BBC E-mail: Fukushima - disaster or distraction?

I saw this story on the BBC News iPhone App and thought you should see it.

** Fukushima - disaster or distraction? **
As Japan's nuclear station slowly regains power, experts ask what is the worst that can now happen.
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12789749 >

** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/email >

** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified.

Best Regards,
Gökhan Tenekecioglu

sent via my iPhone

NYTimes: Carrot Cake Muffins

From The New York Times:

RECIPES FOR HEALTH: Carrot Cake Muffins

Unlike so many cloying carrot cakes, these muffins are just slightly sweet.

http://nyti.ms/ieMPmi

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

A ‘Thin Replica’ Solution for SAP

In most organizations, one of the biggest hurdle is to able to create the test instances. This is usually a big hurdle due to the hardware resource limitations. Of course the limitations are not only limited with the hardware. Technical human resources is another cost item in this need.
Just imagine, if you could take the current production or test system’s snapshot and make your tests, run your test installation or upgrade, or apply a package and test it effects on the system, or change a customization or import a transport request and analyze the results. And, when you’re done, just delete it, and apply it on the real system. And do all those test without need of extra storage, but just your delta changes.
Yes, there is solution for this need today, a ‘Thin Replica’ solution for SAP. It’s called Thin CaptureTM from Kubisys.

The Kubisys Thin Capture is a hardware appliance that allows data center personnel at sites running Microsoft Windows (and soon, Linux) to create identical thin replicas of one or more production servers on demand in only 15 minutes. Then teams can perform comprehensive, in-place enterprise testing on those replicas without impacting the production environment or requiring any additional hardware or software for testing.

In short, Thin Capture enables organizations to bring new test systems up and test the enhancements online in a shorter period of time without any additional storage and hardware requirement, which lets them save time and money.

The Thin Capture Process

The Thin capture appliance is a next generation automated virtual platform which can be used to create a set of virtual machines which mirror a set of production servers in the organization. The ‘thin’ part of ’Thin Capture’ refers to the fact that the virtual machines are created together in a very short time in the appliance, utilizing a strategy of not moving the underlying data. Instead, Thin Capture creates a data pipeline from the virtual machines in the appliance to the original servers’ storage.

In order to create a ‘thin capture’ that avoids the need for copying the data, the software creates
an instantaneous frozen image of the production servers at a point in time (while the production
servers continue to work) and yet enable treating the point-in-time image as a read-only data store. Thin Capture of the system will be based on the snapshot of the source system and the data still resides in the original location and since there is no data movement the system as a whole snaps into life within minutes.

The read-only snapshot maintained in the original storage location is accessed over the network via TCP/IP from the appliance, where a write caching layer is applied before exposed disks to the virtual machines. This effectively creates a complete, read-write, secure point in time copy of the storage associated with the production machine that the virtual machine can utilize. The IP addresses, MAC addresses and other data related to the network configuration are accurately captured and preserved in the shadow environment.
Other ‘thin’ aspects of the system are; 1) there is no software installed permanently on the physical servers which are virtualized; 2) there is very little impact on the physical servers while they are virtualized. In addition, since the ‘shadows’ are thin, many such shadow collections can be made to correspond to different points in time and can be configured differently to test multiple alternatives. The discarding process is very ‘thin’ as well and can be quickly executed leaving no residue behind on the production servers or the appliance.

Applying Thin Capture to Enterprise IT

By creating an encapsulated, identical set of virtual machines which can communicate with each
other as a point-in-time image of the enterprise, which can be modified freely without impacting the originals, and discarded at will, a wide variety of enterprise testing may be accomplished. Users can make both software and configuration changes to shadow servers inside the appliance without affecting production, examine the impact of these changes, and repeat or revert as needed.

The most comprehensive and interesting way to describe the Thin Capture appliance is to describe it as an enterprise simulator. It is a simulator which can run near identical copies of the enterprise machines without impacting the business. When running a simulation however, one encounters the problem of initializing the simulation to the correct initial conditions. The initial conditions for running a simulation of the enterprise in this case are the clones of the enterprise machines — the machines are set up in the thin capture appliance by mirroring/copying the states of the machines in the enterprise. What makes the appliance ‘thin’ is the fact that the copies are made with very little effort. Instead of moving the data across from the original system to the copy, a pipeline to the original system enables movement of data as required. This gives rise to a very efficient way of initializing the system.

Thin Capture makes it practical to apply its on-demand provisioning capability for a wide range of testing requirements including:
• Software upgrades and patches
• New vendor software
• Sandboxes
• Troubleshooting
• Audit evaluations
• Training
• Mandated compliance updates and patches
• Demonstrations
• Documentation
In summary, Kubisys Thin Capture can help IT departments minimize VM sprawl while providing time and labor efficiencies with on-demand provisioning and testbed take down.

Case Study: Thin Capture in a Virtualized Retail Environment

Kubisys is used in production as part of the IT infrastructure at a retail operation. Most servers (approximately 95%) in this environment are virtualized and run on ESX Servers, managed by VMWare Virtual Center. The infrastructure also uses a SAN from Network Appliance for storage, Symantec NetBackup for data protection and NeverFail to provide high availability for certain application servers. The environment is mostly Windows, with some Red Hat Linux, some AIX, some Solaris Sparc and AS400 running financial software.
At this customer site, practically every production server also had a test version of itself. The management of these test servers, and keeping them up to date was a major challenge. In addition, the customer was at the brink of needing to provision even more test servers, to keep pace with their ever-growing testing needs. Thin Capture completely addressed those needs and helped protect the customer from falling into the VM sprawl trap.

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Cloud based 3rd Party Solutions for SAP

SAPSA Article - Cloud based 3rd Party Solutions for SAP

Introduction

As the cloud computing is becoming a trend, in this article, I would like to give you some information regarding cloud based 3rd party solutions.

What's Cloud Computing?

I can simply explain the term "cloud based" with an example from the daily life.
All of us use electricity to run our computers, TVs, lights and other electrical peripherals in the daily life at home. And we pay just for the amount we used. And we don't pay for all lambs installed at home. We pay for just the ones which we turned on. And more over this, we don't maintain a power plant to able to consume electrical power. We use it from its cloud, and we don't know from which source does the electric comes from. If one power plant goes down, the whole cloud is not effected from this, we still continue to receive the power via other power plants. We even don't feel if power source is switched to the backup power plant.

When Edison discovered the electric, all the factories' had their own power plants. Because distribution networks were not available, and power generation was not reliable or sustainable.
Due to this fact, factories were built at the river sides to generate the power they needed from the mill, as today most companies have their own data centers.

Cloud Computing's base is similar to the above electricity example.
Cloud based solutions take their advantage from the highly available, sustainable and reliable internet services. Now, internet is more available then electric. Because it's on the air. It's even in our pockets. So the cloud based solutions are so close to you. It's just one click away from us. We can read and reply our mails, contribute to a shared document, upload documents to the shared folder in the cloud and share immediately with our teams, approve, reject or comment to the waiting workflow action items, and even we can stop and start systems via our mobile phones.
Now cloud is everywhere. Because everything started to move to the cloud. So this article will not be enough to cover all the cloud. Better we start with telling cloud based solutions for SAP.

Why Cloud based Solutions?

In addition to the  advantages which we mentioned in the above example, there are other significant advantages coming from the Cloud :

1. No need for a data center, which means,
1. no hardware cost
2. no electric bills
   
3. no maintenance cost
4. no backup worries
2. no upgrade worries
3. no development cost
4. no initial license cost (just pay as long as you use and as much as you need)

So, these advantages coming from the Cloud saves you a lot, and let's you to cut costs drastically.
Cloud Solutions and Services not only helps you to cut your costs, but let's you to concentrate your core business as well.

Cloud based 3rd Party Solutions

Yes, correct, there are cloud based 3rd party solutions for SAP. It doesn't matter where your SAP system resides. Because,
cloud doesn't care where the independent servers are hosted. They're simply somewhere in the cloud.
Cloud computing is divided in to three major areas :

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
  
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
  
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
  

Today, SAP has also joined this trend as SAP on demand, currently offering services for CRM and BI.
Below we will sort out you some cloud based 3rd party solutions and services.
To able use these solutions and services, it doesn't matter where your SAP systems reside. It can be either on site or outsourced.

Virtualization

Server Virtualization

Gartner Says Virtualization Will Be the Highest-Impact Trend in Infrastructure and Operations Market Through 2012.

SAP supports both virtualization and cloud hosting.

For Windows Servers, SAP Supports below virtualization solutions for productive usage (see SAP Note 1409608 - Virtualization on Windows) :

• VMware ESX Server 3.x and 4.0 (vSphere)
• Microsoft Hyper-V

And, SAP brings enhanced monitoring for the virtual systems for windows environment (see SAP Note 1409604 - Virtualization on Windows: Enhanced monitoring) to able capture system data on virtual systems.

For Linux enviroments, SAP Supports below virtualization solutions for productive usage (see SAP Note 1122387 - Linux: SAP Support in virtualized environments) :

• Xen hypervisor-based virtualization by Novell and Red Hat
• VMware ESX Server / vSphere
• IBM Advanced POWER Virtualization
• IBM z/VM and native LPAR on IBM System z

Although not supported, below virtualization technologies might be used for non-productive SAP sandbox systems :

• Citrix XenServer
• Virtual Iron
• Oracle VM
• SUN/innotek VirtualBox
• Microsoft Virtual PC / Virtual Server

Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization is another cost saver technology for the companies to reduce their IT maintenance costs.

Today, there are two market leaders providing solutions :

• Citrix XenDesktop
• VMWare vSphere for Desktops

Here we would like to give an example for a cost saving live case with desktop virtualization.
VMWare virtualization saving result from Whirlpool case (http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/customers/09Q3_cs_vmw_Whirlpool_english.pdf):
• Spend 75 percent less time on IT administration versus a physical infrastructure
• Expand IT infrastructure without expanding headcount
• Virtualize 90 percent of Lotus Notes environment
• Virtualize 80 percent of Siebel Intel environment
• Virtualize 85 percent of SQL environment
• $256,000 in hardware savings
• $11,000 per year in energy savings

Cloud based Hosting

If you might think that if it's something which SAP supports, we can answer "YES".

SAP updates its customers regarding cloud hosting via SAP Note "1380654 - SAP support in cloud environments".
We would like give two major players among today's cloud hosting world : Amazon Web Services ( http://aws.amazon.com) and Rackspace ( http://www.rackspacecloud.com/ )

Both companies provide very competitive and attractive solutions for their customers.

With the Cloud, tomorrow's IT is on the way to shape from being a purchase and support center, to a design, decision and configuration center.

One of the main difference between conventional data center and cloud data center can be see as in the below picture :

Cloud is one step forward after the virtualized data centers.

With the virtualized data center, OK, you decrease the costs by dividing the physical machines into virtual partitions and reducing the server installation drastically by being able to cloning them.

But, still you have a data center which means still you have hardware, and space to place to, workforce to maintain it, electric cost, license costs, hardware and license upgrade and maintenance costs.

Here is the main difference with cloud, "you order what need, and pay as long as you use it".

We can compare conventional versus cloud with having an expensive car versus calling a taxi. With the car you have a limited space, and you have the buy the space even though you don't need it always. And there are additional costs such as tax, service, fuel, parking etc. But with the taxi, you call a taxi as big as you need, and you pay as long as you use it. Then you don't care for the rest.

How can we ensure the security over the Cloud

We can share your concerns regarding the security when it comes to decide to shift forward to Cloud. Everything is fine, but what about the SECURITY.

Here we would like to tell you about solutions regarding how to secure the Cloud.

For example NordicEdge ( http://www.securethecloud.com ) provides security solutions for the communication over the cloud.

And BeyondTrust provides security solutions to secure your data center regardless if it's in-house, or managed, or hosted, or on the Cloud.

Monitoring as a Service

There are a couple monitoring solutions in the market available. These are such as IBM's Tivoli Live monitring (just released by IBM when we were editing this article), BasisTek's BasisMon, Quest's FogLight, and there are more others.

But since our article is based on Cloud based 3rd Party Solutions, we'll examine just two of them, Tivoli Live Monitoring and BasisMon.

Please keep in mind that, these monitoring solutions are not replacing SAP Solutions Manager, but just completing. SAP Solutions Manager is a combination services (Solutions Monitoring, Diagnostics, Maintenance, Service Desk, Project Management, Training, etc.) more than monitoring.

Basismon, is a cloud based monitoring service. Typically to a cloud based service, it doesn't have a license cost. Pricing is based on your landscape's (total size of SAP systems' databases in the landscape) database size.
It doesn't require any plug-in or a software on your SAP server. It only requires a read-only RFC user. It comes with a 32bit linux compilation pre-installed appliance box. Also a virtual machine is available. Connection, tests, and training in total takes not more than 3 days, and ready to use.
The functionality and reports it brings are incredible nice. It captures all your performance, as well your SAP landscape's inventory, which let's you run comparisons between selected dates. It has a web based monitoring interface, which also enables to create tickets in your own ticketing system with an optional integration.

In the Tivoli Live Monitoring, you have all the similar service as BasisMon, but there is a need of an agent for each platform.