thinkASG's Green IT - Earthday 2009 Event was a great success.  The Presentations by thinkASG on the merits of IBM's x3650 M2, which utilize the Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) Series Processors, along with Cisco's presentation on Unified Fabric, demonstrated to our attendees the ability to run cutting edge technology solutions while simultaneously making great strides towards achieving Green objectives in their datacenter.  Key areas of the presentation revolved around the Dynamic Infrastructure : Cost Reduction: • Containing Operational Costs • Reducing Complexity • Unparalleled Productivity Gains via Virtualization and Optimization Service Improvement: • Providing High Availability across the Infrastructure • Exceeding End User Expectations (both Internal Business U...

Here's a fun one. When you install a new power6 520 with multiple partitions you might want one of them to own the internal SAS raid controller. If you planned to use Raid5 then you purchased the auxiliary cache card. Now when you add the SAS controller to the partition profile, you would think that it would take the cache card along with it since: 1) you aren't given a option to select the cache card and 2) where the heck else should it go?  Well you would be wrong. When you get the system up and running, you may notice that the drives are running in DEGRADED mode. This means that the system doesn't see the aux cache card and to protect you from a SAS controller failure, it is kindly running without using any disk controller cache. Did I mention that it probably took you a LONG time t...

Many meanings to many people.  In its humble beginnings at IBM, it allowed companies to utilize expensive mainframes by running numerous applications at the same time under a single hardware footprint.  With the introduction of IBM's AIX (Unix) Environment, we see the use of similar technology but on smaller, less costly hardware.  Pretty soon, the use of virtualization becomes status quo for those environments.  Other companies in the Unix world begin to try and follow suit (i.e., Hewlett Packard and SUN).   During all of this breakthrough technology, PC servers continue to proliferate and soon become a major issue in datacenters due to the sheer numbers and the cost to run them.   Flash forward to 1998.  A small company is founded to provide virtualization technology to the In...