Third party hardware support and third party maintenance (TPM) enable four types of business value – cost reduction, cost avoidance, business agility, and risk reduction. We’ll cover all of these over time on our blog, but this blog post will discuss cost reduction.

TPM services enable organizations to reduce their direct (budgeted) costs for IT labor and outsourced maintenance services. Here are 3 ways this happens:

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We need to remember that operations isn’t just about deploying applications, it’s about deploying applications within a much larger, interdependent ecosystem.



One of the key focuses of devops – that hardy movement that seeks to bridge the gap between development and operations – is on deployment. Repeatable deployment of applications, in particular, as a means to reduce the time and effort that goes into the deployment of applications into a production…

2009 Gartner study surveyed customer opinions about computer hardware reliability and the need for third-party maintenance (TPM) services. The survey results showed that customers are reconsidering the value of hardware maintenance and in some cases, the need for third party hardware maintenance at all.



More than ever, IT managers must rationalize the value of the hardware maintenance services that they purchase. In the past, many large organizations did not consider third party…

Viruses, spyware, and network threats get most of the attention, but environmental factors like heat, humidity, airflow, smoke, and electricity can be equally devastating to server room equipment, and thus to a company’s IT operations. 



To get a sense of the danger, let’s take overheating as an example. Servers generate high levels of heat, and the facility must be kept cool to ensure optimal performance. The warmer it gets, the more likely equipment will overheat and malfunction.…

Over the last few weeks we have been focusing on the major trends facing the data center industry throughout 2011. We have discussed both the importance of data center business efficiencies and the effects of energy efficiency monitoring and regulation. The last area we’d like to take a look at is mitigating and…

Why is automation technology useful in today’s enterprise data centers? 



Automation technology has emerged as an enabling technology for organizations looking to provide a cost-effective and tangible way to expedite the processing of their IT and business assets. Today’s IT environment consists of multiple servers, both physical and virtual, platforms and a wide range of applications. Organizations continue to place high value in the ability to reduce costs and risk through…

Why is high speed inline compression and data deduplication useful in today's enterprise data centers?



Today’s enterprise data centers are experiencing exponential data growth with limited budgets and staff. The cost of storage has become a major component of IT budgets, often growing faster and less predictably than other areas.



Inline compression and data deduplication allow data to be stored using less physical hardware than would otherwise be required. Depending…

Survey results released at GigaOM Structure in 2010 from Zeus Technology revealed that 82 percent of U.S. organizations struggle to manage their website and services performance, stemming largely from growing IT complexities like virtualization, cloud computing and multi-site data center management. The survey also found that 79 percent of respondents lack resources to manage web applications across complex multi-data center environments, yet 95 percent of senior IT professionals surveyed…

If you have a data center, you can do two things that are related to the cloud. First, you can connect your existing infrastructure in the data center to public cloud storage services. For example, backup your SQL Server to Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. If you happen to be in the same data center with a public cloud storage service provider, such as INTERNAP, you can connect to that provider too and enjoy the fast pipe within the same data center. Second, you can construct your own…

If you have a data center, you can do two things that are related to the cloud. First, you can connect your existing infrastructure in the data center to public cloud storage services. For example, backup your SQL Server to Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. If you happen to be in the same data center with a public cloud storage service provider, such as INTERNAP, you can connect to that provider too and enjoy the fast pipe within the same data center. Second, you can construct your own…