Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Cool video but... - Everything that is being done at the kernel level will eventually (if not already) pass on to the hardware. Virtualization has gone to the chipsets and the chipsets will also do the following: - DPM - Fabric Motion (lot faster) - Fabric Security - Fabric Privacy So you see, all the intelligence is going into the fabric and eventually the OS and the hypervisor will not only be thinned to bare minimum but may virtually vanish as they, or should I say their critical function (OS: host applications, Hypervisor: host OS and Apps stack) gets absorbed into the hardware. But for now, this video may give you the idea of where we're eventully heading for.

CO2 emissions has been the sole cause of eliminating life in the past and it will take our life once again. On a mass scale unless we act. NOW! Following shocking revelations from the past tell us tales that we are in the eye of the storm already. Hundreds of millions of years ago, a sharp rise in CO2 led to mass extinctions. Today humans are witnessing and are responsible for that sharp rise. This is calculated with GEOCARB. Temperature variations since the past 400,000 years. These are changes in CO2 level since industrial revolution.

With the Hong Kong SAR Government seeking a reduction in energy intensity of at least 25 percent by 2030 1 , local business leaders are under increased pressure from stakeholders to employ green initiatives. At the same time, CEOs are planning to increase their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments by 25 percent over the next three years 2 as customers pay careful attention to their suppliers’ CSR profiles, including “green” initiatives. With the rising expectation that suppliers are socially responsible, and the increasing realization of the importance of energy efficiency, IBM’s comprehensive set of solutions are perfectly timed to meet market demand. “Project Big Green reflects our commitment to the environment and to delivering energy efficient solutions to help our clients tackle the escalating energy and rental costs challenge in their data centers,” said Dominic Tong, General Manager, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “With a blend of hardware, software, technology and...

Satyam Foundation’s CSR activities in Visakhapatnam began in February 2008, when initiatives to help local communities were taken up as part of Satyam’s 20-year anniversary celebrations. Today’s launch will reinforce those efforts to enable social transformation in and around the city. Initial efforts in Vizag include encouraging volunteerism and creating enabling platforms, alliances, and partnerships with the community, NGOs, government agencies, and businesses. These efforts will help identify and prioritize Satyam Foundation programs, which extensively leverage key Satyam differentiators, such as technology, innovation and leadership “Wherever Satyam has a significant presence, we lead programs that serve both the corporation and society,” said Naveen Yelloji, the chief executive officer and director of Satyam Foundation. “The incubation of the Call 104 Health Helpline and the subsequent scaling up of comprehensive health services to all residents of Andhra Pradesh are excellent ex...

You must understand hindi!

NY times carried the article: A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs. Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children. But the saleswoman’s tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte , the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer researcher and founder of the nonprofit effort. He demanded that Intel stop what he saw as efforts to undermine the group’s sales, which meant ceasing to sell the rival computer. Intel chose instead to withdraw its support from One Laptop this week. So let me get this straight, Intel sat on the board and then back stabbed the OLPC? NY times story and this is bein...

Versatilism is forcing its way into your organizations, like it or not! Even more direct of a comparison though is the tried and true VLAN. You have a hub/switch, but you need to have multiple subnets running on it. In the old days, this meant buying more devices (in those days probably hubs) and winding up with an unmanageable sprawl of network devices. You can consolidate all of those network devices into a smaller subset, but still keep the isolation of network segments by simply creating a VLAN for each network segment. One switch (or at least a subset of the original switches) while still having the same number of subnets. This sounds strikingly similar to how you can consolidate all those physical servers down virtual machines running on a handful of physical servers. So there you have it. Virtualization is nothing more than VLANs and HSRP/VRRP/GLBP, plucked right from us network admins and applied to servers. You've gotta watch those server folks... This NetIQ guy talks abou...

Starting Oct. 11, Big Blue is launching a new program—dubbed a "mainframe gauge"—for customers of its System z9 mainframes that will allow them to monitor and collect statistics on the amount of energy their mainframes' systems use in a typical day. The Armonk, N.Y., company also will begin collecting and publishing data from approximately 1,000 customers' mainframes in order to better gauge the average numbers of watts a system uses per hour and to offer a better picture of the average watts and kilowatts a computer uses in a given day or week. All of these efforts fall under IBM's "Project Big Green," which the company first announced May 11 as a $1 billion project that looks to double the computing capacity of its own data centers without increasing power consumption by 2010. One of the first steps IBM took toward this goal happened in August when the company announced plans to compact 3,900 of its own servers onto 33 virtualized System z mainframes r...

One technology that can help companies increase efficiency is virtualisation, which can play multiple roles in the datacentre. Virtualisation makes it possible, for example, to divide a single server into smaller virtual servers, or pool smaller, individual machines so they can perform as one larger system. Gartner estimates that more than 90 percent of companies using virtualisation are doing so to reduce x86 server space and costs. In fact, the company estimates that virtualisation cut the x86 server market by four percent in 2006. Power savings can be even greater when addressing storage assets. Storage resources - which IDC says are growing 50 percent per year - are among the largest consumers of energy in the datacentre, in most cases consuming 13 times more power than processors. What's more, use of storage assets is often 25 percent or less, making this environment almost as inefficient as x86 servers. I have been saying this for quite a while, so lets get started! Link

The report shows that virtualization has a strong ongoing adoption rate, largely due to companies' need to cut costs through server consolidation and establish more flexible resources. About 77% of the 320 companies surveyed either have deployed or plan to evaluate some virtualization within environments. However, it was only a matter of time before a red flag was raised about how these new logical environments are going to be secured for high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Bottom line, end users need to start thinking not only about using virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery but also, about how to protect their newly virtualized environments. "Virtualization has been swiftly adopted by end users, particularly in the server realm and largely due to the business pressures to consolidate the number of servers occupying precious real estate space," says Ralph Rodriguez, Senior Vice President for Aberdeen Group. Get the report ...

So dear CxO, are you beginnig to get my (our) drift as to why your "traditional IT manager" is resisting the change? Its because they have the backing of the traditional admins! Its time to make your move now, as virtualization is coming, like it or not! Robert Whiteley and Natalie Lambert have seen the future—and in it, traditional network security is dead. At least that is the message the two Forrester Research analysts delivered to a crowd at the Forrester Security Forum in Atlanta Sept. 6. According to them, in the next five years the Internet will be the primary connectivity method for businesses, replacing their private network infrastructure as the number of mobile workers, contractors and other third-party users continues to grow. In this new world, which Whiteley and Lambert called "Internet Everywhere," corporations will have to redefine network security and focus on data encryption, managing risk at the endpoint and having strict data access controls, the...

Solaris Containers abstracts a single Solaris OS instance into multiple containers, giving the appearance of a dedicated OS instance to each container. Solaris Containers is an excellent virtualization technology when a number of applications can run on the same OS instance. Logical Domains are used to partition the server CPU and memory, abstracting the hardware itself to multiple guest operating systems. Logical Domains can be used to support multiple OS instances on the same server, and each Solaris OS instance can also support multiple containers. With the ability to use each of these technologies independently, or in conjunction, Sun customers have a powerful set of tools for server virtualization in their datacenters. Get the PDF here.

A virtualization solution to help you overcome power and space limitations with measurable reductions in power and cooling requirements and systems footprint, along with improvements in system utilization, compute capacity, and security. * Consolidate using Solaris containers and virtualize hundreds of applications on a single system delivering savings in energy, space and cooling costs and a huge reduction in complexity. * Dramatically reduce power consumption with server consolidation and virtualization of up to 42 servers into a single Sun Fire X4600 M2 server with 8 processors and 64GB of memory.¹ * Reduce storage footprint and energy cost per terabyte, dramatically improving utilization of existing libraries with Sun Virtual storage systems. There are loads of choices and this might just be a conscientious choice to make when it comes to "Corporate Environmental Responsibility". Do please participate in my CRS/CER LinkedIn discussion. , and also check Sun's ...

Would this fit in with the CSR? It sure does make make a lot of difference. Catholic Charities' outmoded, hand-me-down tower and rack servers were difficult to manage, had almost no power redundancy and were totally power inefficient, said Eric Johnson, Catholic Charities IT project manager. Never mind the cooling, because there was none. Unless you count opening windows and using oscillating floor fans on the high setting to circulate the air. With network servers at only the largest sites but also with employees scattered at the organization's 40 locations, employees didn't have access to files stored at the Hub site. There was an urgent need to centralize IT operations and provide consistent access on a highly available system. The IT staff had no experience with a storage area network (SAN), so all data was previously stored separately on individual servers, only complicating disaster recovery measures. With the addition of a SAN, new blade servers and a uniform infr...

In a couple of days I will be traveling to Africa, again! If you could follow my trip last year on RealTravel, then this time you're in for a real treat again! I will be doing the following: Virtualization Training Workshop: Here I'll train the staff, that I hired for the international project, in Virtualization . This will be a ILT+ CBT combo class. I liked the idea when I attended an advanced ADS designing class last year, it was "self paced learning" . Obviously I will customize this training so as to put the candidates to proper test so that they can get into the workshop mode and bake (and break and then replay) a lot of virtual appliances. Green Virtual Infrastructure Evangelizing : I will be presenting a "green template" and may also be interviewed by the press there, I will discuss issues about green and environment friendly data centers. I will be traveling across the country to do that. Anyways a lot of things will be posted when I'm there, bu...

Bola Rotibi, principal analyst at Ovum, said that virtualisation was the next logical step in testing, as the technology becomes more viable. "It makes more sense economically to use virtualisation. Virtualising the test environment allows users to run what-if scenarios much more cost-effectively," she said. Kieran Head, project manager at Northcliffe Media, said the scale model running in VMware allowed the IT team to run a proof of concept project to test how to conduct a roll-out. And the roll-out is in the conventional infrastructure, I presume? See the link here.

I created this open question and do sincerely hope that most of my readers will leave their opnions and comments. Here is the link , the question closes in 7 days, so please get started! Quoting myself: CIOs and IT Managers: Are you willing to adopt virtualization now? 2000: I have been evangelizing virtualization since 2000. I still remember carrying my old Dell laptop with 128mb memory and running Oracle 8.0 on Redhat 8.0 on VMware Workstation. I have consulted about VMware and around VMware ever since. But it was then a way too new technology. My director back then was really excited about it. He really adopted it! He liked the idea that I didn't have to order another laptop just because I could do it INSIDE my laptop! 2005: I went evangelizing virtualization as it needed more visibility. I launched my blog on virtualization. I still met a lot of "traditional" arguments. Still I was also able to help adopt a lot of CTOs and CIOs, who sought my advi...

CIO India is carrying out some smart tips for CIOs and other IT managers to consider before diving straight into the sea of virtualization. Here is a rundown of the key questions to ask before embarking on an enterprisewide virtualization project. Do you have the skills to support virtualization?‏ EMA ranks the lack of "appropriate skills" as potentially the biggest barrier to successful virtualization deployments. The research firm says about three-quarters of enterprise companies that don't yet have virtualization in place believe they don't have the skills to support the technology. EMA recommends training staff before the technology is adopted, determining requirements, documenting expected changes and performing pilots of virtualization technology in small sample environments. Are you ready for the politics virtualization could introduce?‏ The second pitfall is also related to the human element. Because IT departments have existed in siloed groups for years, IT...

Chad Lorenc, information security officer at a financial services company that he asked not be named, said that IT security and compliance projects are far more complex undertakings on virtual machines than on servers that run a single operating system and a single application. "It is a very complex issue," Lorenc said. "I'm not sure you are going to find a single solution" for addressing security issues in a virtual environment. "There is no silver bullet," he added. "You have to tackle [security] from a people, process and technology standpoint." OK, agreed. Therefore a server running virtual machines faces more danger from a single exploit than a single physical server, Gerchow said. He noted that virtualization software allows developers, quality assurance groups and other corporate users to set up virtual machines with relatively little effort, and without IT oversight. Don't agree. corporate networks are not fully protected either. ...

While the market is heating up with VMware's IPO and XenSource's acquisition, Diane takes a moment to enjoy the fruits of her firm by ringing the bell. There is sure going to be a heated battle soon and times might be a lot different than they have been in the past, but no harm in taking a break and basking in the glory once in a while. Good job Diane (and the rest of the team) for providing us with a cool and innovative technology!