Blog

European Interoperability Framework Supports Open Source

20 Dec 2010

Mark Bohannon from RedHat writes: Recognizing the innovative role of open source and open standards in innovation, the European Commission released yesterday its long-awaited “European Interoperability Framework.” 

Paradigm Shift: Changing Times in the Channel

15 Dec 2010

Justin Pirie writes: I’m on my way this morning to speak at the IAMCP UK Member meeting at Microsoft London. That’s the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners to you and me. The people who actually deliver Microsoft solutions to customers and handle 95% of Microsoft Revenue.

The Scale Out Game

10 Dec 2010

Bridget Warwick, Senior Vice President, Marketing writes: Steve Foskett recently wrote about the commoditization of hardware when it comes to storage…or servers for that matter…but the post was focused on storage. The point was made that going forward, all differentiation between vendors was going to be focused on software. A couple of folks argued against that point, Ray Lucchesi and Shmuel Shottan both talked about innovation not being restricted to software. Perhaps the most compelling point for storage vendors to take from all of this is that ultimately it’s the customer who decides what product/technology best addresses their pain point and votes with their wallet. If a vendor can address a pain point sufficiently well at a lower price than the competition then that vendor is going to win the price war, if not also the market share (since it’s not always the lowest price that wins the day).

Mobile bandwidth crunch: fact or fiction?

08 Dec 2010

Gareth Spence writes: One of the fascinating aspects of working in the tech sector is the continuous ream of facts and figures on the state of the world’s networks. Barely a week passes without a new set of data being published that usually signals the end of the modern world, or at the very least the collapse of the network as we know it. Earlier this month, however, I read a report on mobile broadband suggesting that things may not be as bad as we think.

The Power Struggle

03 Dec 2010

Gary Hull writes: In Australia the cost of electricity is rising by 10% year-on-year, an expense that can quickly translate to vast sums for large Australian enterprises. In 2009 Gartner found that energy costs would emerge as a company’s highest operating cost, second only to labour, in 70% of all data centre facilities worldwide.

Black smoke or green cloud?

03 Dec 2010

At PEER 1, we know the responsibility we hold when it comes to addressing environmental issues. As a member of The Green Grid, a global consortium of leading IT organisations focused on data centre efficiency, we are committed to minimising power consumption and improving energy efficiency.

VTL A Cure for Tape-Based Backup Pain in Virtual Data Centers

25 Nov 2010

Mike DiMeglio writes: Let’s do a little word association, shall we?  When I say, “tape-based data protection,” what comes to mind?  Anxiety! Pain!  For many data center managers – particularly those working in virtualized environments – “backup” “pain” and anxiety are words that go together far too easily.

Could video kill the mobile web?

05 Nov 2010

Gareth Spence writes: Video’s record for causing disruption and widespread panic in the technology and media industry is nothing new. In the 1980s, video was accused of killing the radio star (escaped jail on a technicality). In the 1990s, it was implicated in bringing down cinema (thrown out of court). Yet in 2010, video faces its toughest allegation yet: killing the mobile web.

Happy Birthday EMC|ONE

29 Oct 2010

Can you believe it? Our little Social Media 'experiment' from late 2007 has just turned three. It's stunning just how quickly the time flies.

Event: The Content Crisis- Driving Down Customer Acquisition Costs

21 Oct 2010

Justin Pirie writes: It’s been a little while since I’ve posted on this blog- but I felt it was time to give an events update as there is some really good stuff happening and readers don’t seem to be getting the best of me these days…

Ask the Engineer - Do you have any rack-mount UPS recommendations?

15 Oct 2010

On occasion, an installation consists of only a few cabinets and it is desirable to place individual UPS units within each cabinet. Although Server Tech does not provide UPS products and remains manufacturer agnostic, there are a couple things that should be considered from the power distribution point of view.

Be careful what you ask for…

15 Oct 2010

Mark Harris writes:  You know a good friend of mine used to say to me, “Be careful what you ask for… You may just get it!” and I have to say, the words never rang truer than today in the DCIM category. There is simple SO much mystery and confusion as to what is needed, what steps are required to get there, and how to know if/when a group is successful in implementing a DCIM expertise

Are our global networks secure?

07 Oct 2010

Gareth Spence writes: This is a question that many of us perhaps take for granted. When was the last time you considered the security of your data as you transferred money online or emailed sensitive information to work colleagues? Personally, I rarely consider the risk that someone may be intercepting this data. At least I didn’t until now.

VMworld Labs - Thousands of Virtual Appliances deployed in just 4 days!

01 Oct 2010

David Shyu writes: It was on the last day of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco where it happened.  I was sitting at a Lab Station at the Moscone West building, learning a few things myself on vCloud Director.  Suddenly, one of the VMware Lab Staff member announced: "We have just reached a new milestone just moments ago, we have served our 145th THOUSAND (145K) virtual machine being deployed and destroyed)!  We all clapped our hands, we all enjoyed this moment of glory for the world of virtualization!

New Campus Grand Opening - IT's Time to Celebrate

01 Oct 2010

Tim Graumann writes: September marks the official grand opening of Brocade’s new Bay Area campus and with it an exciting new chapter in the company’s history. After years of hard, focused work, the new campus recently earned Brocade a place among the most innovative users of business technology. We have a lot of reasons to celebrate.

Affordable Cloud DR is Here

15 Sep 2010

Jeff Echols writes: While many CommVault users have been interested in cloud storage as a low-cost, long term repository for backup & archive data, the more interesting topic is what can be done to the data once it gets to the cloud. By far, the most frequent user request centers on disaster recovery (DR). This week, CommVault and Rackspace announced 'Cloud DR', an affordable solution that combines enterprise class data management software with on-demand cloud infrastructure.

Cloudonomics

10 Sep 2010

Jim Damoulakis, GlassHouse CTO writes: One of the lingering concerns about cloud computing is determining when it does or doesn’t make economic sense. There is certainly a crossover point at which either the requirements of scale or level of service are such that the cost of the cloud exceeds that of a more traditional approach. However, determining where that point lies and the specific drivers that influence it, has been a subject of much debate.

Fiber in the Sky

10 Sep 2010

Joel Mulkey - CIO - Freewire Broadband writes: Ever try guaranteeing reliable broadband services using radio waves? It’s not easy but that’s how we beat out the LECshere in Portland, Oregon. We create a secure, robust, high-speed Ethernet backbone in the sky using cutting-edge technology.

IBM Day 1 – It’s Official

31 Aug 2010

Steve Kenniston writes: Between time off with the family this summer and all the work required to get done between ‘signing’ a deal to be acquired and ‘closing’ a deal to get acquired, the blog has been a bit slow. But I am here now to tell you it is official. Storwize is now Storwize, an IBM company.

Ever Heard of a Zettabyte?

31 Aug 2010

A zettabyte is the really large measure of data which represents 1 trillion gigabytes, or 1 billion terabytes.

And, the world's online data is crossing the ZB mark for the first time this year.

According to IDC's annual survey of global digital output (published in May 2010 and sponsored by EMC), the current total amount of global data is expected to pass 1.2 ZBs sometime during 2010. To put this in context, IDC compares this as being equivalent to the amount of data that would be generated by every individual person in the world posting messages on Twitter continuously for a century.

How you would hope every Board Chairman and CEO would talk about IT

24 Aug 2010

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of working with the IT leadership team of a $20 billion global company. I was the guest of the CFO and CIO. Toward the end of the first day of the meeting the company’s Chairman of the Board and their CEO joined the meeting. Each spoke for about 15 minutes about the company, its future and what they saw as important in the coming year.

Are you satisfied with your WAN optimization vendor?

24 Aug 2010

I can't get no satisfaction,
I can't get no satisfaction.
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
I can't get no, I can't get no.
--Rolling Stones

One of the most frustrating experiences for an IT manager is to invest in a vendor offering that doesn't function as promised and delivers a very unsatisfactory experience. This becomes even more painful in the case of WAN optimization, because the WAN optimization devices must be physically scattered over numerous locations throughout the WAN infrastructure. Troubleshooting and maintaining problematic devices under such circumstances is truly a nightmare.

Are Data Centers complying with Executive Order 13514?

17 Aug 2010

Joe Polastre writes: In October, 2009, President Obama issued an Executive Order (EO 13514) that set federal energy efficiency standards. EO 13514 superceeds the previous executive order put in place by President Bush (EO 13423) from 2007. While the previous order required the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3% per year, totaling at least a 30% reduction by 2015 from 2003 levels, Obama's order actually lets each department set their own goal. EO 13514, in contrast to EO 13423, is much more specific about the improvements that have to be made in transportation fleets, building design, etc. Just to be clear, this order only applies to federal government and their respective organizations, not the country at large. You can think of it as a government-specific climate bill.

Virtual Desktop Bandwidth Averages Are Just a Start

11 Aug 2010

Daniel Fellar writes: Back in May 2010, I started my Top 10 Mistakes Made with Virtual Desktops. I talked about how much bandwidth certain activities require when using XenDesktop and HDX. The table I provided is great, but it does pose the question, "What does a person do with this information?" Since then, I've been able to spend more time and have recently completed the bandwidth planning guide, which you can get by accessing the XenDesktop Design Handbook. But let's take a closer look at what the planning guide says...

How much data is too much data?

10 Aug 2010

Gareth Spence writes: The explosion of data being generated and transported across the world’s networks is a topic that often consumes a great deal of time in the storage and enterprise community. I often find myself engaged in discussions on data transport using terms such as gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes and even zettabytes. However, there are times when these words are thrown around with alarming casualness and this was reinforced today when I came across the graphic below.

Monitoring is not Management

09 Aug 2010

Joe Polastre writes: There's been a lot of discussion recently about the difference between monitoring and management. This week, I received an email with the title "Revolutionizing Energy Management". Interesting, I wonder what management solution this company provides for energy. The content of the email went on to talk about a brand new meter that provides real time power load information. While I'm sure this company's meter is very innovative (names purposely omitted to protect the innocent), it was clear that this company did not understand what the word "management" even means.

Open Systems SnapVault (OSSV) and Deduplication - Fooling Around With 4K Blocks

06 Aug 2010

A little while ago I blogged about how SnapVault and Deduplication work together for efficient D2D backups. SnapVault allows two NetApp systems to back each other up using block-level incremental snapshots and automatic deduplication. But what if you think that SnapVault is so cool you want to use it for all you backups, including DAS data stored directly on servers? In this blog I’ll tell you how you can do this with another type of SnapVault - Open Systems SnapVault, otherwise known as OSSV.

Seagate Positions Itself in the Clouds

04 Aug 2010

David Szabados writes:

Although Seagate’s core business is hard drive manufacturing, there are numerous business development teams within the company that work with outside OEMs and customers to explore technologies and implementations for the future. One significant area Seagate has continued to look at during the past several years has been the emergence of cloud computing.

Cost Recovery and Cost Transparency in the Virtual World

28 Jul 2010

Paul Martin from the Vizioncore blog writes:

Chargeback in the days of exclusively physical infrastructure was so much simpler wasn’t it? You bought what someone needed, put an asset tag on it and slapped them with an invoice. Well, maybe or maybe not. Chargeback, even in those environments (and those environments still exist), had it’s challenges. It’s just back then nobody really used chargeback as much as people want to use it today with virtual environments. Today, virtualization really means you can very effectively and securely share infrastructure, but you need the right tools to figure out how much of what resources are being used and by whom. This is in addition to understanding where the costs lie inside the environment.

How desktop technology drives data centres

16 Jul 2010

Christian Paetz form Raritan writes:

One would assume that data centers are a place where high tech gets introduced and the mass PC market is a followers market. However there are plenty of examples where it is just the other way around. For years the processor market was driven by the battle between Intel and AMD this battle was fought where the volume was and is – consumer PCs. Another good example is the keyboard interface. Servers still used PS/2 when it was already hard to get a non-USB keyboard for consumer PCs. Also the good old VGA interface has only survived in the metal rack cabinets of data centers and data rooms.

Social Media: Can’t Live With it, Can’t Live Without It.

16 Jul 2010

Kevin Haley from Symantec writes:

Despite threats, companies lack policies on social media at work

Nothing has happened to change the mind of IT management in the last several years; social networks remain a major security concern. What has changed is that social media has become more established, and the ability for IT management to block access to social media is less and less likely. According to some survey work we did, there is only a 1 in 20 chance of your company blocking access to social networking sites.

And so, it begins …

09 Jul 2010

The announcement that EMC is to acquire Greenplum is not altogether a surprise—it was always a possibility that EMC might decide to move into the data warehousing space for itself, given the number of its existing partners in that space—if it chose to do so the main question was who it would choose to acquire. Now we know the answer.

How the Cloud Changed World's Oldest Newspaper

07 Jul 2010

Bernard Golden writes:

Recently I was in London, speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum. From my perspective, it was an ideal event: large enough to have a critical mass of interesting vendors and attendees, and small enough to support quality conversation. If you've been to any of the large U.S. cloud shows, you'll know how hard it is to accomplish the latter quality at them - they're packed and conversations are reduced to sound bites. Of course, the conference being located in Britain, there was less tolerance for over-the-top claims and marketing hype, which was also a refreshing relief.

Storage Optimisation Part 2

06 Jul 2010

The second part of Philip Howard's article on Storage Optimisation.

This is the second of two articles about storage optimisation. In the first I discussed how an optimal solution would be one based around discovering (at a detailed level) all of your SAN infrastructure resources (servers, disks and so on) in real-time to create a consolidated view of the entire environment. Then for the solution to take that awareness, combine it with any specific, unique policy or other restrictions that might be in place, and to apply business intelligence principles to the problem of how you might optimise those resources. As a result of this analysis you would like the software to recommend potential solutions, allowing you to choose which one you prefer and, once that determination has been made, for the software to implement relevant changes (actually prepare the storage for migration and then to perform the data migration) for you automatically.

Everything Old is New Again, or DCaaS (Dead Cat as a Service)

30 Jun 2010

Roger Klorese writes:

(When I'm at a loss for a quick breezy title of my own to sum up the subject at hand, I resort to song or album titles. Thanks this time to the late Peter Allen – I considered Leonard Cohen's "New Skin for the Old Ceremony" instead, but, on the one hand, it might be too obscure... still, on the other, it's Leonard Cohen! But to the point...)

You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting a pundit talking about cloud computing. (For that matter, there's probably an online service that will rent you a virtual dead cat to swing for $0.07 an hour, and market it as Dead Cat as a Service, or DCaaS.)

Assessing Risk in the Virtual Data Center

28 Jun 2010

Brian Gracely from Cisco writes:

Having lived through both the Internet bubble in 2001 and the Housing/CDO bubble in 2008, we’re all too familiar with what happens when large inter-connected entities start having problems. It can often be like watching dominos fall. Things were really great when the systems appeared to be working according to the plan, but then “the plan” got sidetracked and bad things started happening that weren’t on the radar.

Storage optimisation

28 Jun 2010

Philip Howard writes:

This is the first of two articles about storage optimisation. In this article I will discuss what the issue is and in the second I will consider how vendors are (or, mostly, are not) addressing the real problems that users are facing.

Take a simple scenario in which you have three applications running against three separate databases, each of which has its own 1Tb disk. Suppose further that the databases require 700Gb, 150Gb and 600Gb respectively. The 150Gb database used to be a lot bigger but you’ve recently introduced an archival product that has allowed you to significantly reduce its space requirements. It isn’t hard to see that you could move that application to one of the other two disks and so free up one of the disks for some other purpose.

Simplify, but lose control... not in my data center!!!

24 Jun 2010

Charlie Leeming writes:

In my last post, I talked about how we all – in our personal, and for those of us in technology, our professional lives – are trying to simplify and do more with less. This all sounds good in a data center unless it increases risk and/or lessens our actual visibility for control over our data and applications. We all get great offers and PowerPoint slides about how vendors A, B and C can easily simplify our data center and consolidate tier 1 and tier 2 applications down to virtualized servers.... but often, I am left wondering several things: Have these vendors done this before? Will they be around to support it? Will it really be cheaper when I calculate the OpEx required to manage all those virtual server sessions I can no longer see and touch?

Digging for Data

23 Jun 2010

Chris Sweetapple writes:

I’ve recently been introduced to the idea of ‘search styles’. Despite using Google or other search engines almost every day of our lives, it seems – if they’re anything like me – that most of us don’t really think about how we search for information. It seems natural: you log on, you type in the name of the theme park you’re going to at the weekend, and after a few clicks, you’ve managed to find the directions you were after.

Understanding the Resources of "The Cloud" within IT

21 Jun 2010

Scott M Herold writes:

I have just returned from a great week meeting customers and partners across Germany. This was my third trip to Europe this quarter. During this time, I've had a chance to visit customers and partners across UK, Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany. One thing remains abundantly clear, people still don't seem to understand "The Cloud". This is globally across both the US and Europe, so I'm definitely not singling out one region over the other. I'm of the opinion of "Who can blame them?" The marketing behind "The Cloud" is absolutely hideous. Everyone and their mother (seriously, my mom actually asked me about "The Cloud") is using the term to describe everything from Facebook to "Look, my application has a web console so it's in the cloud".

vFoglight QuickView: Functionality Worth Noting - Don’t Take it From Me!

10 Jun 2010

Ben Scheerer writes:

Wow, the response has been tremendous, it’s only been a week since the announcement of vFoglight QuickView and downloads have already been in the quadruple digits! The responses have been so positive we are confident that QuickView provides the right solutions for the right level of requirements.

Paradigm Shift - TWIS#27- Google I/O coverage in depth

02 Jun 2010

• Google I/O news- Google TV- is TV going to be the next cloud battleground and opportunity?
• Google announces “enterprise” partnership with VMware- fails to put enterprise ready SLA’s into the mix but extends PaaS options
• Google tries it’s hand at solving the perennial SaaS distribution problem- announcing the Chrome Web Store
• Android in numbers- it’s growing FAST
• Google launches S3 Competitor- Google Storage for Developers
• Evernote continues to showcase their numbers and make the case for Freemium- new Video
• API festival at Gluecon! How people are solving the problem of Glueing SaaS and Cloud together
• But customers aren’t thinking about Glue says Information Week research…
• Sinclair Schuller on Cloud Architecture
• Reuven Cohen on the coming of Clouds from a historical hosting perspective
• Bessemer CEO conference coverage- Great Design and User eXperience essential
• In other news, Microsoft, Salesforce, Ray Wang, Xobni and Banks in the Cloud.

The £60 billion question

01 Jun 2010

Jim Mortleman writes:

The $6.25 billion of public-sector cuts announced on 24th May by the Chancellor George Osborne and Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws included $95 million of IT savings, but the pain doesn't stop there.

Twittering Botnet Says Hello!

25 May 2010

Peter Coogan from Symantec writes:

A recent blog from our colleagues at Sunbelt highlighted a new Trojan botnet creator tool called "TwitterNet Builder." Symantec has detection in place for this threat as Trojan.Twebot. As the name suggests, the builder is closely linked to Twitter, using a Twitter account to issue command-and-control instructions to the Trojans created by the builder.

Technical scribblings RE Harmonizing Global Metrics for Data Center Energy Efficiency

24 May 2010

John Stanley form NPlusOneIT wrties:

A couple of weeks ago, several industry and government groups from the US, Europe, and Japan announced that they had come to some basic agreements on “the guiding principles of data center energy efficiency metrics.” There are some very encouraging technical aspects to what was decided, which I’ll describe in this post.

Will Symantec discover Internet Identity with VeriSign acquisition?

20 May 2010

Avivah Litan from Gartner writes:

Symantec finally confirmed its rumored purchase of VeriSign’s security business for a whopping $1.28 billion. (Kudos to Verisign for getting such a high price from Symantec!).

Four Disaster Recovery Options for Virtualized Environments

19 May 2010

Robin Howard at Double Take writes:

Virtualization is great for saving money and resources, but if you lose a virtual server you have larger bigger problems than if you had just lost a single server. While no company wants to put their business at risk by under-protecting their VMs, nobody likes to spend more than they have to on non-productive expenditures like insurance.

Talking the Cloud Talk, Walking the iPhone Walk

13 May 2010

John Pescatore from Gartner writes:

I spent a day last week in St. Louis with several Gartner enterprise clients, and then yesterday I spent the morning with a Gartner federal government clients in Charleston, SC. Pretty much everywhere we started out talking about what they need to think through about security issues around future use of public cloud computing services, but almost invariably ended up spending much more time about how to deal with the here and now of managers and users demanding to use iPhones and iPads and Android phones.

Stock Market Roller Coasters and “Random Acts of Preparation”

07 May 2010

John Pescatore from Gartner writes:

Yesterday I sneezed and Accenture lost 99% of its market capitalization. I spit out my coffee in surprise and the stock went back up from $.01 to $40.00, so I looked at Gartner’s stock and spit out more coffee – but Gartner’s stock just sat there. Turns out it wasn’t me – looks like what sent the stock market on its roller coaster ride was some human error was magnified by the power of software.

A Virus Is Coming! Tell All Your Friends!

04 May 2010

John McDonald from Symantec writes: Email hoaxes are nothing new, dating back at least as far as 1994 with what is widely believed to have been the first email hoax—referred to as the "Goodtimes virus" or the "Goodtimes virus hoax" after the subject of the email.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall: Power of Extended Match

30 Apr 2010

The Barracude Networks Product Management Team write:

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall features a flexible rule-matching engine which gives administrators the flexibility to create rules for handling and manipulating traffic.

Helping Your Network Through Growing Pains

27 Apr 2010

Uli Plechschmidt from Brocade writes:

We all want more... of everything. Customers always want more and rightly so – it’s what keeps vendors on their toes and drives them to innovate and deliver excellent service. However, sometimes these demands place extreme pressure on resources, sometimes even to deliver more than is physically possible. I am a firm believer in the old adage that, “anything is possible”, but it seems that this mantra is not applicable to the modern network infrastructure in many organisations.

So just what is the business case for 50 Gbps NetScaler MPX models?

27 Apr 2010

John Gudmundson from Citrix writes:

Until now organizations that needed very high throughput were forced to undertake costly network segmentation with added networking gear and IT administration expenses. Ensuring proper stateful flows was a royal pain. The new ultra high-end NetScaler MPX 17500, 19500, and 21500 appliances overcome these issues and are critical to cloud computing with shared services, service providers and large enterprises with their high capacity datacenter needs.

Eyjafjallajokull – a taste of things to come and a green ICT opportunity

20 Apr 2010

Pete Foster from The Green IT Review writes:

As you may know, the snappily-named Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland is erupting. I know because I’m in the UK and the ash being thrown up by the volcano has drifted into our air space shutting down all flights in and out of the UK. (Much of mainland Europe is also affected).

My Head in the Clouds: Why Less Is More

16 Apr 2010

Max Riggsbee from Brocade writes...

In March, a nor'easter came roaring up the U.S. East Coast knocking down trees, taking out power and forcing many residents in NY, NJ and CT to boil their drinking water. When the power went out in my home around six pm, the backup power unit kicked in to keep the cable modem alive, the laptops shifted from AC to internal batteries and the Internet died.

Debut Cloudhackers Cloud Demo Hack Day

08 Apr 2010

jclouds project founder Adrian Cole (see his video talking about the benefits of using Cargo to automate app deployment to vCloud Express) updates us on recent cloud discussions that we want to share with our vCloud blog fans.

It's (still) not just about bandwidth

06 Apr 2010

Mark Lewis from Riverbed writes:

It’s interesting to see how much has changed in the WAN (Wide Area Network) optimisation space over the last half a decade or more, yet some things haven’t changed much. Five years ago I recall a white paper had been written on the subject titled, “It’s not just about bandwidth”. At the time bandwidth reduction was a great story and the management reports within Steelhead were great at sharing how much bandwidth had been saved, but although some organisations were able to justify the business case on bandwidth alone many struggled. Saving bandwidth which gives rise to potential cost savings or as in most cases, defers bandwidth upgrades, is only part of the story and for most, a small part of the story. The real deal only happens as we speed up data across the WAN through either optimising the transport layer or better still accelerating the applications.

Will Google be your next ISP, Telco or Internet?

29 Mar 2010

Pete Gerr from HDS writes:

While Google has been making headlines on dry land from its challenges in China, the company’s investment in a $300 million ultra-highspeed fiber optic link to Japan is nearly ready to begin paying dividends

thedatachain of thought2

24 Mar 2010

"The notion that a single converged data center network makes for fewer switches and ports, resulting in a simpler network consuming less power and cooling, is flawed, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner research shows that a converged data center network requires more switches and ports, is more complex to manage and consumes more power and cooling than two well-designed separate networks."

Cisco Unified Computing System and Intel Xeon 5600 achieve record-breaking performances

22 Mar 2010

by Harris Sussman, Cisco Data Center Solutions - Unified Computing System

Opinions vary widely as to the criticality of computing benchmarks, but most people agree they are required, and an important data point. One month ago, I already shared with you the importance of reviewing data for virtualization .
Today, Cisco announced some breakthrough results based on industry standard benchmarks for virtualized environments as well as other key data center applications.

Cisco continues to prove it’s Unified Computing System is not only an architectural game changer, but it’s wide adoption and consistent performance are impressing folks like Boyd Davis, General Manager, Data Center Marketing, Intel who said “It’s quite an achievement for Cisco to have scored so high on so many of the industry benchmarking tests”

thedatachain of thought

11 Mar 2010

The 'soft' launch of thedatachain continues to go well - with several key content partners on board, and more in the pipeline. Our intention is to use video as the primary delivery mechanism - short, sharp, incisive comment from vendors, analysts and end users as we visit the many data centre, virtualisation and cloud events out there. This content is backed up by vendors own video content, plus the site's strong news focus, articles and, over time, a valuable information source on buzz topics.

3 Reasons Why Channel Partners Should Include Virtual Appliances in Their Business Model

09 Mar 2010

Sai Allarvarpu from Citrix writes:

Last week, when we launched Access Gateway VPX and Branch Repeater VPX, I blogged about the feedback customers gave us. In this blog, I want to discuss the feedback from channel partners from a few focus groups and meetings over the past few quarters.
Traditionally, vendors talk about competitive dynamics when discussing customers. That is normal because new product launches often don't fundamentally change partners' practices of or decisions about any given vendor. Such product launches don't really sway the partners to favor one product over others or switch from one vendor to another.

Network automation: Key to differentiation and profitability

05 Mar 2010

Michael Ritter from ADVA Optical writes:

The goal is clear - increase process speed, reliability, and control so you can provide better customer service, increase productivity, and capitalize on new revenue opportunities. To achieve this goal, service providers need to streamline their key business processes that drive value for customers. They need to optimize, automate, and transform these processes to a more service-centric approach in order to separate the organization from the competition.