Virtualization technologies represent an enormous growth area in the enterprise data center. Yet existing management tools are inadequate to manage the new virtualized environment. Businesses are extremely hesitant to fully migrate to virtualized environments without comprehensive and real-time visibility into the entire infrastructure (servers, network, storage and end-user devices), as they absolutely need to maintain the same application performance and availability in a virtualized…

Many of you probably heard about Stuxnet, the malware that infected monitoring and control system PLCs in the Iranian nuclear program. The Stuxnet worm was able to damage centrifuges used to purify uranium at a highly secure facility in Iran. The result of the infection and infrastructure damage was that the Iranian’s quest for nuclear weapons suffered a serious setback.

The idea that a computer worm could cause damage to physical infrastructure was almost completely unprecedented. The…

The process of modeling financial options for IT service delivery is evolving as service delivery components become more fragmented, service provider options multiply, contract maturities decrease and enterprise IT organizations adapt to a service delivery “assembly” culture.



Before the economic meltdown of 2008 – 2009, the rate of change in enterprise IT service delivery models proceeded at a glacial pace. Most organizations operated with an internally focused set of service…

The process of modeling financial options for IT service delivery is evolving as service delivery components become more fragmented, service provider options multiply, contract maturities decrease and enterprise IT organizations adapt to a service delivery “assembly” culture.



Before the economic meltdown of 2008 – 2009, the rate of change in enterprise IT service delivery models proceeded at a glacial pace. Most organizations operated with an internally focused set of service…

Reducing storage costs is a top agenda item for enterprise data centers, yet data is an organization’s most valuable asset. Struggling with the performance, scalability and management complexity required to maintain conventional file-based storage systems is a losing battle if you need to store your data more than 90 days. Object-based storage delivers better value and reduced cost of ownership as well as improved performance, scalability and near-zero administration. Object storage systems…

The ideal is a monitoring system that is comprehensive (alerting on all conditions that need attention) and noise free (NOT alerting to any conditions that do not need attention.) A noisy alert system is almost as bad as no monitoring – it will train people to ignore their alerts.

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It boils down to providing protection for databases during a crucial period of time. Patches are regularly issued by database vendors to address known vulnerabilities in their DBMS software. But for a variety of reasons, enterprises are not always able to install those patches in a timely manner; often, they are not installed at all. Yet, once the patch is released, hackers know about the weakness, and can exploit systems that are not yet patched, gaining access to sensitive records. That’s…

The cost and complexity of managing security requirements in today’s enterprise data centers has created a major need in the marketplace. With new threats emerging all the time, and growing data traffic volumes and bandwidth demands, data center managers are challenged to cost-effectively manage and scale their security infrastructure, without sacrificing the performance-levels required to meet the needs of the business.

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