Microsoft unveiled a new way of delivering expert configuration and troubleshooting information for Windows Server and Windows applications at its Management Summit in Las Vegas Tuesday. By the end of the year, System Center, the management console for Windows Server, Hyper-V, and other Microsoft systems, will get an add-on component, System Center Advisor, which automatically collects information on your server configurations, notifies you of known or potential problems, and recommends a best practice alternative.
Network Computing
Microsoft System Center Offers Private Cloud Advisor
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IBM Pulse2011 Conference: Helping Enterprises Get Smarter
Yogi Berra is attributed with the quote, “This is like deja vu all over again,” and that is what last week’s IBM Pulse2011 conference in Las Vegas felt like. The event had the same title “The Premier Service Management Event” and the subtitle “Optimizing the World’s Infrastructure,” as well as essentially the same message with some exceptions, such as an emphasis on Smarter Computing, as last year’s conference. But that is not a bad thing. As was noted many times during Pulse2011, integrated service management is a journey. For most enterprises, that journey takes much longer than a year, so staying the course is important.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Upping The Ante For SaaS Providers And Corporate CIOs
Although cloud services continue to be a hot IT topic, a 2010 Quest Software survey revealed that 40 percent of businesses interviewed had yet to adopt a cloud solution and that, “After an initial surge of adoption, growth will slow until remaining companies see proof of success from early adopters.” A 2010 survey of senior level IT professionals conducted by Electric Cloud, a private development cloud company, and Osterman Research revealed that 52 percent of companies using cloud computing have cloud infrastructure resources that are rarely or never used and that 47 percent report some or lots of excess capacity. Gartner further reported that many companies are taking their on-premise bad habits into the cloud–like paying for unused software, also known as shelf-ware.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Dear RSA, Trust Is Earned Everyday; You’re Not Earning It Today
Trust is earned every day and in information security, losing your customers trust is easy to do and hard to earn back. RSA had a breach with unknown ramifications. RSA Chairman Art Coviello’s cryptic notice and RSA’s relative silence since then, is not helping customers feel confident in SecureID as a product or RSA as a company. Just look at what’s happening on Twitter for gems like this “Dear #RSA, open your pants and show us the problem, or we will never trust you again.” I don’t think any reasonable information security or IT professional would expect any vendor to be 100 percent secure and RSA is no exception. When a problem or breach occurs however, you retain your customers trust by being forthright about the problem and stating what you are doing about it. That is what Microsoft and VeriSign did when VeriSign erroneously issued two code signing certificates in 2001. The two companies owned up, came clean, and moved on. Fact is, RSA has to come clean publicly about what was taken, when it was taken, and a forthright assessment of the damage to customer or you risk losing their trust.
Network Computing
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rPath Buttons Up Software Automation And Control
rPath, a software developer focused on automation and control for enterprise systems, is rolling out X6, an IT-as-a-service platform that automates deployment and update of the entire system stack, including application, middleware and operating system software and configuration settings, across physical, virtual and cloud environments, with the click of a button. In addition to the push-button user experience, the new product unifies software and configuration automation so that software stacks can be personalized and activated through easy editing of host configuration settings, such as network protocol, storage and IP settings, states the company.
Network Computing
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ONPATH Launches All-Optical Switching Blade To Support Applications Up To 100Gbps And Beyond
ONPATH Technologies, the leader in scalable connectivity and monitoring solutions for high performance networks, today announced the release of an all-optical blade, called the O-Blade. The O-Blade uses a 3D MEMS-based optical switch supporting 96 ports of non-blocking, any-to-any optical connectivity. The O-Blade has been designed to operate in the same physical UCS 3900 chassis as the company’s other switching blades. It can be simultaneously managed locally or remotely through ONPATH’s HorizON management software.
Network Computing
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Commvault Turns Snapshots Into “Proper” Backups
As we discussed a few weeks ago you can certainly argue that snapshots, when combined with replication, could serve as an adequate backup system. My biggest objection was that snapshots lack the catalog that conventional backup applications build as they backup data. Commvault’s SnapProtect fills that gap providing catalogs and a management console for snapshots across a variety of arrays and other snapshot providers.
Network Computing
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OpenFlow Coming To InteropNet Labs
One of the most interesting aspects of Interop is the Interop Labs area on the show floor, which highlights new and emerging technologies. Years past showed VPN’s, network access control, and various Trusted Computing Group projects. This year, InteropNet’s OpenFlow Lab is going to showcase OpenFlow, with live demonstrations of the OpenFlow protocol. Openflow may well become an important networking protocol that will have significant impact on how you can deploy and manage networks.
Network Computing
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Seagate Refreshes Enterprise SSD, HDD Lines
Seagate is unveiling five new storage drives in what it calls the industry’s largest-scale enterprise launch in years. The roll-out includes two solid-state drives (SSDs) in its Tier 0 (hot data) Pulsar family, two new products in the Tier-1 Savvio hard-disk drive (HDD) line and the 3TByte Constellation ES Tier 2 near-line drive. The company says that the new offerings bring new features, reliability and/or capacities that address different market opportunities, from offering the first multilevel cell (MLC)-enabled SSDs to handling exponential data growth reliably.
Network Computing
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VKernel Performance Analyzer Provides Real-Time Analysis Of vCenter
In a move that helps the company better compete with the recently announced VMware vCenter Operations, VKernel Corp. has added performance analysis functionality to its VKernel Capacity Management Suite software. VKernel Performance Analyzer provides real-time analysis of system alerts and metrics coming out of vCenter to help determine abnormal trends and their impact, as well as the root cause and a resolution of current problems in the environment. In addition to competing on features, VKernel is also competing with VMware by using a different type of pricing structure that is more attractive to companies that are using virtualization heavily to make a more efficient use of their servers.
Network Computing
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