IT Expert Voice

Your company has to keep exploring new markets and introducing new products because existing products become obsolete so fast and profits get squeezed. Since all new products need systems support to bring them to market, you will be an indispensable player on your company’s senior management team if you can quickly deploy flexible and scalable systems without spending a lot of money up front to get started. READ MORE

The seeming friendliness of social media makes corporations vulnerable to a variety of security threats. People using social networks often have a false sense of safety since they are interacting with friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances, as well as their favorite brands and sports teams. This sense of trust has many social media users letting down their guard and ignoring basic online security measures. IT can help users use social media safely and productively, without threatening enterprise security. READ MORE

You can provision and deploy entire cloud-based Windows Server images in just minutes with services like Amazon, GoGrid, and BlueLock. That’s nice enough if you need one or two images. But what if you’re a burgeoning data center cluster?

Although it was born of the need to relocate existing resources seamlessly, the category of cloud computing services called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) manages on its own to change the characteristics and texture of an enterprise network. Businesses now have both the means and the incentive to subdivide their server functionality into discrete roles rather than physical boxes. They can then deploy, using IaaS, roles that can reliably be managed remotely — for instance, the customer-facing Web server and the SharePoint server. That’s a fundamental architectural difference from the days when businesses had 16 or so processors here, and 10 or so there, distributed the functions among them as evenly as possible, and used load balancing techniques to make sure none of the servers were overworked.

As a result, the emerging image of the server image — that virtual, entirely digital, construct that’s the principal agent of cloud-based functionality — looks altogether different from the server that once resided on premises, even after the server started becoming virtualized. Unlike a typical virtual processing cluster in data centers today, an IaaS cluster of server images is apportioned and managed entirely differently, with the objective being to enable the customer to administer the business function assigned to the server image, rather than the server itself. READ MORE

Standardizing your virtual machines with templates saves time, effort, and money in both deployment and management.

Virtualization aims to maximize savings through consolidation and standardization. Although the largest savings come from consolidating many virtual machines (VMs) onto fewer physical servers, standardizing your installations can save significant costs in provisioning and managing virtual machines. READ MORE

Maximizing virtualization benefits means getting the best match of virtualized and physical resources.

In theory, you can put any virtualized workload on any server. In practice, it’s more complicated than that. First, you want to use as few servers as possible to support virtualized applications and servers. (That’s one place you get cost savings, after all.) Second, you want to avoid single points of failure and improve overall efficiency. It takes a fair amount of planning to do server virtualization right. READ MORE

Moving LAN and storage to Ethernet can cut costs and reduce the cabling rat’s nest behind the servers. But there are problems to consider. Find out what you need to know about competing storage-over-Ethernet technologies.

Increasingly, companies are looking to converge data center networks on Ethernet. The benefits are clear, including lower hardware costs and easier management.

Unfortunately the problems are also clear. Running a storage network over Ethernet presents technical challenges. And enterprises have sunk costs in existing non-Ethernet networking technologies, principally Fiber Channel. READ MORE

For most companies, the best disaster recovery (DR) strategy is a blend of physical and virtual. The trick, of course, is in figuring out what goes where. To that end, it’s a good idea to determine the where and the what before the how. READ MORE

A hybrid cloud approach can be a great way of achieving disaster recovery. Three experts weigh in with their best advice. READ MORE

Cloud computing tools are becoming increasingly important to disaster recovery (DR), but they need to be used right. A misstep can be costly, if not devastating. We asked three experts to share their tips to help you fine-tune cloud and DR efforts. READ MORE

Which is better: a virtualized disaster recovery center, or a physical data center? We explain the options.

Disaster recovery would be considerably easier to plan if the future were known. As no time machine yet exists, the best one can do is plan according to probabilities. But calamity often wreaks havoc on the best of plans. A strong disaster recovery (DR) plan is designed with sufficient resilience and versatility to overcome any disaster.

But which provides greater resilience and versatility, a physical DR center or a virtual one? Which is the better strategy? Or is a blended solution the best recourse? READ MORE