Data-Center Efficiency! Going Green!

Posted on March 10, 2010, 8:35 am, by Juan Maldonado and received No Comments ».

Ever walked into a hot data center and fear for the life of the machines?  Maybe while walking in that data center you tripped on a loose tile and did the Macarena trying to catch your balance just to end up taking a foot and a half drop because of the raised floor?  Well, progress is great!!  As of late, engineers everywhere have adopted a way to use the key principle of physics in data center layouts.  In the older data-centers cold air would be sent from the space under the raised floor to cool the datacenter but this would require extra energy (see figure below).

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Holes in VMware without Storage Foundation

Posted on March 9, 2010, 9:14 am, by Leon Clark and received No Comments ».

Most features in Storage Foundation are supported in a VMware environment, but let’s focus on the features that work differently in VMware environment and why certain features are not supported.

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Know Your Hypervisor

Posted on March 8, 2010, 9:16 am, by Van Ristau and received No Comments ».

Virtualization is very much on the minds of IT managers this year. Some have the vision of a low power, smoothly running, optimized data center; thinly staffed but capable of provisioning new users almost instantaneously (AKA ‘Nirvana’). Others see the nightmare of single points of (hardware) failure bringing down an entire agency, virtual machines migrating from host to host hungry for more resources, virtual server sprawl soaking up network resources exponentially, and other horrors – ending with the IT manager banished to the Smoking Tombs of Dante’s sixth circle.

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IT Services Delivery- “From the Ground to the Cloud” Part 2

Posted on March 5, 2010, 8:56 am, by David Masembwa and received No Comments ».

In my previous blog  IT Services Delivery- “From the Ground to the Cloud”, I touched on the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Service Transition; 4) Service Operation; 5) Continual Service Improvement, as they pertain to “physical” –  non-virtualized IT environments.  For this blog, I will examine the pillars 1) Service Strategy and 2) Service Design, as they pertain to virtualized or cloud based IT environments.  IT Service Strategies in virtualized environments require a great amount of thought and planning.  Speaking of planning – planning is a definite must have when exploring virtualization initiatives. Implementing virtualization technology by consolidation and “going from many to one” of servers, workstations, network switches, OS’s and Applications, can appear to be deceptively simple; however, many of the IT software and hardware components fall under the “umbrella” of one system – the virtualization host.  What is an Administrator to do?

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A Data Center Intervention

Posted on March 4, 2010, 8:34 am, by Greg Agana and received No Comments ».

With the recent rush over the last decade to virtualize everything in the enterprise and products being marketed with “Green” or “Cloud” somewhere in the tagline, you would think that there was nothing left to virtualize.  If you make that assumption, you would be wrong.

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Microsoft Exchange Administrators Should Like Symantec Enterprise Vault (Part 1)

Posted on March 2, 2010, 8:15 am, by Matt Hamilton and received No Comments ».

Many organizations implement Enterprise Vault to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements.  Enterprise Vault does a great job at archiving journaled messages and provides legal, compliance and HR department’s quality backend search tools to search and export archived email.  But what’s in it for the Exchange Administrators who already have enough to worry about keeping email running smoothly?  You can hear it already, “we purchased a new application for e-discovery called Enterprise Vault that you need to learn and implement.  Oh, by the way you will be supporting it going forward as well”.  Don’t throw up your hands.  Read on.

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Government Procurement – What’s the Big Deal?

Posted on March 1, 2010, 8:17 am, by Rick Marcotte and received No Comments ».

In my last blog, I outlined why public sector is an attractive market and draws the attention of many companies, especially when the commercial market is soft.  I also mentioned that only those companies who add real value have a chance to win and the “Johnny Come Lately’s” have a real challenge to try and be successful.  Today, I look at one element of this complex market – the procurement process.

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Symantec Storage Foundation 5.1 for UNIX: A solid approach to data management

Posted on February 26, 2010, 9:00 am, by Pete Smith and received No Comments ».

I work with a number of data center managers whom increasingly need tools that will allow them to handle expanding complexity with smaller budgets.  Symantec Storage Foundation maximizes storage hardware investments, and as a staple for UNIX systems, has proven to be reliable and capable across heterogeneous storage arrays. Many features have been added in recent years, and the latest 5.1 version builds on the product’s capabilities. I thought it would be helpful to share some impressions of this version’s new and important capabilities.

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Duplicate Data Elephant in the Room?

Posted on February 25, 2010, 8:25 am, by Matt Hamilton and received No Comments ».

Smartly managed data replication is an important element of many enterprises’ IT operations.  Good.  The problematic distant cousin to this is data duplication.  A sloppy, hard-to-avoid problem.  Data deduplication (DD) solves this problem by eliminating redundant data and reducing storage requirements—also known as “intelligent compression” or “single-instance storage”. Data deduplication can reduce the amount of data stored on media considerably, as well as improve data protection and increase the speed of service.

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Thoughts on Symantec NetBackup 7.0

Posted on February 24, 2010, 10:00 am, by Matt Hamilton and received No Comments ».

With the release of Netbackup 7.0 scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, I wanted to give you my take on the substantive features. There are three:

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