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Well, here I am at the annual UK HP Enterprise Technology Summit. On the Proliant and Storage front the focus is most certainly on the Blades, VM’s and Storage. Combine the three and wehay, a rather good solution…
Along with the presentation lectures I have attended a couple of labs, one on ‘High Availability Computing with Proliants’ aka VMWare running on blades in a VM clustered arragement and the other lab on the HP ‘Rapid Deployment Pack’ .
Speaking with other attendee’s a lot of them report that customer interest in virtualisation has really increased in the recent months. Maybe there is a wider shift in the acceptance of virtualising servers. All good news in my opinion. Many of their companies are putting forward Blade solutions which real ties on with what I am also seeing.
The topic of ‘Green Computing’ is also making its presence felt especially with the Chip Manufacturer, Intel, who are the Platinum sponsor for the event. This is good to see though I still don’t really see any clear direction within the industry that ties in all the different manufacturers of hardware to a common defined goal. Still I suspect that it’s a matter of time before the marketing departments hop on the ‘clean and green/save the planet’ bandwagon once they realise that this is a massively untapped and potentially financially lucrative idea that businesses are slowly buying into.
Someone at one of the lectures raised a really good idea of having IT equipment with a power efficiency rating – rather like those that are found on washing machines, fridges and the like (eg: A Rating, B Rating, etc). Admittedly this would take a bit of working out as some hardware would consume different amounts of power depending on average utilisation and how loaded with extra hardware it was (eg: servers fully populated with memory and hard disks Vs one that had the bare minimum installed). Still, it’s a good concept.