John Lewis uses virtualisation to cut power bill by £2,500 a week

John Lewis uses virtualisation to cut power bill by £2,500 a week

The John Lewis Partnership is saving £2,500 a week on power by using server virtualisation at its Bracknell and London datacentres.

The retail group started its virtualisation project in 2006 to reduce the number of servers it required because it was running out of space and power at both datacentres.

But Dave Barker, technical architect in the IT department for John Lewis, told Computer Weekly the project has significantly cut power consumption.

"Although the main business driver was to win time to plan a customised new datacentre to replace our London facility, the power saving fits in nicely our green IT initiative," he said.

Virtulisation allowed the firm to keep pace with business demands for server capacity without rushing into any decisions about setting up a new datacentre.

"We have reduced the overall server count across the two datacentres from 450 to 400 while at the same...

Marks & Spencer in the clear over loss of staff data

Marks & Spencer in the clear over loss of staff data

The information commissioner has dropped an enforcement notice against Marks & Spencer after the retailer encrypted every laptop across the organisation following a major security breach.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued the enforcement notice in January after it found M&S in breach of the Data Protection Act, following the theft of an unecrypted laptop containing the personal information of 26,000 M&S employees.

The laptop, which contained details on employees' names, salary details, addresses, national insurance numbers, dates of birth and phone numbers, was stolen from a printing company.

The ICO cancelled the enforcement notice after Marks & Spencer confirmed it had completed its encryption programme in July.

Darrell Stein, IT director at M&S, told the ICO in a letter on 8 July that all 4,352 laptops in the organisation across 11 countries had been encrypted using software...

Be aware of legal risks with open source, says Eversheds

Be aware of legal risks with open source, says Eversheds

Understanding the risks and limitations of open source software and how to manage them is key for UK business, says a technology lawyer.

Simon Crossley, a partner at law firm Eversheds, said business needs to understand the implications of using open source software as well as the benefits.

Any business using open source software should manage it as carefully as proprietary software to reduce risk to the business.

Organisations should have a policy that ensures all use of open source software is recorded and that compliance with the relevant open source licence is checked.

Crossley said businesses should appoint an open source compliance officer or have a review group responsible for tracking obligations in terms of open source licences.

This approach ensures that any commercial software that is developed does not infringe the rights of any open source developers.

"Open...

Government earmarks £300m for laptops and broadband for poor households

Government earmarks £300m for laptops and broadband for poor households

The government is to spend £300m on laptops and broadband connections for poor households in England in an effort to bridge the digital divide.

Prime minister Gordon Brown told the Labour Party conference this would bring the internet to a million more families.

"We will fund over a million extra families to get online, on the way to our ambition of Britain leading the world with more of our people than any other major economy able to access the internet and broadband," he said.

The programme will work through local authorities with a pilot starting in November 2008 and a full roll-out a year from now. Families on income support or unemployment benefits will be able to apply for a "Home Access" grant to buy a package from accredited suppliers. The programme aims for universal home access by 2011.

Read the whole article...

Ofcom to let BT set own prices for fibre broadband

Ofcom to let BT set own prices for fibre broadband

BT should set its own wholesale prices for broadband in an effort to speed up investment in optical fibre networks, the telecoms watchdog said today.

CEO Ed Richards said there was enough competition from interested companies and technologies to let the broadband market discipline BT. Ofcom will also encourage network operators to share investment risk by partnering with each other.

Richards, announcing a formal consultation on the proposals, said a number of new players were keen to enter the market, but did not say who they were because of commercial confidentiality.

In January, Virgin Media announced it would roll-out a 50Mbit/s fibre network that would bring high-speed newtwork access to about 50% of UK homes by 2010.

See here for the whole article.

-Ken

Act now to build next-generation IT department

Act now to build next-generation IT department

IT outsourcing is here to stay and IT directors should not hold back from preparing for the inevitable, with changing the skills of the IT department a top priority.

Many IT departments have recognised this and remodelled the skills within to get the best out of the skills outside. This involves developing more business, commercial, contractual and people management skills alongside more strategically minded technical people. But the trend could also lead to the setting up of a new department to sit between the IT and business folk and even the creation of the next-generation CIO.

Read the whole story here.

-Ken

VMWorld: IT professionals give their verdict on Microsoft virtualisation moves

VMWorld: IT professionals give their verdict on Microsoft virtualisation moves

Microsoft's entry into the virtualisation supplier market will drive better products through increased competition, attendees at VMworld in Los Vegas said this week.

"Competition usually breeds better products, but let us hope Microsoft does not come into the market and quash VMware by giving products away for free," said one end-user.

Some attendees said they expect Microsoft to adopt "Guerilla tactics" by integrating its technology tightly into its server operating system in the guise of a value-added service.

"Giving away razor blades and selling razors is a common tactic with Microsoft," said one end-user.

"I would have expected Microsoft to have started doing virtualisation maybe a bit sooner, but everyone is doing it now," said one attendee.

Very few, however, consider Microsoft as a viable alternative to the products they are using from VMware. They say...

Fire Your Boss: The best place to cut IT organizations is generally at the top.

Fire Your Boss: The best place to cut IT organizations is generally at the top.

...In 2008 we're facing cuts in IT that are prompted by economic decline. Many of the IT shops I talk to are in denial about this. Many more, while not in denial, are making bad decisions. I think this is a good opportunity to do some housecleaning that probably should have been done years ago. If you have to cut your budget by 10 percent, where do you cut? What if you have to cut by 30 percent?

As I have written before, one of the great problems in IT management is that the big bosses typically haven't a clue what is happening, what is needed to happen, and what it all should cost. There is a role for trust here, but if the Big Guy is signing off on a budget he can't even read, much less understand, well something is wrong. Some IT departments like this, of course, just like my students liked it when class had to be cancelled (they liked getting LESS for their money), but...

Microsoft downplays BitLocker password leakage

Microsoft downplays BitLocker password leakage

Microsoft is downplaying the severity of a password leakage issue in BitLocker, the full disk encryption feature built into Windows Vista, insisting that a real world attack scenario is “very unlikely.”

According to an advisory from iViZ, the password checking routine of Microsoft Bitlocker fails to sanitize the BIOS keyboard buffer after reading passwords, resulting in plain text password leakage to unprivileged local users.

Read the whole story here.

-Ken

Google Chrome vulnerable to carpet-bombing flaw

Google Chrome vulnerable to carpet-bombing flaw

Google’s shiny new Web browser is vulnerable to a carpet-bombing vulnerability that could expose Windows users to malicious hacker attacks.

Just hours after the release of Google Chrome, researcher Aviv Raff discovered that he could combine two vulnerabilities — a flaw in Apple Safari (WebKit) and a Java bug discussed at this year’s Black Hat conference — to trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser.

Raff has cooked up a harmless demo of the attack in action, showing how a Google Chrome users can be lured into downloading and launching a JAR (Java Archive) file that gets executed without warning.

Read the whole story here.

-Ken