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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When it comes to application performance, data center managers don't usually dig too deeply. They are embroiled in the day-to-day requirements of managing the infrastructure that sits beneath the applications. Yet when users start complaining about slow response times or application errors, the IT managers who oversee those applications come knocking at the data center door with questions. How is the network/storage/servers affecting my system? Data center managers don't always have those…

Servers haven’t changed much in recent years. This may be a common misperception, but it’s a huge misperception.

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