Workers and customers, empowered by smartphones and widely available Wi-Fi services, want and are demanding 24x7 access to email, company network resources, and Web sites. And thanks to today’s global marketplace, even small companies must support round-the-clock activities. 



Unfortunately, IT system downtime remains a problem for companies of all sizes. A 2010 eWEEK article1 reporting on an industry study noted that North American businesses suffer an average of 10 hours of IT…

Cloud computing is extremely beneficial for today’s datacenters. Private clouds are typically offered as a more managed service offering, so companies can move some (or all) of day to day IT management duties to a cloud provider, housed in a datacenter. This increase of customers choosing the cloud means cloud companies will continue to increase their footprint in datacenters.

IT Managers should care because of the variety of operational and strategic benefits:

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The Cirtas Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller is useful in today’s enterprise data center because it resolves the issues surrounding rapid growth of data storage capacity and associated data protection costs. By harnessing the power of public cloud storage utilities, Bluejet frees up data center rack space and substantially reduces power and cooling requirements. To servers and applications, Bluejet looks like an on-premise storage array accessed using iSCSI, NFS (network file system) or CIFS…

The dynamic nature of today’s virtualized data centers presents new environmental monitoring challenges 



The combination of today’s powerful servers with the wide-scale adoption of virtualization is radically changing the way companies must monitor their data centers. 



The consequences when problems arise are very high. While the loss of a single system in a smaller server room is cause for concern, a single data-center blade server failure in a large…

The “what” is a dynamic data center infrastructure. Cloud is “how” to get there. 



Admist the chatter and sound bites on Twitter coming from Cloud Connect this week are some interesting side conversations revolving around architecture and how cloud may or may not change the premises upon which those architectures are based. Architecture is, in the technology demesne, the “fundamental underlying design of computer hardware,…

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…

Cloud computing is an over-bloated concept, where many different technologies and software are squeezed in. Our solution focuses on the Infrastructure as a Service layer, where virtualization is playing a crucial role in the evolution of traditional data centers. In short, our solution is the key to the door of the next paradigm that will rule the running of tomorrow's data center.

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Ethernet keeps evolving. A number of technology evangelists recently gathered together at the Ethernet Technology Summit in Santa Clara, California. They discussed nothing but Ethernet for three days. The program covered current and future Ethernet technologies, such as 40/100GbE, FCoE, 25Gbps signaling, Terabit Ethernet, virtualization, cloud computing and Ethernet in the data center.

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Ethernet keeps evolving. A number of technology evangelists recently gathered together at the Ethernet Technology Summit in Santa Clara, California. They discussed nothing but Ethernet for three days. The program covered current and future Ethernet technologies, such as 40/100GbE, FCoE, 25Gbps signaling, Terabit Ethernet, virtualization, cloud computing and Ethernet in the data center.

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These days good data center DESIGN includes attention, as a corporate priority, to efficiency of space, critical support systems and IT equipment as well as the monitoring and data collection of the operations. Then together with consideration of design best practices, traditionally including provisioning a scalable and secure facility envelope (e.g. raised floor area, support areas, clear height, floor load and secure access),a floor plan configuration with proper room adjacencies, hot and…

CPU-intensive or large-memory workloads that require high performance computing exist in almost every enterprise that has an analytics-driven or data-warehousing environment. vSMP Foundation is the core ScaleMP solution for solving three fundamental problems facing high performance IT today:

Workloads with high CPU count or large memory needs

Simplified cluster installation and management

Scale up cloud resources for high performance or large memory…