NEC's new high-end server

 NEC's new high-end server contains swappable battery packs, intended to provide backup power without the need for an external uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in data centers.

The new rack-mounted server is part of NEC's main "Express5800" line. The company said the internal batteries will cut power use, outlast traditional UPS systems and allow for more compact data centers.

"The Express5800/R320c is a dual-socket fault tolerant server developed with Intel’s latest Xeon processors. The R320c provides exceptional high availability, affordability, and operational simplicity through its fully redundant modular hardware design featuring high-performance processors. These fault tolerant servers are ideal for customers who require to eliminate planned and unplanned downtime for the most important applications." NEC site

About Data security

 "Data security practices that disrupt workflow place an undue burden on users and administrators. The best data security tools work in the background-transparently-and provide automated, non-disruptive protection of assets and seamless authentication of network users. Similarly, administrative tools should provide consistent support for corporate data security policies and minimize the need for manual oversight or time-consuming, hands-on procedures."

Startup Weekend Tripoli

Hyper-V on Windows 8

Have you ever needed an extra machine to have an old version of windows or a different operating system? .. most of us had , especially if it is risky to try some software on your labtop/PC.

Vmware workstation and Virtual PC is commonly used among IT engineers for training and testing purpose by engineers and students in our community. Microsoft Hyper-V worth to try.

Microsoft Hyper-V server 2012 is a hypervisor based server virtualization product, it can be used directly on the server, or on top of Windows server. with windows 8, Hyper-V is enabled to work on the client machines, not only the windows server, to give us, users, the ability to create VMs as need and install other version of windows, linux or any other x86 OS, it runs more than one machine, with 32-bit and/or 64-bit OS at the same time


*What is a hypervisor?
In computing, a hypervisor or virtual machine manager (VMM) is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines.
A computer on which a hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines is a host machine. Each of those virtual machines is called a guest machine. The hypervisor presents to the guest operating systems a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources.

News Mix 1-10-2012

September 27, 2012

WD (Western Digital )  had released another 4TB enterprise hard drive, the Ultrastar 7K4000 made by its Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) unit, in April.  WD today expanded its enterprise-class storage offerings with the release of new WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives that offer capacities of up to 4 TB, said to be the highest available capacity today.

The RE drives are available in 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB capacities for nearline SAS (serial-attached SCSI) and 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB for drives based on the lower-performance SATA (serial ATA) specification.

 

October 1, 2012

Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced the new ElitePad 900 tablet with Windows 8, and said the device can be easily disassembled to replace components in order to save hardware and support costs.

 

The tablet, targeted at businesses, has a 10.1-inch diagonal display and runs on Intel's Atom Z2760 dual-core processor (Clover Trail), which has a clock speed of 1.8GHz. The tablet weighs about 680 grams and is 9.2-millimeters thick. The Gorilla Glass screen can display images at a 1280 by 800 resolution

News Mix 27-9-2012

September 13, 2012

Anticipating greater usage of Ubuntu within the enterprise, Canonical has released a significant update to its Landscape Ubuntu system management tool.The new version of the software, Landscape 12.09, is designed to better manage systemwide software updates. It offers more compliance reporting. This version also exposes its API (application programming interface) so it can be connected with other system management tools, such as Puppet. Also, the for first time, the software allows administrators to install Ubuntu over a network, in a process called bare-metal provisioning.

September 24, 2012

In an effort to expand programmer awareness, Oracle has released a free version of its Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF).

"This [release] allows the ADF framework to be used outside of the Oracle stack," said Bill Pataky, vice president of product management in the Oracle Fusion team. The package, called Oracle ADF Essentials, promises to be "a really powerful way to create rich Web applications very quickly," Pataky said.

September 25, 2012

Hitachi has developed a glass-based data storage medium that is highly heat and water resistant, capable of holding data for hundreds of millions of years, and says it may be able to bring it to market by 2015.

The company's main research lab has developed a way to etch digital patterns into robust quartz glass with a laser at a data density that is better than compact discs, then read it using an optical microscope. The data is etched at four different layers in the glass using different focal points of the laser.

September 25, 2012

Many signs suggest that Oracle is about to introduce a next-generation version of the Exadata database machine, the first and apparently most successful of its "engineered systems" that combine Oracle software with servers, networking, and storage.

September 25, 2012 

Microsoft has extended mainstream support for Windows Server 2008 by 18 months, and again reminded customers that the still-strong Windows XP will retire in April 2014.

News Mix

September 18, 2012

Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it has started mass production of a new type of memory chip for mobile devices, LPDDR3, that will dramatically increase performance in future smartphones and tablets.

September 19, 2012

Dell rolled out its new lineup of business-focused Windows 8 computers Wednesday, announcing that it would add two portable Latitude devices and a desktop OptiPlex to its offerings once the new Microsoft operating system is released.
While the announcement provided few technical details, Dell did say that the OptiPlex 9010 is a 23-inch all-in-one desktop, and highlighted its incorporation of touchscreen technology and flexible form factor as its chief selling points. The announcement comes less than 10 days after rival HP announced a set of four new all-in-ones designed for use with Windows 8.

September 20, 2012

Normally, malware is an Internet phenomenon. But a recent Microsoft study reveals even new PCs and electronic gear may carry infection

September 20, 2012

Hewlett-Packard on Thursday announced new Pavilion Sleekbooks, which the company is pitching as laptops that are cheaper than ultrabooks but competitive in weight and thickness.

Tough rack installations

It was not easy to install that rail kit in that rack, the best solution is to turn off everything and take them all out to be able to use the screw driver to tight its screws. But that will kill the customer who would kill me  ^_^ It was tough 

From Experience: Sun StorageTek 6140 , CAM can not find it

CAM stands for Common Array Manager , it's the software provided by Sun "Now Oracle Sun" to manage and monitor StorageTek storage systems. one of the very important thing CAM provide , the ability to collect "support data" , it's what we need when trying to troubleshoot a warning or critical alarm in the storage system.


Once; When tried to register the storage on the CAM to be able to read the alarms, the CAM could never find it, even new versions, Always when stuck with CAM , try the CLI ( command line interface) , it may be able to find the storage and read its alarms. Save the time of trying to troubleshoot why CAM can not register the array and connect through CLI to find out what's wrong.

In the case I worked on today, The solution at the end was satisfying , I enjoyed turning off  more than 30 power switches and enjoyed the silence before switching them on , and It's solved and I could see it on CAM, and collect support data.

Note: when powering off a storagetek ,  the Controller tray is the first to switch off and the last to switch on

The Disaster Recovery Plan - Part 4

IT Disaster Recovery Planning Process

Developing a technical disaster recovery strategy is just one step in the overall IT Disaster Recovery Planning process. This process is common to all IT systems and utilizes the following six steps:

1. Develop the Business Contingency Planning Policy and Business Process Priorities
2. Conduct a Risk Assessment
3. Conduct the Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
4. Develop Business Continuity and Recovery Strategies
5. Develop Business Continuity Plans
6. Conduct awareness, testing, and training of the DRP
7. Conduct Disaster Recovery Plan maintenance and exercise

The objective is to design a technical recovery strategy in step 4. Since this step is being accomplished before a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) can be performed in step 3, the recovery strategy is developed into a standard suite of service offerings that can be activated after the BIA has been completed. A BIA can take months to complete and some organizations do not have the budget for this. However, management should understand the potential return on investment for conducting a BIA.

The goal of the BIA is to define objectives for the recovery of host computing systems that run the applications that support the business processes. These objectives are stated as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO is the number of hours or days management has put on resuming a business process or a system. RPO describes the age of the data you want the ability to restore to in event of a disaster. For example, if the RPO is 8 hours, systems should be restored in the state they were in no longer than 8 hours ago. The technical disaster recovery strategy depends upon meeting RTO and RPO specifications. The RTO and RPO requirements determine which option of disaster recovery plan to implement.

Recovery time, and how current data is are key components in determining the level of service a business process requires in the event of a major disruption. To properly implement a disaster recovery plan, one must know the RTO and RPO that the organization is willing to accept in case of a disaster. The technical disaster recovery strategy of different options of recovery is based upon a combination of these requirements.

Often times, in regards to business continuity, business and IT units are not on the same page. "As companies become more dependent on information, the business-continuity tolerance for information loss becomes less and less, particularly in e-business," says Don DeMarco, Director, IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services. Although recovery management (maintaining an ITbased contingency plan and IT recovery plan) is an element of the systems management discipline, DeMarco says, "The decision as to the acceptable amount of risk for information loss must come from upper management."

For example, IBM uses RTO and RPO to classify the two objectives management must consider in business continuity. RTO is used by management to determine the amount of time needed to set up IT capabilities in order to resume critical business processes. RPO is something that management tends to forget. During an outage when business processes cannot be performed, how much data can the organization afford to lose and how current must data being recovered be? A manager of a bank cannot afford to loose six hours worth of data. Management must decide what are the acceptable levels of risk.

source:// SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room

The Disaster Recovery Plan - Part 3

Disaster Recovery Plan

In its full context, the focus of a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is to restore the operability of systems that support mission-critical and critical business processes. The objective is for the organization to return to normal operations as soon as possible. Since many mission-critical and critical business processes depend on a technology infrastructure consisting of applications, data, and IT hardware, the DRP should be an IT focused plan. Every organization should develop a Disaster Recovery Plan for all applications. Restoration of systems does not necessarily imply technology redundancy. The DRP may call for some procedures to be completed manually. The decision to revert to manual procedures, rather than to build and maintain an IT infrastructure is a cost-driven decision made by the organization. Having a DRP in place reduces the risk that the length of time that a disruption in a business process does not go beyond what has been determined to be acceptable by management in the organization. During the recovery phase, the focus is on establishing controls over occurring events to limit the risk of any additional loses.

source:// SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room

The Disaster Recovery Plan - Part 2

Disaster Recovery Process

A disaster is defined as a sudden, unplanned catastrophic event that renders the organizations ability to perform mission-critical and critical processes, including the ability to do normal production processing of systems that support critical business processes. A disaster could be the result of significant damage to a portion of the operations, a total loss of a facility, or the inability of the employees to access that facility.

The disaster recovery process consists of defining rules, processes, and disciplines to ensure that the critical business processes will continue to function if there is a failure of one or more of the information processing or

telecommunications resources upon which their operations depends. The following are key elements to a disaster recovery plan:

• Establish a planning group
• Perform risk assessment and audits
• Establish priorities for applications and networks
• Develop recovery strategies
• Prepare inventory and documentation of the plan
• Develop verification criteria and procedures
• Implement the plan

Key people from each business unit should be members of the team and included in all disaster recovery planning activities. The disaster recovery planning group needs to understand the business processes, technology, networks, and systems in order to create a DRP. A risk and business impact analysis should be prepared by the disaster recovery planning group that includes at least the top ten potential disasters. After analysing the potential risks, priority levels should be assigned to each business process and application/ system. It is important to keep inventory up-to-date and have a complete list of equipment, locations, vendors, and points of contact.

The goal is to provide viable, effective, and economical recovery across all technology domains. The following can be used to classify organization applications and/or systems:

(Mission Critical) :

• Mission Critical to accomplishing the mission of the organization
• Can be performed only by computers
• No alternative manual processing capability exists
• Must be restored within 36 hours

(Critical) :

• Critical in accomplishing the work of the organization
• Primarily performed by computers
• Can be performed manually for a limited time period
• Must be restored starting at 36 hours and within 5 days(Essential) :

(Essential) :

• Essential in completing the work of the organization
• Performed by computers
• Can be performed manually for an extended time period
• Can be restored as early as 5 days, however it can take longer(Non-Critical) :

(Non-Critical) :

• Non-Critical to accomplishing the mission of the organization
• Can be delayed until damaged site is restored and/or a new computer
• system is purchased
• Can be performed manually

The disaster recovery process will identify the risks and exposures to mitigate their consequences to a level acceptable to senior management. These risks and exposures will assist in identifying the level of recovery required. Requirements will determine which recovery strategy option is needed to support those

requirements.

source:// SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room

The Disaster Recovery Plan - Part 1

Relationship to the Business Continuity Plan

The Business Continuity Plan may be written for a specific business process or may address all mission-critical business processes. The BCP is an umbrella plan whose major sub-components include the Disaster Recovery Plan.

Information systems are considered in the BCP only in terms of their support of those business processes. A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) consists of the following component plans:

· Business Resumption Plan

· Occupant Emergency Plan

· Incident Management Plan

· Continuity of Operations Plan

· Disaster Recovery Plan

The Business Resumption Plan, Occupant Emergency Plan, and Continuity of Operations Plan do not deal with the Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure. The Incident Management Plan (IMP), which does deal with the IT infrastructure, establishes structure and procedures to address cyber attacks against an organization’s IT systems and generally does not involve activation of the Disaster Recovery Plan.


source:// SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room

Architects

are defined by their experience in integrating multiple systems

Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation "SPECjvm2008"

SPECjvm2008 is a benchmark suite, containing several real life applications and some benchmarks focusing on core java functionality. The main purpose of SPECjvm2008 is to measure the performance of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). It also measures the performance of the operating system and hardware in the context of executing the JRE. It focuses on the performance of the JRE executing a single application; it reflects the performance of the hardware processor and memory subsystem, but has low dependence on file I/O and includes no network I/O cross machines. The SPECjvm2008 workload mimics a variety of common general purpose application computations. These characteristics reflect the intent that this benchmark will be applicable to measuring basic Java performance on a wide variety of both client and server systems running Java. SPEC also finds user experience of Java important and the suite therefore includes startup benchmarks and has a required run category called base, which has to be run without any tuning of the JVM to improve the out of the box performance.

Did you know?

that Oracle Solaris 11 is a fully virtualized cloud operating system and has a new availability features to reduce planned downtime by up to 50%.

Clever

A friendly way to tell your website visitor, that your website is down for maintenance :)

IT Jobs announced in february

Rida Technical Services Ltd ( Service Engineer ) 

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Global Information Technology ( IT Engineer )

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Four Points by Sheraton Tripoli (10 Jobs Vacancies)

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Linux Server Administrator at Libyan Spider, LLC,

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Sales & Marketing Director at Libyan Spider, LLC

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VSAT Installer at Supreme Ideas ICT (Benghazi)

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Helpdesk support Eng at alshamel (Misrata)

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Web Developers & Designers at Castille Energy

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IT Test Engineer at Castille Energy

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Head of IT Delivery at hrhouse

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Data Warehousing Analyst at hrhouse

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Operations Manager at Castille Energy

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IT support Engineer at GS1 Libya

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Web designer - Salary between 2000-5000

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Data Base programming at LTT

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Experienced Account Managers needed at International IT Company

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IT Administrator at Osoul Libya

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Linux Server Administrator at Libyan Spider

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Project Manager at Kenexa

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IT Service Desk / Helpdesk Support Technician at Alshamel for ICT

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Sales Person at ZTS

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Master Control Room (MCR) Operator at Alassema Television

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Web Designer at ARD computer & technology

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Web Designer + Programer at Sakora ltd

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Joomla Expert Needed at Taimurian Web Development Studio

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Senior Mobile Programmer at Synergy Soft

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IT Instructor \\ Trainer at ARKAN IT Solutions, Consultancy & Training

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Web Designer at United Nations in Libya

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IT Helpdesk Technician at Alshamel for ICT

***

Sr. Oracle Developer at NISCO LTD (near Ras Lanouf)

Fiber Channel speed, Brocade races ahead of Cisco by doubling the speed

To whom needs a background:

In datacenters, data files and databases are stored in "Storage" ,in other words, a box of disks, with different technologies and topologies which are available in the market. Like SAN and NAS storages, these storages can link to your computer (server) through a SCSI , SATA or fiber connection. 

The speed of the ports on the storage box , and FC (Fiberchannel) on the server, will affect how fast your data moves from the storage box to the server and vice versa. This also affect other things like connectivity with remote sites, backups, and so on.

A year ago, speeds are 2,4,8 Gbps, 2Gbps is almost obsolete, and the most used and purchased in the local market has been the 4 Gbps, the 8Gbps has been an expensive luxury that we don't need.

Brocade is a network solution company, which is not well known in the local market, its presence is almost zero in the Libyan market, Now Brocade beats Cisco with it's 16 Gbps FC, double the speed.

This will not affect Cisco presence in Libya in the mean time, by the time we start needing the 16Gbps, Cisco would have its products with that level. unless Brocade fights to have a presence.

custom-made Server Solutions, Is it a need in the Libyan Market?

I've been browsing here and there and ran into the ZT company, it's an american company that provides custom made servers, Like the way we collect parts into a working desktop.

Most of the times I've been to a customer datacenter, the server is not fully utilized, especially the virtualization concept has just began to have an existence in our datacenters, I can't blame the engineer or presale who chose the model and specifications, because I've been in their shoes before, when building a BOM (Bill of Material) I find myself stuck between two models, RAM levels, or different number of PCI slots...etc. First choice is below minimum requirement, and the second is away above required. 

SO, I tend to the custom server idea, BUT the Libyan market is not ready for such an idea, we look for the brands we're familiar with, and the rule of purchasing is "I won't be the first one to try it"

A wisdom

Budgets are like toilet paper, the more you have the more you use. The less you have, the more creative you become!

A free IT Help desk Ticketing software

Spiceworks is a free network management tool, and as per all the reviews I've read, it works for a company network that contains any number of servers, desktops, printers, and various networking devices.

All the engineers who've used it in their environment or a customer's, they encourage to try it, If you're looking for one, maybe you should.

Cisco with the new MIMO, increasing performance Access Point

Cisco Systems developed its latest enterprise access point with corporate bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies in mind, aiming to give tablets and smartphones as well as traditional workplace devices strong and consistent performance.

Cisco Aironet 3600 Series Access Point Data Sheet

5 hot specialties for software developers, as per Neil McAllister

1. Cross-platform mobile developer
2. Mainframe/cloud integration specialist
3. Cloud migration engineer
4. RIA  (rich Internet applications) portability specialist
5. Parallel computing architect


These may be the hot specialities world wide, but in Libyan market it's not the time for it yet, some of them might be in need after five years , I think.