USB storage devices provide a clear benefit to making it easier to handle the large amounts of data that people need on a day to day basis. The benefits arise out of not having to rely on network services which often have technical and policy limitation on the amount of data that can be moved easily. For instance, for as long as I can remember, it’s been fairly common to impose a 10 megabyte limitation on email attachment size. Yet over the years, that size limit is growing tighter and…

Today, enterprises and service providers that are interested in launching cloud computing services face the difficult task of integrating complex software and hardware components from multiple vendors. The resulting system could end up being expensive to build and hard to operate, minimizing the original motives and benefits of moving to this new model.

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Given the dispersed nature of today’s organizations, with mobile workers and regional offices, the data center and IT infrastructure in reality extends beyond the boundaries of one or more centralized physical locations. What this means is that the operations team will be required to monitor, from a central NOC location, the performance of core IT infrastructure at remote sites and offices.…

The data center model is constantly evolving. A few years ago it was good enough to take daily tape backups of your critical information and send them into offsite storage. Often the off-site storage was at a data center and the service included a “cold backup.” This meant that in the event of a disaster on your primary server – the data center would provide a backup server and restore your latest tape saves – and effectively rebuild your environment from scratch.

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Data center cleaning is useful in today’s enterprise data centers for several reasons. Decontaminating a data center in accordance with ISO Standard 14644 (Class 100,000 .05 micron particles per cubic foot of atmosphere) has the following benefits:

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It is challenging enough to manage a slew of disparate resources without having to deal with the additional noise from cloud vendors offering too-complex products that do not provide sufficient capabilities or performance for the average organization, or that lock them into a specific platform that does not integrate with their existing IT infrastructure.

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A data center is built with fixed available capacity which includes provision for Space, Power and Cooling. However, owner/operators rarely, if ever, achieve anywhere near full utilization of the available capacity. The cause can be directly associated with the dynamic nature of the facility; IT assets as well as the type of equipment housed are in a constant state of flux.

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Whether an organization has an e-commerce site relying on web applications for revenue, or is a service organization dependent on information delivered through web applications, constant and continuous availability is a major concern.

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The explosion in data volumes and the increasing complexity of new data types have added stress to traditional data warehouses and raised the cost to store years of data on expensive hardware environments that require specialist DBA resources. Information lifecycle management initiatives, while attractive as an architectural concept, have proven difficult to implement, as organizations struggle with defining the business rules for which data classes require disk versus lower-cost storage…

Enterprise operations teams need a way to manage and monitor all of their physical servers, networks, storage devices, and an increasing amount of virtual resources. It is no longer a simple exercise to determine where your services are physically running, and what the impact is if a device has to go offline.

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Companies spanning multiple industries – including education, financial and healthcare – are turning to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a way to improve their operational efficiencies and bottom line. VDI enables IT to provision and deploy new desktops faster; replace traditional desktops with more cost effective thin clients; as well as enhance overall security by centralizing system administration.



Yet many deployments have been fraught with difficulty – frequently…

Companies spanning multiple industries – including education, financial and healthcare – are turning to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a way to improve their operational efficiencies and bottom line. VDI enables IT to provision and deploy new desktops faster; replace traditional desktops with more cost effective thin clients; as well as enhance overall security by centralizing system administration.



Yet many deployments have been fraught with difficulty – frequently…

Tape is like insurance. You’re tempted to save a few bucks by doing without it, but the cost of not having it when you need it can be catastrophic. Without a tape backup solution, or with the wrong tape backup solution, a company can lose access to data and either fire their IT manager, face severe regulatory fines for not being able to reproduce data, or flat out go out-of-business. Tape is rarely top of mind to an IT manager. An IT manager is more likely thinking about server performance,…

Over the course of the last 5-10 years, IT organizations from the smallest of the SMB to the largest of the Enterprise have become dependent upon remote access tools to manage their servers and devices. The problem, however, is that these tools were adopted by different groups within the organization, without a clear strategy (i.e., the Windows team adopted IP KVM and RDP, while the network team bought console servers and adopted SSH).



Over time, the vast majority of IT departments…

• Be flexible to adapt to changing requirements and technology
• Be reliable in supporting customer processing
• Be maintainable, so as to retain design reliability over time
• Include vendor-neutral solutions to encourage competitive procurement
• Be well-documented and understood by…

Despite significant investments directed at avoiding downtime, businesses continue to suffer significant outages. Often, these outages are due to factors beyond their control and are fundamentally due to the complexity and fragility of the typical application infrastructure stack. The TransLattice Application Platform (TAP) provides a new way of delivering business-critical applications that eliminates any single point of failure and dramatically reduces the complexity of implementing and…

What constitutes a good data center design?

Today’s best data centers are designed from the concept stage through the entire service life of the facility, with the following three objectives:

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Virtual Infrastructure Optimization is about optimizing the performance, availability and utilization of both the physical and virtual IT infrastructure. Virtualization, both for servers and for storage, is becoming widespread and somewhere between 30% to 40% of IT applications are now virtualized within a typical data center. For many organizations, this is where “virtual stall” enters the picture. The low-hanging fruit of IT-controlled applications (e-mail, file services, test & dev,…

Internal processes may be the best answer to mitigating risks associated with third-party virtual appliances.

The enterprise data center is, in most cases, what aquarists would call a “closed system.” This is to say that from a systems and application perspective, the enterprise has control over what goes in.

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Expectations are high for enterprise and service provider data center organizations

to adapt their complex, dynamic infrastructures to the changing needs of business. But between virtualization and public/private cloud hybrid environments, the old ways of doing things won’t cut it when it comes to scaling dynamically to provide elastic monitoring and performance analysis, finding the root cause of problems and analyzing service levels across the entire infrastructure.

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