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Dear CIO/IT managers,
This
CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in
Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs
easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or
recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo.
Old
issues
are available here.
Topics in this issue:
Cisco's
ground breaking Unified Computing System
architecture
Cisco has
launched a new ground breaking products called "Unified
Computing System (UCS)" which could save 20% on capital
expenses and 30% on operating costs of a datacenter (source).
Basically, it contains a blade chassis with up to 8 blades with
built-in management software and virtualization support. However,
what's more interesting is that (source
1 and source
2):
- Instead of
having Ethernet ports and SAN ports, they are merged
together to run on Ethernet using a protocol called Fiber Channel over
Ethernet
(FCoE). This allows you to run the Fiber Channel protocol to access
your SAN over GbE. This reduces the number and
complexity of
cabling.
- Instead of
having
individual cables connecting to the core switches, a blade chassis has
internal switching and only has one super high speed (10Gb) uplink
(actually, two, for redundancy) to the core switches. Again, this
simplifies cabling.
- Three
times more RAM are installed into the Intel CPU than officially
supported. This allows more virtual machines to be run on a blade and
thus reduces the number of blades, power and cooling.
What's the catch? I think
the primary issue is
vendor lock-in. Because FCoE
is still under development, for the moment, Cisco is making the blades
itself and only those blades can be fitted into a UCS chassis. However,
I believe what is the most important here is not the specific Cisco
products being launched, but the architecture that is being pioneered.
After all, I won't be surprised if server vendors such as HP, Dell or
IBM come out with similar products with the same architecture with
added interoperability.
Intermediate
ITIL v3 training now available
Our ITIL
v3 Operational Support and Analysis Capability Course
is now open for enrollments. If you have studied ITIL Foundation and
would like to gain a deeper understand on how to apply ITIL to IT
operations, this is a good opportunity. Attending the same course in
Hong Kong will cost on average
HKD18,000 but we're offering it at
MOP15,500.
Your staff can
also attend the upcoming ITIL
Foundation workshop to get an overview on ITIL.
A
promising web-based project collaboration platform
When working on projects
with team
members from different
organizations, it is difficult to collaborate with team members: One
needs to email files to others to review/modify. Very soon there will
be multiple versions of the same file kept by different people and
people may start making changes to an outdated version by mistakes.
Fortunately, with online services such as Central Desktop,
the problem should go away as all team members can access the same
workspace and collaborate on the same text documents,
spreadsheets and tasks. Even though I haven't really used it,
it
has a free version for small teams, so you can try it without any cost.
Adopting
open source software in economic downturn
When cash is king, open
source should look more attractive to businesses. As an
indication, the
revenue of Red Hat in the 4th quarter 2008 has
jumped
by 17.5%.
Upcoming courses
for CIO/IT managers
Feedbacks
Any
questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at
28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also
have two other newsletters: Network
administrator newsletter and Software
developer newsletter, your staff may like to subscribe.
Until
next time,
Kent
Tong
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