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Earlier on this month I was fortunate enough to find myself jetting off to the spectacular city of Rome for NetApp’s annual Technical conference, Insight 2011. The aim of which is to provide NetApp employees and Partner Companies the opportunity to gain an in-depth review of new NetApp technologies and have a sneak-peak into what NetApp are planning in terms of products and developments in the near future.

Arriving at Insight I was astounded at the size of the event:

• 2000+ delegates
• 26,600 hours of Technical Learning
• 200+ breakout sessions

 

As expected, new storage hardware was discussed in detail with the new FAS2240 receiving a lot of attention.

The FAS2240 is aimed at the SME market and as such has a price to match. Perhaps the most impressive feature of this hardware is its scalability; capable of storing up to 432Tb with the ability to transform the FAS2240 into a standard disk shelf which can be incorporated without any data migration into a larger NetApp storage platform. This all fits in very nicely with the new “Start Right, Keep it Simple, Grow Smart” strategy.

 

Storage Efficiency technologies are an area that NetApp are very proud of. So much so that Dave Hitz (Founder and Vice President of NetApp worldwide) made it the topic for his breakout session and keynote speech. What was very impressive is some of the statistics that were covered:

Using FlashCache, SATA can be used instead of SAS to achieve the same performance meaning less than half the cost, power and rackspace. Oh and you get double the storage capacity!

 

 

 

Deduplication carried some very impressive figures, so far worldwide has saved NetApp customers over 5 Exabytes of data!! To put that into perspective that’s 5,000,000,000 Gb! The message with Deduplication was simple..

Just turn it on!

 

So what can we expect NetApp to bring over the next year or so?

Well, the term “infinite and immortal” has become more popular in recent months with NetApp folk, this is their vision of the future for their storage platforms. Infinitely scalable in both size and performance and immortal through hardware resiliency. Reflecting back on the breakout sessions I attended it’s clear to see that they’re on the right track.

With Data ONTAP 8.1 cluster-mode (due early 2012) linear scale-out performance can be achieved by simply adding another node which in turn adds to the overall reliability and resiliency of the storage cluster as a whole.

There is also a strong belief that ‘Big Data’ will be the cloud of 2012, with NetApp’s recent announcement of the e-Series aimed at High Performance Computing, Seismic data and full motion video data capture they may be ahead of the curve.

Gardner’s Hosted Solutions offers a tiered approach to backup and continuity services and unlike many “cloud” based backup services; our solutions are tailored to meet your needs.

Benefits include:-

1. Know exactly where you data is stored
2. Keep your business online with our tailored Business Continuity solution
3. Move away from out dated backup methods
4. Backup your data at any time day or night
5. Protect against accidentally deleted files and hardware failure
6. Option to back-up your entire server infrastructure to Gardner

Are you concerned about the vulnerability of your IT systems and the effect that a major loss of service or data could have on your business? In many cases today, IT systems are critical to the day to day operations of an organisation. Data loss can be devastating and in some cases fatal to a business, yet many still rely on out dated tape based methods and often don’t know where their data is stored. Some businesses feel that robust backup and continuity service is too expensive and an option for large companies only.

Using Gardner Systems Hosted Solutions you can be confident that your data is secure. Find out how to protect your business, contact our Hosted Solutions team on 0151 220 5552 or email hosting@gardnersystems.co.uk.

Find out more here:

http://gardnersystems.co.uk/solutions/hosting/

Like most organisations, Gardner has its’ share of footy fanatics and enthusiasts. We have had an internal league since the inception of the Premier League in 1998. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea but what is surprising is just how many of our day to day business contacts enjoy discussing football.  These days it is much easier to run a league using the online services provided by the Premier League at fantasy.premierleague.com

We’ve gone a bit further now though and got sponsorship from NetApp and Microsoft to award small prizes to winning managers in our league. Each month we will send £20 in gift vouchers to our manager of the month.

If you want to add your team to our league, just contact Paul Stringfellow (pauls@gardsys.co.uk) and he will send you the registration link.

On Wednesday 24^th August we staged our Personal and Business Security Day. Sixty delegates were able to hear from a selection of experts which included Merseyside Counter Terrorism Officers. The subjects ranged from specific threats posed by trips abroad to how those threats can turn into very significant problems for the individual and their employer.

Industry security specialists then presented on reasonable counter measures which can be adopted and where the future lies for such processes. The day was one of the best we have run and the feed-back has been excellent. Such is the response from our clients that we are strongly minded to re-run this event in an updated version early in 2012.

You may of seen us mention recently the increased amount of work we’ve been doing with the Liverpool Business Continuity Management Forum, LBCMF is one of the most effective City Council initiatives we’ve worked with here.

The forum pulls together businesses and expertise from across the region to provide help and advice on how business can build business continuance plans.

The great thing for us as an IT company, is that this puts IT into context as part of continuity plans, IT maybe important, even critical for most businesses however, it is by no means the only thing that needs to be considered. The forum outlines everything from where to setup a new office in the event of a catastrophic failure, to understanding a “grab bag” and what should be in it. Understanding the bigger picture of continuity and DR planning is key to developing an effective plan.

To now build on the great work these guys have already done, they are offering free training to Merseyside businesses to help them develop their own continuity plans. I would certainly strongly recommend you take a look at this, the information these guys can provide, could one day be critical to the survival of your business.

So here’s the offer….

FREE TRAINING FOR BUSINESSES

Liverpool Business Continuity Management Forum is offering FREE training for small/medium businesses and voluntary organisations throughout 2011.

The fledging forum has only been operating for twelve months but has already attracted over 180 members. The forum meets regularly to discuss hot topics and promote business resilience throughout the greater Liverpool area.

The training curriculum is primarily aimed towards companies who are new to the concept of business resilience, but is open to all organisations. The aim of the programme is to provide step-by-step guidance for businesses to develop their own contingency plans. The plans when written should enable companies to recover quickly from incidents ranging from small fires right up to terrorist attacks.

Experienced professionals from a diverse range of private and public sector backgrounds will lead the exciting free seminars.

An introduction to the three training events is to be held during Global Business Continuity Awareness Week on the 22nd March in Liverpool with the programme concluding in December with a prestigious awards evening. Companies who stay the course will receive trophies and certificates of professional development. If you are interested in attending the training events please contact BCM@liverpool.gov.uk for further information.

So drop them a note and see how Steve and the team at LBCMF can help your business.

One of the biggest issues people have approached us with over the last 18months has regarded their need for increased protection of their key data systems.

Enterprises are realising that these days their business is usually entirely dependent upon their critical data, when in the past IT was often just an adjunct to the business process. Given sufficient planning, the IT process can now function from pretty well anywhere and play a big part in your business continuity plan.

With this in mind, we thought it would make sense to offer a forum to share our experiences and present some of the solutions we have put in place to offer protection of critical business systems to a range of organisations.

Looking at how we have used technology from NetApp, Microsoft, Platespin (Novell) and VMware to name but a few, to help companies deliver a range of different solutions, from off site backup of data, to replicating entire infrastructures and giving them somewhere to house key staff, so they can access business systems in the event of a major failure.

So we have decided to run an event here at Gardner Systems on March 17th, to show how this mix of technologies, with  the addition of some cloud and hosted services, has offered a number of our clients a really flexibly way to ensure they protect both their critical data and importantly their business from all kinds of eventualities.

If it sounds like something you’d like to attend, then please click here and visit our events website to register.

Hope to see you there…

At the end of last year we entered into an agreement to deliver some IT presentations to members of the St Helen’s Chamber of commerce and on March 16th, we’ll be doing our first event with the Chamber on “The Future of IT”.

Here is the official release from the Chamber;

The future of IT – Gaining a competitive advantage

Throughout 2011 and probably well beyond, most companies will want to either reduce existing costs through better use of IT or will consider an entirely new IT process as long as it offers a new and promising income stream. Discover where the key industry players see major returns on IT investment taking place.

Benefits:

• Gain an insight into the way IT providers are shaping and delivering their solutions in 2011 and beyond
• Find out how key topics such as Cloud computing, Dynamic IT, Data Efficiency, Backup and recovery solutions, Unified communications and Virtualisation continue to evolve
• Give yourself a competitive edge by understanding what technologies will be relevant to your business and how IT can help you to continue to grow in challenging times

Lunch and refreshments will be provided

so expect lots of information on topics such as Office 365, Lync, NetApp, Systems Management, Automation, desktop solutions, data centre efficiency, control of data and any other hot topics that pass our way between now and then.

It’s a very exciting change for us, working closely with a Chamber like this, and congratulations to the Chamber for doing something new, if it sounds like something you think you could benefit from, visit the Chambers website by clicking here it would be great to see you there.

We’re lucky here at Gardner’s that we get to work with a whole range of interesting customers, who do a wide range of interesting things and LIPA fall right into that category.

The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts opened in 1996 to forge a new approach to performing arts training. It was co-founded by our Lead Patron Sir Paul McCartney and Mark Featherstone-Witty (LIPA’s Principal), and is housed in his old school, which underwent a multi-million pound renovation to transform it into a state-of-the-art performing arts higher education institution.

As high profile customers go for Gardner, we certainly don’t have one with a more famous patron!

So what’s that got to do with the title of this piece?…well to be fair nothing!…

However we started talking to LIPA mid 2010 regarding a resilience project for their production IT systems, they where interested in our ability to deliver some offsite and hosting solutions. What we found was a couple of interesting things, which has allowed us to deliver a solution, that not only addressed what they wanted to do, but also saved money and provided functionality that they may not otherwise of been able to achieve

LIPA as any good organisation would, had started looking at the benefits of consolidating their server infrastructure and had embarked on a process of virtualisation using VMware ESXi , they had consolidated the vast majority of their physical hosts down to three ESXi servers. However as is often the case, they had reached a stage where they knew that to continue to develop this, would need some major investment, in terms of Vsphere upgrades and SAN infrastructure, to allow them to deliver high availability, mobility and greater scalability to their core IT services.

When we first discussed this project with them, we looked at two solutions which we thought could deliver much greater value than what they had already looked at, as well as providing them with an option for a highly flexible approach to business continuity and disaster recovery.

So what did we suggest;

• Hyper-V and System Centre – because of the hugely Microsoft centric nature of their infrastructure and the lack of real need for some of the very clever high end Vsphere (don’t get me wrong this is in no way a slight on VMware’s capability – we have many happy VMware customers, but increasingly Hyper-V is fulfilling the need extremely well and often at a fraction of the cost) functionality we suggested that a mixture of Hyper-v and system centre would help to deliver the flexibility and resilience they desired, while saving them a good amount of money at the same time.

 

• NetApp storage – many of you will know that we supply NetApp storage here and have worked a long time with them, but this was another great example of how NetApp provide a solution, which in our opinion is second to none, for underpinning a virtualised dynamic IT infrastructure, the mixture of flexibility provided by the NetApp unified storage model and the efficient storage technologies included, with fast efficient snapshots, deduplication, thin provisioning and excellent application integration provide a great platform for a virtual infrastructure. Importantly for LIPA NetApp also deliver a simple model for easy IP based data replication, with the ability to replicate data to multiple locations, which helps provide the platform to fulfil phase two of this project and provide continuity and DR to the business.

The mix of these two solution sets have allowed us to provide LIPA with a robust solution that delivers exactly what they need, while in the mean time for LIPA, because we’ve been able to save them money in terms of software licencing, they could invest the money differently to give them an even better solution than they had planned for.

I mentioned this to our good friend over at Microsoft Matt McSpirit (if you want to learn about Microsoft’s virtualisation and management stack, Matt is definitely your man, check him out on his BLOG here… http://blogs.technet.com/b/mattmcspirit/) and he thought it was a good story…to the point where Microsoft thought it would make an interesting case study, so if you want a bit more detail on what we did and how it benefitted LIPA and find out what their IT manager Ben Faulkner thought, then check the Microsoft case study over at Microsoft.com by clicking here

So a pretty enjoyable project all in, for a really good team of people over at LIPA, great mix of technology and a solution that is working a treat, this was a tough to beat!

If you want to know more of the techie detail, feel free to drop me a line.

The Windows 7 OS has recently celebrated it’s 1st Birthday (Happy Birthday Windows 7) and it’s growing up fast with Microsoft recently announcing the release of Service Pack 1 (sp1). The date for this SP1 public release is 22nd February 2011 although MSDN and customers with a Volume License Agreement can grab the update from 16th February 2011.

What’s to be included?

SP1 does not include any new features to the Windows 7 OS and will consist mostly of security patches and non-security fixes that have previously been made available through Windows Update.

Two features that will be included are RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory. Allowing companies to better leverage virtualisation technology with Windows Server 2008 R2.

RemoteFX

Microsoft say:

By leveraging the power of advanced codecs and virtualized graphics resources on the data center host, RemoteFX adds support for any application, including 3D, and rich media to a virtual desktop environment. In doing so, RemoteFX complements and extends the user experience enhancements of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services.

From a user perspective, things are going to look a whole lot nicer, Windows 7 Aero will be possible on thin clients. What this means from a business perspective is that the cost of client machines can be significantly reduced without having to compromise on graphical performance. Thin-clients can even do CAD design. Excellent!

For more info, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/rds-remotefx.aspx

DynamicMemory

Again, for use in Virtualised Infrastructures; Dynamic Memory is the ability to pool memory as a resource and use it where it is needed when it is needed. This ability to automatically shift RAM from one virtual machine to another whilst running increases RAM utilisation and can reduce overall equipment costs.

For more info. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff919570%28VS.85%29.aspx

Some time ago (September 2009) we made a blog post about being able to provide maintenance services for HP servers delivered by IBM. We have received a lot of interest on this topic as purchasing IBM ServicePacs for HP Servers could be cheaper than buying them from HP. This offer remains available through ourselves, the details are outlined below.

 

Service detail

The IBM ServicePac is a simple, cost-effective way to purchase a range of support services and is particularly suited to those small and medium sized organisations who want the full backing of a world-class IT services provider yet at a competitive price.

IBM ServicePac offers a fixed term and predefined scope and is available through Gardner’s. The IBM ServicePac range is wide and includes hardware maintenance services, software support services, implementation services and education.

This ServicePac is available for a selected number of HP® servers including P class blades, Proliant DL and ML servers.

 

Highlights

• Provides pre-packaged hardware maintenance services for a one time payment
• The hours of cover are 7 days a week , 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
• Gets your systems up and running fast, with over 30% of support calls currently fixed remotely
• 4 hour on site response time following problem determination
• Helps to minimise downtime and expense
• 1or 2 year contract term
• Network of UK stores with over 42,000 parts stocked

IBM delivers these services using the same systems, methods, resources and contact centre that are used for IBM products. This means that the service is delivered to the same high standard as other IBM services. This is not a subcontracted service.

ServicePac options are designed to be easy to use and order. Plan your support by making a single payment and be confident that IBM is delivering the service you need. Contracting has never been so simple. Each ServicePac is a self-contained contract and simply needs to be registered with IBM to activate service.

For full description including ServicePac Selection Guide and HP ServicePac Guide please visit:-

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/uk/index.wss/offering/its/n1629769