infrastructure the company maintains on behalf of its clients. Should any BCE client experience an event, IT-Lifeline will replicate the customer’s IT environment “in the cloud.” Recovery times are… continue reading
Posted on: September 16th, 2011 by admin
When reporting on some recent outages of cloud services from Google and Microsoft, Kevin McCaney at GCN recently asked the question: “is this the new normal”? It’s an interesting question to pose, but let’s take it a step further: ”Are outages of key IT services becoming the new norm?” With that frame of reference, I did a little digging around the web and indeed the frequency and impact of IT outages has increased. In addition to the Google and Microsoft outages reference in the link above, some more recent highly visible events of the past year include: Target website goes down Netflix video streaming outage #1 and outage #2 Amazon Cloud down in EMEA AWS in the US, outage #1 and outage #2 Sony PlayStation Network Twitter disruptions San Diego Power Outage There was no one thing that caused these outages as they ranged from natural events to human error, and they varied… continue reading
Posted on: September 14th, 2011 by admin
Missoni Madness. Missoni Mayhem. Missoni Mania. All have been cited by the media as reference to the phenomenon that caused Target’s web site to crash yesterday when consumers flooded the retailer online with hopes of scoring an item from the limited-edition, low-cost designer collection from Italian fashion designer Missoni. Target.com was wiped out for most of the day as a result of the high demand, reminiscent of the most popular shopping days of the year such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday. As a leading retailer that should be prepared to maintain continuity of service on peak shopping days, this unexpected failure to sustain its online retail channel through an onslaught of web traffic and accommodate unusually high demand is being called amateurish by industry analysts and was a high-trending source of frustration among consumers on Facebook and Twitter. As is often the case, when one company falters, others gain.… continue reading
Posted on: September 6th, 2011 by admin
The task of going virtual can appear daunting. Complexity and cost are both major concerns as implementation and maintenance projects creep in their scope. One of the major sources of complexity is the need to manage and protect both your physical and virtual infrastructure separately. Unified management platforms are the solution to this problem. By bringing together virtual and physical infrastructure management, unified management platforms enable organizations to consolidate IT process and streamline operations. This in turn allows IT organizations to use commodity “off the shelf” hardware components to create integrated continuity and disaster recovery services that bridge the gap between virtualization and physical infrastructure. The result is a business-critical infrastructure with massive hardware and operational efficiencies. On Wednesday, September 14th, Egenera and Virtual I/O will co-host a webinar addressing the key issues on this topic, and the solutions that are available: Automatically healing virtual resource pools Pre-emptively scaling capacity… continue reading
Posted on: July 25th, 2011 by admin
Q2 is behind us now and it marked another exceptional quarter for Egenera. I’m so proud of the Egenera team and the hard work they’ve done to turn this company into a profitable leader in the Converged Infrastructure space. Q2 marked our 6th consecutive profitable quarter! Our software business continues to grow significantly. Compared to the 1st half of 2010, our software sales are up 400% in the 1st half of 2011. That’s phenomenal growth and proves that our open strategy is the right one. Having HP, Dell, and Fujitsu as partners offers our customers exception choice in platforms. We will announce additional platforms later this year and cement our place as the ONLY open player in this market. Want more proof? We just announced a new customer, PDRI , where we competed directly against Cisco UCS. PDRI chose Egenera PAN Manager on the HP BladeSystem platform because we offered best of breed technology in… continue reading
Posted on: May 16th, 2011 by admin
Egenera has had a number of significant events over the last few months, signing the partnership with HP, moving our headquarters to new facilities, signing on a number of new partner relationships. This month there was another significant event, the first time the new Egenera field sales and support team met. Gathered together were both the veterans and those new to the fold. It was a week of intense communication, and team building. From East coast, West Coast, the UK and Germany, there were a variety of backgrounds represented. What we had in common was a sense of purpose. With the Egenera PAN Manager software we have a winner. This is a solution which has defined a marketplace: converged infrastructure. We created the field ten years ago. With our recent and ongoing partnership agreements, Egenera has the components in place to implement the converged infrastructure solutions our partners’ and resellers’ need to support… continue reading
