News for December 15

TheRegister: Hitachi Data Systems SSD flashes into view

by Chris Mellor

Hitachi Data Systems' customers can now buy flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) for the high-end USP V and VM storage arrays. HDS will also support the coming Hitachi GST SSDs, built by Hitachi GST and Intel.

This leaves IBM's DS8000 as the last enterprise drive array with no flash drive option, as both HP and Sun resell the Hitachi USP product as their high-end drive array. An IBM source hinted that Big Blue could do this earlier in the year. Neither HP not Sun has actually said that they will take USP arrays with the flash option.

HDS is following in the footsteps of EMC which made Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD) available for Symmetrix many months ago. Clariion support was added fairly recently. However, HDS is not adding flash SSD support to its mid-range modular AMS arrays.

The flash drives will be used to satisfy I/O requests from I/O-intensive applications which need low-latency responses from the storage array, responses far faster than 15K rpm Fibre Channel drives can satisfy.

HDS' Storage Command management SW supports flash in this "tier zero" role and HDS says storage administrators can work with a flash-enabled USP as per normal, but with this extra very fast tier of storage to play with.

It is thought that HDS is using STEC's SSD product, STEC being EMC's supplier, although HDS has not confirmed this. The HGST/Intel drives could replace the STEC products when they become available. No prices were revealed.

InfoWorld: The 7 deadly sins of IT management

by Dan Tynan

Odds are, you've committed some venal sins at work – if not mortal ones. Whether it's falling prey to gadget lust, hoarding information, avoiding necessary but onerous chores, coveting thy neighbor's budget, venting anger all over your staff, or letting ego get in the way of the job, we're all guilty of something.

Not surprisingly, most of our transgressions find their foundation in the classics: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride. With apologies to Dante Alighieri, here are the seven deadliest sins IT managers can commit.

(The identities of the sinners have been obscured to protect the guilty. Read and learn from their wicked ways.)

Read. Repent. Repeat. Then go forth and rectify.

IT sin No. 1: Lust for new technology
There are many kinds of lust in the IT universe – lust for power, for position, even (gulp) the physical kind. But believe it or not, the most damaging unbridled desire in the IT workplace might just be gadget lust.

The most common expression of lust in IT is the endless pursuit of new technology for the sole purpose of having new technology, notes James J. DeLuccia, author of IT Compliance and Controls.

TechRepublic: Virtualization outside the data center: The client hypervisor

by Scott Lowe

If you haven't implemented some kind of virtualization in your data center by this point, you're in the minority. Data center virtualization has become a common way to achieve higher levels of hardware utilization and consolidate servers onto less hardware. Organizations have jumped all over this technology as a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In the data center, hypervisor-based virtualization technology is used to achieve these aims. In these cases, the hypervisor exists to enable disparate operating systems to run on the same hardware. Although some commonality between servers is a good thing, in the data center, the goal is to run workloads necessary to enable the business. This could mean that a mail server running Linux runs on the same hardware as a database server running Windows.

Virtualization in the data center is definitely a good thing for the reasons that I just mentioned. However, from a technical and efficiency perspective, a client hypervisor would be a huge boon, but for different reasons. One of the major challenges in the realm of desktop management lies in image management. For every new batch of computers, a new image is necessary, along with the hope that everything will work just right. Of course, there are other tools out there that can help handle this dilemma, but a client-based hypervisor would be the ultimate solution. A client-based hypervisor would allow an organization to support a single desktop image, regardless of how many desktops or desktop models exist in the organization. As is the case with the server hypervisor, a client hypervisor would abstract the system hardware from the equation, making driver issues a thing of the past as it relates to image management.