As more and more private clouds are deployed, organizations will face the requirement to implement chargeback or at least show back. Key to implementing chargeback is...

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Just as organizations faced regulatory and legal pressures to archive and discover emails over the last decade, they now face those same pressures to preserve their social media communications. Most, however, are not doing so. As a result...

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Today’s businesses are searching for ways to reduce costs, yet maintain reliable access to critical Web and cloud-based applications—even in the event of server hardware failure...

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If you have dealt with UPSs for any length of time, you have no doubt heard plenty of hype about high-efficiency or “ecomode” UPSs in the past. Those terms generally referred to UPSs that switched between modes to improve efficiency. Some form of multi-mode capability has been available on UPS products for years. But, those conventional multi-mode UPSs have their limitations...

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Two disruptive trends have recently dramatically increased the data protection challenge: massive growth of digital data and the adoption of virtualization technologies that are driving server consolidation. Massive growth in data storage and processing and a decrease in physical server counts with virtualization technologies...

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Public PaaS, for a variety of reasons, is not accessible to a majority of enterprise IT use cases. However, PaaS in general is highly beneficial to enterprises as it automates typically mundane and long running tasks such as application deployment and provides a foundational architecture for guest application scalability. Private PaaS allows enterprise developers to access the value of PaaS without the accessibility problems of public PaaS since it is offered to them by their own IT…

As enterprises with large-scale applications or content adopt cloud computing and managed services, the costs to properly monitor, analyze and report on availability and performance become more challenging and more expensive. That challenge and its associated cost was just one of many reasons Stephanie Tayengco, Vice President of Network Operations and the Logicworks team sought a better IT management solution...

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Organizational inertia is the single biggest challenge to the embrace of IPv6 in many large telecom companies. Fear, uncertainty and doubt are often factors; indeed, it is often difficult to devote resources to immediate problems, let alone to a problem whose costs will accrue at an unknown time. Another factor is the...

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Throughout the first half of 2011, cyber criminals stunned the business community with unprecedented attacks on industries once thought impregnable. Despite a substantial increase in IT security spending this year – up 4.5 percent from 2010 according to a Morgan Stanley survey – spear-phishing campaigns, security flaws in SecureID tokens, and an increase in Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) have led to successfully executed attacks against companies like Sony, Citigroup, Lockheed Martin,…

Temperature monitoring throughout the data center facilitates efficient, cost effective cooling without risking hot spots and downtime.



Cooling costs in the data center can comprise a substantial portion of an IT department’s operating expenses. While guidelines for temperatures are slowly increasing and cooling solutions become more efficient, inadequate cooling still poses a serious threat to uptime and reliability. Simply overcompensating by lowering overall temperature is a…

...The fact that so many cloud providers – large and small – have no interest in managing privileged identities and segregating duties to limit access to sensitive data and systems should give customers pause before putting their most precious data and resources in the hands of many providers.

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Anyone reading a newspaper or watching the evening news is aware of what seems to be a weekly occurrence of major data breaches – recently, Epsilon and Sony have dominated the headlines. The fact is that any type of breach – major or minor – can cause serious damage that will negatively impact the organization for months or even years after the actual incident.

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Cybercriminals create autonomous applications called bots that can infect networks in a variety of ways, via Web or email. A botnet is a network of these applications that are capable of acting on instruction once they are triggered. This happens when a bot, that may be dormant in your network,, “calls home” via any port. This allows perpetrators to control infected computers via their command and control hosts residing outside your network. In a study of 130 large companies done by…

Traditional data center managers and IT admins take a conservative approach related to managing/provisioning I/O connectivity to rack mount based servers, typically installing multiple network interfaces cards (NICs) and storage host bus adapters (HBAs), with redundant cables/switches. This causes a burden on IT’s ability to agile/responsive to their business needs, as the setup/teardown of these environment are both time consuming and costly.

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Cost: When you include the resources at both ends of the cable – the switch ports and adapter cards – a single cable can represent up to $4000 in CAPEX.

Downtime exposure: Even with the most rigorous best practices observed, a cable is still the physical device most likely to fail and one of the hardest to troubleshoot.

Cooling: Efficient cooling requires unrestricted airflow. A wall of cables impairs that, causing equipment to run hotter and cooling systems to work…

A quick survey of the market tells us a number of key things about managed hosting in terms of the value proposition offered, as well as the challenges that it can present. The value proposition seems clear: Organizations that need their infrastructure managed and don’t have the internal resources to do so can either expand their IT capabilities or look externally to a service provider to take on the work. Many choose the second option because it is much faster and more cost effective than…

Our customers tell us that analyst reports are true: IT & Operations budgets in the last 4 years have increased only 22%, while IT workloads have increased 165%. CIOs are saying "do more with less." Automation is the often the answer. 



As automation tools become more powerful, true unattended automation in the data center is accessible and possible. Automation tools used to be a small sliver of the $8 billion Business Process Management (BPM) space, but we feel as automation…

For data center managers wrestling with demands to increase performance, server hot spots remain the bugaboo. Would it be better to shift racks around, replace equipment or just throw more CRACS at the problem?



For some companies, CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis delivers the answer. Its 3-D models of temperatures and flow can replace guesswork with answers accurate within 10% or better. What better way to design new facilities or enhance existing ones.

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In today’s litigious society it’s more important than ever to have a sound and defensible data retention and collection strategy. New regulations, changes in market expectations and advancements in technology make it wise to review legacy data identification and collection strategies. Old technology that was once state of the art or “tried and true” may no longer be so.



Below are four key items that should be considered when defining a new, defensible process.

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