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…

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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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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Space is a premium in today’s racks

With today’s increasingly thin and dense servers, the tendency for many IT professionals is to stack more equipment into their racks. Doing so creates new challenges in airflow, power capacity and serviceability. With these thoughts in mind, Crenlo is now offering rack-mounted accessories to help IT managers keep their equipment running smoothly and easily serviceable.…

Why is data replication useful in today's enterprise data centers?

In today's data-driven economy, a few minutes of downtime, or losing a “few” gigabytes of data, can cause substantial financial loss and damage a company's reputation. Enterprises large and small face the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data, complying with complex regulations, controlling rapid data growth, and managing geographically-dispersed data centers.

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Given the rapid adoption of shared and virtualized infrastructure in the data center environment, a new approach is needed to ensure the effective performance of the IT infrastructure. Rather than monitoring individual nodes and components in the data center in a piecemeal manner, organizations need to monitor the performance of supported services instead - by correlating all the underlying components of the service. The monitoring approach for applications and services has to account for…

Today’s CIOs face many challenges. For example, they are asked to do more with less and must prepare for and become more familiar with rapidly evolving technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, consolidated fabric, etc. I find the relentless demand for increased bandwidth remains a near constant requirement as a fundamental enabler.



Following the formal adoption of 40 and 100 Gb/s Ethernet Standards, the question of upgrading to 40 and 100 Gb/s is no longer…

Proactive Monitoring Helps Maximize ROI and Maintain High VM Performance

In a virtualized environment, applications compete for shared, dynamic infrastructure resources such as storage, CPU and memory. This resource sharing makes capacity management in a virtual environment an order of magnitude more complex than in a purely physical environment. As a result, proactive capacity management is critical as once problems manifest themselves, they can be difficult to…

Virtualizing users is important in today's enterprise. By virtualizing the user and treating it as a separate layer on top of the Operating System and the Application Layers, the user can now move seamlessly throughout an environment, across any delivery mechanism, and cross Operating System. Allowing for a way to centrally manage the entire environment from a single location, as well as enabling administrators to tailor policy based on the context of their users such as assessing device or…

Migration is not going to happen overnight and it’s going to require simultaneous support for both IPv4 and IPv6 until both sides of the equation are ready. 



Making the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 is not a task anyone with any significant investment in infrastructure wants to undertake. The reliance on IP addresses of infrastructure to control, secure, route, and track everything from simple network housekeeping to complying with complex governmental regulations makes it…

Drobo is Big Storage in a Small Box. Physically, a single Drobo looks like a black rectangular box with LED capacity and disk status indicators on the front, with 4 to 12 disk-drive bays, and various connectivity options (iSCSI, Ethernet / File Sharing, USB 3.0, eSATA, Firewire).



The Drobo allows any combination of types, sizes, or speeds of hard drives to be placed in some or all of the drive bays, at any time (hot-swapping is possible), where they form a larger logical redundant…

Common helpdesk challenges in today's enterprise:



Mobile users. The help desk technician still needs to be able to support users who are on-the-go. As long as there is an internet connection, the right support tool gives the technician access and the ability to help the user. 



"Drive-by's" - Chance encounters between end-users and help desk technicians during which the end user asks for support. An organized approach to support is needed and results in…

IT Organizations are faced with the constant demand to process, move and store more information, including multiple copies of the same or similar data for longer periods of time while reducing per unit costs. In addition, IT organizations also need to maintain or enhance quality of service (QoS) levels. The result is a squeeze play that requires innovation to allow more to be done with already available resources without compromise of customer services. Many approaches are being used…

Concerns over security and lack of control have prompted IT departments to turn away from public cloud options in favor of home-grown private cloud services. Organizations that make this decision risk losing the core benefits that cloud computing was intended to provide in the first place – a more cost-effective and less resource-intensive model for managing enterprise-class systems and applications. 



What if the problem wasn’t in the public cloud model itself but with the way that…

Why is multimedia communications important in today's Enterprise?



Today’s workplace is behind when it comes to emulating our personal technology lives. To offer mutli-media communications options helps enterprises take a step toward bridging the gap between our work and personal lives. Additionally, more employees are part-time remote workers or are trying to do more in off hours to stay on top.

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