Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

IDF 2008 - Join us to learn more about vPro

josh.hilliker — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:21:44 GMT

If your headed to IDF (Intel Developers Forum) in San Francisco this year we will have a booth, classes and great folks to talk with about Integration, Activation & tools.

I will post out a list of Client classes in the next few days.

BIOS Settings, Updates, & Utilities - Newly tested updates & wiki-ized!

michelegartner — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:53:36 GMT

This document contains links to BIOS updates and available utilities to some of the OEMs out there. Take a look - this is helpful stuff if you are getting a vPro deployment off the ground!

BIOS Settings for Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) Devices

Using HP or SCCM? User doc links now posted

michelegartner — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:40:18 GMT

New additions to the User Docs include:

Microsoft SCCM - Quick Start Guide and Migration Utility Download

HP Out of Bound Management - Solution Brief and Registration Link

Enjoy!
Michele

Challenges in remote management in the Intel training rooms

Dave McCray — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:42:49 GMT

Our very own Randy Nystrom discusses the challenges of managing remote PC in the Intel IT training rooms. With Intel® vPro^TM^ technology he can remotely power on PCs, install OS or application software, and debug any PC problems, regardless of the state of the PC! Watch as he explains the challenges he faces in effectively managing the devices in the 77 training centers around the world. Randy's training rooms have been an outstanding test bed for the Intel vPro implementation since he faces many of the same issues as the larger environment but in a controlled environment.

What Technology Concerns Are Small & Medium Businesses Thinking About Today?

edtownse — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:50:17 GMT

If there’s one constant in small and medium business, it is this: change. (SMB) Having to deal with the various pressures of a changing or growing business. From the cost of doing business (gas, electricity, etc…) to finding (and keeping) customers. All while trying to keep their technology infrastructure running efficiently and reliably.

I have the opportunity to talk to a lot of small businesses about technology, and two topics keep coming up: 1)How do I maintain the infrastructure I already have in place, while also staying current with any new tools for a my industry, and 2)How can my business make a difference when it comes to the ‘Green” movement? These are two key issues that do not have one correct answer.

The basics of technology for many small businesses is three things: capable PCs that will run your business apps without delay, the right software tools for your industry or job function, and a network to improve communications and share resources across the company.

While simple on the surface, just keeping all of these pieces up and running from a maintenance point of view can take more time than you expect. Because of this, are seeing more and more small businesses turning to their IT service providers to keep their technology infrastructure up and running, and by deploying PCs that are easier to manage remotely (example: PCs with Intel vPro technology). These hardware, software, and services resellers are know as ‘managed service providers’ or MSPs. There are many advantages for a SMB to use a managed service provider. First, MSPs have expertise in PCs management, networks administration, and software implementation - expertise often found only in businesses with established IT groups. Some businesses can’t afford to hire full time IT, or even if they do have an IT staff, they don’t want them spending their time on maintence – they want them building solutions the bring more capabilities to the business. You may want to talk with a local MSP in your area to see how they can help you. You can find a MSPs in your area by going to https://intelmsp.goirctools.com/IntelMSPLocator/Search.aspx

The other technology issue that small and medium businesses are trying to understand is how can they make a contribution to the ‘Green’ IT movement – especially when their plates are already full with day to day business. Most larger corporations are already introducing initiatives within their company: expanded recycling, increased telecommuting opportunites, and lower power consumption. When I talk with small businesses about what they are doing around “Green IT”, I hear over and over again is reducing power consumption, and for obvious reasons: it not only helps our environment, but it also lowers the cost of doing business.
You maybe wondering how do I reduce power consumption if my business is growing? . One approach that many businesses don’t consider is this: focus on what you can do during non-business hours (6pm to 6am). For example, if you have PCs (Desktops or Mobile) that are not turned off on Friday night and run the entire weekend - well, there are 2+ days of wasted power with no business benefit. If you look at a small business environment where there are more than several desktops, notebooks, and servers (which often consumer even more power), the energy saved by having all machines shut off for the weekend can make a real difference in energy costs.

How do you get started? I recommend you start by looking look at which PCs and servers are still on when you are leaving the office this Friday. This will give you a good idea of the initial impact your company could provide by reducing your power consumption. In addition, if you are already using a manage service provider (MSP) to manage your network, ask them if they have a power savings plan that you could implement.
So while there may not be one single answer to more effective technology management, or for making your business more green, there are a few relatively simple steps you can take today that won’t disrupt your business but that will allow you to spend more time doing what you should be doing, and doing it with less impact on your environment - not to mention bottom line.

All My Communities

Heath Buckmaster — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:07:59 GMT

There are so many social/networking/professional tools out there, but they all have a common purpose (or should), and that is to create a community.

Professional tools target professional communities - many of them based on the knowledge of a technology, software, product suite, etc. That might be an ERP community, professional group affiliation, or one based on a programming language like C#.

Networking tools create a wider set of communities - perhaps based on common interests like group affiliations (Camping/Hiking Clubs, Religious Clubs, Fan Clubs, etc.). They focus less on a professional grouping and more on overall populations, but still with the intent of connecting people.

Social tools tend to focus on interactions that, in my opinion, are a bit more coffee shop, telephone, local park. In other words, they are less about connecting people and more about chatting on day to day stuff. They don't necessarily focus on people who might want to coordinate a camping trip or ask technical questions, but they offer an online watercooler for socialization and gossip and play.

Each tool has a user base, with some overlap, but they tend to tailor their offerings based on the type of user they really want to visit. Take a look at MySpace*, for example - you can completely customize your profile with music, videos, flash animations, colours, whatever. You can't do that on something like LinkedIN* because that's not primarily what it's about.

When I'm at work, I focus on the Professional or Networking tools - places I can go to ask questions about a technology problem I'm having, or to find someone who not only likes the Sci-Fi Network* show Eureka but wants to chat about geek gadgets for the digital home.

When I'm at home, I think less about work and so I shift my focus to Networking and Social tools. I'm more inclined to look for people who want to chat about the latest episode of American Idol, or perhaps go read the latest deliciously sarcastic blog from TV icon Bobby Rivers.

I'm part of any number of communities that are dynamically created based on my hobbies, interests, and likes. It's exponential the number of communities I'm a part of on any given day, but I thought it might be interesting to figure out just how many.

So here's what I consider to be 10% of the communities that I am a part of:

First, I will boil it down to the lowest common denominator and eliminate things like: human being, on planet Earth, inhabitant of the Milky Way Galaxy, and anything that would be consistent with every other person on the planet.

So what does that leave... US Citizen, NC Native but CA resident who lives in the Sacramento area, employee of a high tech company, team manager, user of an overloaded laptop. Alumni of a college that gave me a BSBA in Information Systems, formerly a member of a professional organization at said college, alumni of my high school and the marching band, child actor (used to be in a lot of plays when younger). Camper, book reader (sci-fi, horror, comedy, adventure), bike rider, gardener, writer of books, lover of reference materials/trivia, bicentennial quarter collector, RPG game player, movie watcher (sci-fi, action, comedy, thriller), music listener (ambient, jazz, soft pop, 80's), caretaker for three cats. Sushi eater, coffee drinker, non-American sports car driver, and lover of diet Pepsi* vanilla.

Now that I write all that out, I don't even think that's 10% of the communities I'm a part of. I can think of a hundred other aspects of my personality/life that would lend themselves to larger communities...so how is this at all useful?

The example that I'm prone to use when asked about the value of Social Networking/Communities is this... I want to find people of any gender and any race, working at the same place I do, who like to eat sushi for lunch, who are fans of Stephen King novels, have some experience in wiki's and online document repositories, and have a background in organization development. And then I want to schedule a lunch with those folks so we can discuss putting together an internal website on org development BKMs, and after we're done talk about the latest novel from our favourite horror writer, all the while enjoying unagi and maguro.

That, to me, is the power and usefulness of the community. Where do you find value?

* Company and/or product names are copyrights and trademarks of their respective companies.

Relevance of Architecture: Part 3 - How Architecture Can Help

BobStoddard — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:45:29 GMT

Manageability & Automation - It is all about planning!!!

How can Architecture help:

The primary role of architecture is to provide an orchestrated plan to meet short term and long term Manageability & Automation (M&A) objectives. Architecture is all about technical planning and can enable reduced operational costs and agility if done correctly. I strongly believe that architecture can help accelerate the rate of change and provide real value for "M" and for "A".

Some specific Architecture-enabling activities include:

Service Definition - Define the core Services and what are in/out Scope. Example below.

Taxonomy - Define the next level of Services details. Example below.

Establish a high-level Strategy and Conceptual Architecture (5-10 year vision). Example below.

Define a strategy with a set of guiding principles / policies to enable the M&A. These may include:
- Vendor strategy (single / multiple sourcing)
- Integration "Frameworks and/or Point Solutions" (or combo) strategy
- Operation model strategy (centralized / distributed)
- Data strategy

Define a 3-year horizon "capabilities" roadmap with the first year committed (partnership of Architecture, Operations and Engineering) and the last two years a best guess based on realistic funding, estimated vendor product delivery schedules, business trends, emerging / disruptive technologies, etc. Use this roadmap to communicate and synchronize with vendor roadmaps, driving your requirements into their products.

Establish governance to insure compliance to guiding principles and capability roadmaps.

Define specific detailed architecture (reference, service and solution) to connect the dots. Depending on the detail, they may include: logical diagrams, ports, protocols, product names, configuration standards, naming conventions, etc.

Be vocal when it comes to new concepts/technologies and push back it they do not make sense or pull if they do. In our enterprise, some worthy examples include: SOA, OS/Apps streaming, virtualization, IAMT.

We have seen architecture help. Two years ago, we started assembling an architecture plan (definition of the business, conceptual architecture and a capabilities roadmap). We focused resources and funding (consistent with the roadmap) on improving the "M" (Manageability) first. We have been very successful in key areas like compliance auditing, patching, basic autonomic responses to exceeded thresholds, etc. for servers and clients. We will focus the next couple of years on: increased "A" (Automated responses) and prevention for core platforms, integrating data (for business health reporting and enabling Automation), extending capabilities (like more event sources from storage and data center facility), extending remote management (IAMT), developing Capacity & Performance Mgt to a new level of sophistication and actively enabling automation to meet the operational business needs. The key is to have an agreed to vision and deliverables with some meat around governance to make it happen. This is more like a marathon, not a sprint.

I hope this was thought provoking.

Regards,

Bob

For context, Introduction of the "Relevance of Manageability & Automation Architecture" topic.

Supporting content is at:

Relevance of Architecture: Part 1 - Observations
Relevance of Architecture: Part 2 - Current Situation

Demo of SCCM R2 w/App-V from Microsoft World Partner Conference

Jason A. Davidson — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:54:34 GMT

The 2008 Microsoft World Partner Conference (WPC) was hosted in Houston, TX on July7-10, 2008, with global participation. The WPC provides an online and in-person forum to learn more about business growth opportunities and product innovation from Microsoft executives.

This year the ECMF team participated at the event and provide a showcase that incorporated the manageability of Intel vPro in a real world scenario that utilized application virtualization and steaming. For the showcase the team used SCCM SP1 R2 beta as an enterprise management console with Microsoft's App-V (Soft grid 4.5 beta) to stream and manage applications to the vPro clients.

This provides the ability to:

Dynamically deliver application on the world's most manageable clients
Enable greater business agility with an enhanced end-user experience
Achieve IT "Green Computing" and reduced TCO objectives via fine-grained update controls.

After the event, I sat down with Craig Pierce to record the demonstration. I think it is a very compelling 4 minutes of video. In the demo he shows both the server console and the client experience, and launches 2 versions of Microsoft Word (2007 & 2003), which share drivers and normally wouldn't be able to run on the same machine. This concept can be extended to many other applications.

Application Virtualization and streaming allows you to no longer go through the entire install process, but simply stream and execute the applications you need when you need them - and the licenses for these applications can then be reclaimed when your not using them. This should become a defacto standard over time, as it works well in all compute models (from the rich client models to thin clients).

Questions? Comments? Funny remarks?

-Jason A. Davidson
p.s. Thank you to Chris Kaneshiro, Sophia Stalliviere, Nicole Trent, and Gunitika Dandona for your help in filming & editing this video.

Expanding the use of MicroTCA outside telco

nforrester_emerson — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:13:24 GMT

One of the subjects I’m most interested in is how MicroTCA and AMC modules are evolving to open up opportunities in lower cost spaces such as the enterprise and industrial markets.

As many people know, the AMC specifications were driven out of the need for hot swappable mezzanines for ATCA blades. The MicroTCA specification was kicked off based on the belief that by plugging the AMCs into a backplane wrapped by a smaller enclosure that the AMC market would be greatly expanded. One of the more contentious issues in the specification discussion was about potential cost targets. At the time, it must have been difficult to imagine how new integrated devices such as the Intel Atom processor would drive system level pricing down when combined with lower cost packaging and other optimizations. Now, a couple of years after the MicroTCA specification was ratified, I am often amazed by some of the applications for which potential customers are thinking of using MicroTCA systems. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, as I started my own career by using open standards-based boards for embedded applications, but that’s another story.

Back to the subject, one question I’ve been asked is whether it is possible to remove some of the built-in AMC features such as hot swap, in order to save cost. Most of these questions come from people who have legacy hardware and who believe that hot swap particularly is not of any use to them. I suppose a typical application might be in industrial automation where the system is controlling and/or monitoring a process. Typically, to carry out maintenance the controller is switched off, as well as the equipment or production line, so there is no need for hot swap and therefore it appears irrelevant.

As industrial automation becomes more complex, I have seen installations that are complex to shut down and take a long time. Having the ability to add an additional module on the fly, even if only for troubleshooting, can be extremely beneficial.

I have also started to see a few instances where one MicroTCA box is used for more than a single function. For example, the ability to add an additional Intel-based processor for monitoring or server functionality without requiring all the existing modules to be powered off is extremely useful. The idea of upgrading these embedded systems while live seems to be gaining a bit of momentum, especially now that other techniques such as virtualization have started to break the mental barrier that one module does a single task in one box.

If anyone has similar views on how they envisage hot swapping to be used I would be interested to hear.

Intel SMS/SCS to SCCM Migration Utility production version released

miroyer — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:11:26 GMT

As referenced in the Overview of SMS/Intel SCS migration to SCCM SP1 blog post, Intel has developed a utility to easy the migration of vPro Client that have been activated on SMS/SCS to SCCM SP1.

The Production version of the Intel SCS to SCCM Migration Utility has been released and will be available for downloaded from the following location shortly: http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/3898.htm

A User Guide on how to use the migration utility has been included in the download.

--Matt Royer