Keeping you in the know

HP has introduced a new range of powerful desktop and notebook PCs and displays designed to meet the performance and reliability demands of business users while helping businesses increase efficiency and reduce their impact on the environment.

Among the new products being announced are:

The HP Compaq 8000f Elite Ultra Slim Desktop PC, the industry’s first Microsoft Windows® based desktop PC to be free of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from the wall to the mouse.(1)

The HP EliteBook 8440 p/w and 8540 p/w series notebooks incorporate the latest mobile technologies, are engineered to meet the tough MIL-STD 810G military-standard tests(2) for vibration, dust, humidity, altitude, and high and low temperatures, and also are BFR/PVC-free.(1)

Click here to find out more, or email ndna@dtpgroup.co.uk

Council IT managers say they are disappointed with the Government's ICT strategy because its emphasis is on cutting technology costs, not using IT to achieve organisational savings and improve services to the public.

SOCITM, the society for IT managers in the public sector, gives its views on the Government ICT Strategy in a document published on Friday. It's a formal response to the Government ICT Strategy which was published last month.

Click here to see what SOCITM had to say.

Information technology's seemingly unquenchable thirst for energy has been well established. But when you add up all of information and communication technology's energy footprint -- the increasing need for computational power, data storage and communications -- it amounts to about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, growing to 3% by 2020, according to McKinsey & Co.

At least, that's the story some of the largest IT companies are telling.

And they're backing it up with a seemingly impressive array of capabilities to make the world not just more efficient, but to make it better.

Click here to read on.

Beware of Sever overload.

As virtualization stretches deeper into the enterprise to include mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, IT executives are learning that double-digit physical-to-virtual server ratios are things of the past.

Virtualization vendors may still be touting the potential of putting 20, 50 or even 100 virtual machines (VM) on a single physical machine. But IT managers and industry experts say those ratios are dangerous in production environments and can cause performance problems or, worse, outages.

"In test and development environments, companies could put upwards of 50 virtual machines on a single physical host. But when it comes to mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, that number tends to plummet to less than 15," says Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in Boulder, Colo.

Click here to read on