What You Need To Know

• The Road Goes on Forever and the Reboot Never Ends....

  Wed. May. 14, 2008
  by David Graves, Editor—Inside IT

  We've seen reports by Lee at Technibble here and at Hexus.net here about "endless reboots" on systems with Windows XP SP3 and AMD processors. I've seen some coverage out there that says "OEMs are at fault." Wait just a minute. Let's not be so hasty with such a broad brush of blame.

  This is not an AMD or Microsoft issue. It's an issue of matching the correct software image with the correct hardware. I talked to our software engineers and it seems the real culprit is a driver called intelppm.sys. By the name, you can probably tell that this is an Intel driver...and it causes issues with AMD-based systems.

  From my discussions with the engineers, I also wanted to set the record straight that Dell systems shipped out of the factory are NOT affected. Quite frankly, this is not a new issue and we've disabled this driver for AMD systems to prevent it.

  If OEMs are shipping this Intel driver enabled on AMD machines - anyone else picking up this story, please leave Dell off the list.

  If you do experience this issue, Microsoft has a support page that will walk you through a resolution.

   

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• TechCenter Chat on Tuesday: Managing the switch to OpenManage

  Mon. May. 12, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  Our lovely and talented TechCenter Supergeeks will be around for an online discussion tomorrow (Tuesday) to help customers migrating from other server management tools to OpenManage.

  In a few weeks we are going to have a chat on iSCSI networking.  Stay tuned.

  -marc 

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• Shine on U crazy diamond!

  Thu. May. 08, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  DevCentral has an great post about the development of HA over the years. And he's a rocker too, which led me to a completely unrelated site that I liked.

  (this post was first made on my Storage @ Work blog)
   

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• TechCenter Chat Today: Migrating from Insight to OpenManage

  Tue. May. 06, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

   Svengali says do it. 

  TechCenter chats are staffed by strong tech folks who know what the heck they are talking about.  Even if you have an off-topic question this week, they are hard to stump. 

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• Dell's secret system management revealed

  Mon. May. 05, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  I received a comment from Customer X Factor on one of last weeks' posts:  

  Problem with Dell Managment tools is that,

   a) nobody knows how to us them or find them

   b) sales people inside dell dont push them, as they want you to buy 3rd party stuff that they can sell you.

  The first part of that is actually addressable, although it is a bit of a secret that shouldn't be.  Dell's TechCenter has a lot of great information and technical chats -where they have access to lab equipment and can check stuff out - more or less in real time - or close to it.  Read this chat transcript from last Tuesday's chat if you want to get an idea of how it works.

  Tomorrow's chat is on how to migrate management routines from HP's Insight Manager to Dell's OpenManage tools. 3:00 Central time. 

  Then there's other stuff (technical papers/wikis) that describe stuff to make your lives' easier like the one on applying bios updates to Windows systems using Microsoft's SCCM.

  As for the 2nd criticism - that our sales people don't push them.  I'm curious - what do they push?   Have others experienced our inside sales people prioritizing third party products over our own?  Just curious......

   

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• Online demos of stuff you need

  Wed. Apr. 30, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  Posted earlier today on Storage @ Work

  There's a few excellent live online events in the next couple days you might want to check out.

  April 30 (Today) 12:30 PM Eastern: De-dupe for Dell EqualLogic iSCSI arrays - featuring Exagrid's new iSCSI De-dupe gateway product.

  April 30 (Today) 1:00 PM Eastern: VMware's Site Recovery Manager and Dell EqualLogic storage. I know a lot of people are going to be interested in this one - integrating intelligence into the recovery side of VMware DR!

  May 1st 3:00 PM Eastern: Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array live demonstration

  May 2nd 10:00 AM Central European Time: In German: Live Dell EqualLogic PS Series array product demonstration

  May 2nd 1:00 PM Eastern: VI3 (VMware Infrastructure 3) and Dell EqualLogic demonstration. Our online events calendar

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• How much can you turn off?

  Fri. Apr. 25, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger
  Technorati Tags: ken brill,uptime institute,greenbiz,Blades,Dell,Energy conservation,Green benchmarks,Green technology,HP,Hardware,IBM,Open Source Systems (OSS),Power consumption,Power supplies,Sustainable IT

  GreenBiz radio has an interview with Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute.  Its a bit long, but all the text is there so you can speed read through it if you want.

  One of the more interesting things that Brill claims is that lots of energy can be conserved by turning off equipment that isn't being used.  Here's a quote from the interview transcript:

  KB: Well, the institute believes that IT could radically reduce its energy consumption, and it would save money in the process. And there are a number of things that people can do and we're gonna be talking about these at our upcoming symposium. But the first thing that people can do is to go through their data center and identify what is running that could just be turned off. Between 10 and 30 percent of the energy consumption in a typical data center is for servers and storage and other things that is no longer in use.  And it could just be turned -- I mean, as literally, as simple as turning the switch.

  Ken has some interesting things to say about blade servers too. Just like any other technology, there are important differences in blade server designs.

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• An udder tasty bit from LoneSysadmin

  Thu. Apr. 24, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

   

  OK IT peoples, u should b c n Plankers good stuff, (this time on 2 vCPU VMs)

  He putin freshies in ur blogsphere every few daze I spose.   

  -fargo farlee

   

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• Visit the Server Room and Give Blood

  Fri. Apr. 18, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  This post also appears here on the Storage@Work blog. 

  The Server Room has to be one of the best forums I've seen.  So if Dell EqualLogic people go there, lets make sure we don't trash it. Put the Name Dell in your sign on to avoid being poachers and don't pimp our stuff.  It's fine to talk about experiences and what we know and all that, but its a tech forum not a drop box for hype - perbole.

  And the rest of you too.  Do your thing and back up your blood type. Somebody might need it for the ultimate restore. 

  Format: flv Duration: 02:45

  Downloads WMV  MP4  OGG

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• Ars Technica's Server Room forum is loaded with great stuff

  Wed. Apr. 16, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  Dell has sponsored a forum on the Ars Technica site called The Server Room.  This is how it's described on the forum header:  This forum is dedicated to the "bigger picture" topics--high-level systems that don't easily fit in the other forums. Before you can build a server room, there must be understanding of the requirements and technologies. This forum, then, is for the architects, the designers, and the decision makers for IT systems.

  There are a lot of smart people weighing in there on some interesting threads, such as  Interesting Uses of Virtualization. For example, two scenarios discussed in that thread involve using a VM to circumvent corporate security implementations and using a VM as a surrogate when your laptop goes into the shop.

  I recommend this forum to any readers who want to compare notes with talented and smart IT professionals. Of course, if you need help from experts at Dell, don't hesitate to visit the forum on the Dell TechCenter.
  

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