I recently attended the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference (BPLC), where our sales director, Gareth Pritchard, and I received on behalf of Centiq the fantastic honour of a Beacon Award 2012.

IBM devotes a big part of the BPLC programme to recognize and reward innovation and development by its thousands of worldwide partners.  Only 27 gain the coveted Beacon Award.  To our delight, Centiq received one of them: the Outstanding Optimised Workload Solutions category.

Glyn Heath, Founder of Centiq Ltd, speaks to IT Advisor.

The benefits of IT monitoring and the early warning of system issues.

monitoring, managing and mitigating risk

With SAPs release of the High Performance Analytic Appliance, SAP HANA, I wanted to know...

How fast is SAP HANA?

I've been asked this question quite a lot lately, and to be honest I've been a bit stumped, other than a  gut feeling that monitoring from the OS as well as the VMware layer is a good idea, I had little else to offer the argument. So I figured I should take a more serious look at the monitoring available within VMware vCenter and come up with a more compelling argument. Perhaps the more seasoned VMware admins out their could comment to offer their thoughts on the topic?

vCenter for VMware provides an excellent selection of performance graphs enabling you to track the CPU, memory, network and I/O consumption for each VM as well as the ESX host itself. You can also set "alarms" that trigger e-mail notifications. So why would I ever need an additional agent based OS monitoring package? What more could you possibly need? Do the OS metrics become less important in a VM world?

In September 2009 IBM announced the availability of SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator on the BladeCenter S. Now, just over 18 months later, IBM no longer approve this solution for new systems. However, all systems already in the field are still supported.

The BladeCenter S solution bought BWA functionality to users at a much lower price point than the BladeCenter H solution. Although it suffered from limited redundancy and scalability the BladeCenter S did prove a popular choice with Centiq customers. To plug the gap left by this mini BladeCenter IBM submitted the System X x3850 X5 server to SAP for qualification. The system has been tested and approved for use with BWA. So, if you are looking for a small BWA solution at a low price point, then maybe you should be considering the IBM System X x3850 X5.

One of the greatest challenges to realising the benefits of tiered storage is the ability of an organisation to classify data within the application bounderies to make tiering effective. What an organisation generally leans towards is tiered applications. E.g. all oracle on Tier 1, file services on Tier 3. This approach has a finite scope in terms of storage purchases as it is defined by the number of applications installed not by the varying value of the data within those applications.

Moving inactive data or "Data Tiering" requires IT to have a far greater insight to business process and the confidence to challenge the "we need to keep everything forever" syndrome (also known as "Compulsive Hoarding Disorder" ). The benefit of this question however is that sometimes data can be identified for complete removal, and storing less is the ultimate cost containment exercise. (Not to mention the benefits in business recovery planning that can be attained).