Entries tagged with datacenter - TechNet Edge

Service Manager 2010: Operations Manager Integration and Service Maps

Dave Morehouse — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:01:00 GMT

System Center Service Manager, scheduled to ship in 2010, is a flexible IT automation platform that provides built-in workflows based on industry best practices for incident and problem resolution, change control, and asset lifecycle management. It can help provide better service management by:

Reducing the cost and improving the responsiveness of customer service requests by combining knowledge, self-service, and the ability to automate requests on the Service Manager Self-Service portal.
Optimizing processes and ensuring their use through templates that effectively guide IT analysts through best practices for change and incident management.
Providing the foundation for informed and cost-effective decision-making to better align IT systems and services to the ever-changing needs of the business.
Reducing resolution times by cutting across organizational silos, ensuring that the right information from incident, problem, change, release, or asset records is accessible through a single pane.
Delivering flexible process workflows and templates that IT pros can adapt to their organization’s requirements.
Extending the value the Microsoft platform delivers by automating the processes and activities among System Center products.

In This Video
In this presentation w/ UI demo created by Marc Umeno, senior program manager on the Service Manager team, you'll find out how System Center Service Manager can import service maps from System Center Operations Manager and extend them to include relevant business information, user information, and service information. Service maps in System Center Service Manager allow IT to better understand how issues affect services, perform root cause analysis faster, and quickly identify the right course for remediation.

See the System Center Web site for more information on Service Manager.

Mike Manos on Data Centers

Adam Bomb — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Every time I talk with Mike, I come away with a new appreciation for what it means to manage a big data center. I used to think a 20,000 machine installation was big, but Mike can add that many servers in a month. Mike's been busy on the conference circuit lately talking about green datacenters, and he's been vocal about the recent move Microsoft made to container-based data centers. In our Chicago facility, a truck drives up and drops off a 40' shipping container, preloaded with 2000 servers. The container is plugged in to Ethernet, power, and cooling and is ready to power on and go. Mike has a nice animated tour of the facility that he shows around the 10 minute mark. He also talks about the challenges of measuring efficiency in the data center and deciding when is the right time to virtualize workloads. You can keep up with Mike's adventures in data center on his blog.

CommNet: the portable datacenter

Adam Bomb — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:47:00 GMT

The communications network at conferences has become so ubiquitous that I've never really stopped to think about what goes in to putting it in place. Chris Craig is running CommNet here at MMS, and he was kind enough to take us deep into the bowels of the Venetian to show us the racks that provide the infrastructure and tell us a little about what it takes to put together the infrastructure for a show like this. These guys come in the weekend before a show, set up the the network for hundreds of machines used in a show for labs, evals, etc., make sure everything is running and tested, all in just a couple of days. Right after the show, they pull it all down and send it off to the next show's venue.

Chris gives us a breakdown of what it takes to build, and shares some war stories about running the network.

Robots in the Data Center?

Adam Bomb — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:01:00 GMT

We were really excited when the Robotics Research team approached us to debut their latest piece of technology. We've seen robots used extensively in manufacturing and other industries, but this is the first time we've seen general purpose robotics put to use in IT.
David got the full scoop and product demo directly from the research team.
Truly revolutionary work. Can't wait to see one in every datacenter.
(hopefully, you've realized that this video is a joke. April Fools!)

Doing IT Green

Adam Bomb — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:10:00 GMT

IT Forum in Barcelona included a panel of industry representatives sharing their thoughts on 'going green' in the datacenter. I managed to catch up with a couple of these guys, Nigel Bridgeman of HP and Michael Manos from Microsoft to ask them about the panel and what their respective companies are doing to make data centers more environmentally sustainable.
This is a topic I've really started to become passionate about, and I'm curious to hear what you think - would more features on Green Computing be interesting to you? What are you doing to make your own computing more environmentally friendly?