Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Apr 30, 2010 @ 05:13 AM
IBM Power Systems Capacity on Demand is one of the best ways to provide your enterprise with a capacity for limitless growth without the downtime involved in constant downtime for upgrades and for moving applications. Even with VM technologies, you’re going to find some limitations as to how fast a system can grow in response to demand.
Capacity on Demand for IBM Power Systems allows you to activate dormant resources without having to bring a system or an application down. It lets you do this on a permanent or a temporary basis, and it does it fast.
Depending on the availability of capital resources and your specific configuration needs, there are a number of implementation strategies for Capacity on Demand that you can consider:
1. On/Off Capacity on Demand. This is a temporary way to address short-term capacity needs. It provides you with a limited amount of memory and processor activation to be used during peak times. Whether your business experiences seasonal increases in demand, has special needs at the end of the quarter or other priods or whether you expect increased need during a promotional period, On/Off may be right for you. With On/Off CoD, you get an enablement code that will let your system operator make requests for increased memory or processor capacity. There are pre-pay options for On/Off CoD as well as post-pay options.
2. Permanent Capacity Upgrade on Demand. Under this configuration, you have a more permanent solution to your capacity needs. You bring memory and processors online in a dynamic fashion without having to interrupt systems, applications or partitions. As your workload increases and as your processor needs increase, you simply place an order to activate additional features. There is no hardware shipping to wait for or install. You simply retrieve an encrypted code that will unlock the capacity that you need.
3. Utility Capacity on Demand. If you have short workload spikes and you need an automated way to make sure that your servers perform, Utility CoD may be right for you. It gives you automated use of processors from the shared pool. Your usage is measured in terms of processor minutes, rather than in increased processing power or increased memory.
4. Trial Capacity on Demand. Sometimes, you aren’t entirely certain if you need extra processor capacity or not. In this kind of situation, you can implement additional processor cores or memory for a trial period to see if the additional capacity meets your needs in the way you think it will. You can turn on additional cores or memory for a certain number of activations, giving you a measurable period in which to compare. From there, you can make a purchase of permanent processor activations as needed.
5. Trial Active Memory Expansion. On POWER7 servers, Active Memory Expansion lets you go beyond the limits of the physical memory on your server. This means that a server that was previously constrained by memory can now do more work. Trial Active Memory Expansion operates by utilizing CPU resources to compress and decompress the partition’s data. You can activate this solution for 60 days at no cost to evaluate how the expansion works for you.
Data Center Optimization
The economic realities of the data center’s drain on the bottom line are hitting home in all market corners. IT managers know that optimizing existing data center space is the best way to lower capital and operating costs; reduce carbon footprint; and at the same time, boost business continuity and efficiency. Click here to read more.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Apr 28, 2010 @ 06:02 AM
IT departments today are faced with increasing service level expectations all while being held to higher cost saving objectives. What this means for the IT department is that it’s time for a new way of thinking about infrastructure. It’s time to move away from addressing your organization’s daily operational challenges, and move toward a strategy that enables you to deliver more services at a lower cost and with better-managed risk.
Here are some general principles you need to start considering if you want to meet tomorrow’s IT infrastructure needs:
1. A dynamic infrastructure improves service, reduces your costs and keeps risk to a minimum. Accordingly, you want to use a high-availability solution to your infrastructure needs. IBM Power Systems can be at the core of providing the kind of dynamic infrastructure you need.
2. Visibility, control and automation are essential to infrastructure utilization. This means that you need to have technology solutions that can measure performance and then be adjusted accordingly. Ideally, you will use a solution like PowerVM that can let you make changes to allocation on an automated basis.
3. Virtualization and energy efficiency provide significant cost savings. Whether you’re talking about implementing an internal cloud environment or whether you’re simply talking about server consolidation, your organization can save significantly on its ongoing expenses just by dumping old or unnecessary hardware. The savings in power, cooling technology and even staff help you meet increased demand at a lower cost.
4. Data growth makes management a challenge. These challenges are best met with infrastructure initiatives. An optimized infrastructure is scalable, secure and protected, keeping each type of data where it needs to be and in a container big enough to fit it.
5. Infrastructure choices should match your business needs. Here is where you often need the expertise of an IBM support provider. They can work with you to look at different delivery options, such as cloud computing, and address issues like scalability or rapid provisioning.
6. Infrastructure management is risk management. Accordingly, your risk management solutions need to be designed to meet the needs of your organization, its various business units and even individual workloads. Technologies like ZIBM Clientscan can help to proactively manage security concerns throughout the enterprise and maintain resilience in spite of multiple threats.
7. Infrastructure decisions are business decisions. Your infrastructure enables the communication and commerce of your organization. It connects your internal resources, as well as vendors, clients and even competitors. Being able to leverage infrastructure to meet business goals is key to not only providing necessary service levels, but to being able to justify necessary infrastructure costs.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Apr 26, 2010 @ 08:31 AM
Virtualization isn’t just a hot trend. Virtualization is at the center of solid IT strategies across many industries and around the globe. Virtualization lets you take all of the workloads across the enterprise and put them onto fewer systems. This, in turn, reduces your capital costs and increases your server efficiency and utilization.
In the world of virtualization, IBM PowerVM is one of the top contenders. If you want to put the power of virtualization to work in your organization, you should be looking at this cutting-edge technology.
Here are 3 ways that IBM’s PowerVM will benefit your business:
1. Utilization
Increased utilization of resources. PowerVM lets you make the most of your data center resources. Not only does PowerVM maximize your utilization, it also does it in such a way that is more effective and efficient than other VM technologies. With virtualization machines from other vendors, each physical core has its own queue. This means that each processor has to do its own work, and that requests are sent into queues based on workload. If one core finishes its queue, you may still have other processes waiting in other queues.
PowerVM utilizes just a single queue. When a core opens up, the request that's at the front of the line goes to the next available processor. In this way, IBM PowerVM makes the most of your hardware and reduces the possibility that you'll have physical cores sitting idle while requests go unanswered in a different queue.
PowerVM also works with the physical hardware in a Power System to make the most of memory usage. Two IBM technologies, Active Memory Sharing and Active Memory Expansion, help with this. Active Memory Sharing works in a manner similar to the core queue system in power VM. Active Memory Expansion utilizes memory compression and decompression methods to make it seem like physical memory is larger than it is within a given memory partition.
2. Availability
One of the concerns many enterprises have when implementing a VM technology is availability. PowerVM increases the number of workloads on a server, which raises the concern that a process could, potentially, be disrupted. Not only that, when a server goes down there is the potential that more workloads and more users will be affected.
The good news here is that powerVM and IBM Power Systems have a number of features aimed at keeping availability at a maximum. PowerVM provides redundancy through a number of technologies, including shared I/O and multiple VIOS partitions. This eliminates single points of failure in your I/O subsystem, meaning that hardware upgrades, repairs and reconfigurations don't need a planned outage. You can move an application rather than stopping it.
3. Flexibility
PowerVM can handle servers on a broad range of platforms, from Linux to UNIX to Windows. Of course, it supports the full range of IBM servers, including the new POWER7 systems. The competition uses specific VMs for specific server lines. That means that if you reconfigure your data center by getting rid of smaller servers and moving to larger servers, you need to reconfigure your partitions. With PowerVM, you don't have that kind of limitation.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Apr 14, 2010 @ 05:56 AM
If you’ve been in project administration for any amount of time, you know that the sheer administrative tasks surrounding your job can, at times, be overwhelming. If you’re not on top of your game, your projects can fail, and fail miserably. If they do, your company is going to lose valuable resources, both in time and money, and you’re likely to be out of a job.
Fortunately, you’ve got what it takes to be a successful project administrator. You just need a little bit of encouragement and advice along the way. Here are 5 project administration tips that will help you keep your laser focus and make sure your projects come out on top.
1. A project’s implementation methods can’t be separated from the project’s nature. In other words, the type of project you’re administering will strongly influence how exactly you manage it. Take, for example, a project that utilizes commercial licensing. The way you govern your project will be heavily influenced by external factors, including things like corporate strategy, the structure of the organization, the organization’s financial priorities and even existing, established procedures.
2. Finances are key. Money makes the world go ‘round, and it's also what makes your projects get approved in the first place. Know from the start what costs are allowable and which aren't, know what to do if there's an overexpenditure, understand any cost sharing requirements and keep on top of fiscal management.
3. Stay in compliance. Yes, compliance is more important in some industries than others. However, issues like conflicts of interest or auditing requirements are just as important as, for example, things like OSHA. Follow your organizations policies and the laws governing your industry to an exacting specification. Compliance isn't just about covering your hid or protecting the company, in many cases it's about safety, saving money and serious liability.
4. Remember the human factor. Ultimately, whether a project fails or succeeds has a lot to do with the people involved. Keep on top of the HR area. If there are personality conflicts on a project team, do what you can to minimize them or to at least manage the fallout. While vendors can become territorial, even personnel from different departments within your organization may decide that they need to jockey for position or credit. Keeping people in line is at least as important as keeping to a schedule and a budget.
5. Vendor management. One of the most important aspects of your job, and the reason you're doing the job instead of someone else, is because you have skills at managing vendors. You need to be able to work with vendors to contain costs, to keep schedules and to keep in compliance with your project requirements. Vendor management is easy when you've got a good vendor, but can be a nightmare when a vendor falls through or lets you down. Knowing when to drop a vendor is nearly as important as being able to select the vendor in the first place.
Unitiv's Project Services include:
- Temporary staffing and implementing specific solutions
- Integration, testing, staging of equipment and installation of software before delivery, or onsite before you deploy the asset (this includes software configuration)
- Upgrades to your data center systems
- Proof-of-concept support for new technology or platforms
- Program and project management services
- Specialized staffing
Click here for more details.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Apr 12, 2010 @ 05:43 AM
A business rises and falls on its data storage. Ready access to business critical information is the backbone of a business in today’s information dependent world. Having the right storage server for your business is essential if you’re going to increase productivity, have reliable performance and do it all without breaking your IT budget.
The good news is that there are several options for business storage servers. From hosted services to locally attached storage, a business can pick and choose the types of solutions that best fit its business, its processes and its needs.
Hosted Storage Server Options
One of the most common models used by businesses today is a hosted storage server option. When you use this kind of solution, the service provider hosts the relevant hardware and software on their premises. They manage data backup, and they handle everything from operating system upgrades to redundancy to throughput.
The obvious advantage to a hosted solution is that you don’t have to put much up front in the way of capital expenditures. You don’t need to pay for storage servers or for network infrastructure. You don’t need to hire a storage manager or pay for training for one of your existing server admins or engineers. In addition, with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) you can often wind up with increased uptime and reliability over an in-house solution.
Network Attached Storage Server Options (NAS)
Another business storage server option is Network Attached Storage. With this model, your company purchases specific devices that plug into your network. These devices are, essentially, storage devices that can be accessed and utilized by many servers.
The advantage to a NAS model is that you can adjust your storage capacity and manage your storage resources much better than with traditional servers or hard drives. If your Exchange server runs out of space, you simply allocate more space on the NAS device, for example.
Storage Area Network Server Options (SAN)
A Storage Area Network is a network separate from your data network that’s devoted solely to storage. The SAN provides space to servers, and it also provides storage to users. A SAN is especially useful in that it has certain built-in redundancies that aren’t always present in some other types of business storage server options.
One downside to this model is that it requires a good bit of additional infrastructure to support. In addition to network equipment, you need a SAN administrator to monitor performance, make changes and adjustments and to optimize the overall use of the network resources.
Disk Attached Storage Server Options (DAS)
This is the oldest model of storage solutions. This model includes the use of dedicated storage servers, each of which has its own hard disks and is limited to its own hardware. This type of solution is not just out of vogue, it’s really obsolete for most businesses. The risks involved in such a configuration are significant, both in terms of performance and in terms of disaster recovery.
