What a business system should look like

One ongoing debate within the desktop support community is what makes for a successful desktop platform within an enterprise? From my perspective, there are several key features a desktop must have to make it a viable platform within a company environment:

1. Integrated capability for centralized password management, virus definitions, and security policies.
2. Centralized capability to deploy software and monitor license usage
3. System that is priced correctly to replace about every 2.5-3 years. This ensures staff have fast machines with up to date software to complete their roles.
4. Simplicity of security auditing to ensure that IT staff know where data is, when and that it is secure
5. Abundance of tools from third parties to manage the platform remotely to minimize support costs
   

Why do I rattle off this list? There was a very good article in CIO recently that hits on the topic and covers the common discussion topics well.

Ethernet Improvements

I wanted to call attention to a couple interesting projects in the ethernet space. They both have the goal of lowering the overhead that is commonly associated with using ethernet within an HPC environment.

Open-MX
GAMMA

There is a very good write up at http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7253, giving a little more background on each.

Managing in IT

A very good posting on managing technical/IT folks and the quirks that go along with the common personalities you will find in IT.

• http://www.wikihow.com/Manage-Geeks

Lustre Monitoring

I have had several Lustre deployments recently that included performance monitoring, here are the common tools folks use for monitoring their Lustre environments. As time allows I will get a HOWTO posted for each on installing and configuring them.

• collectl
• Lustre Monitoring Tool