Entries categorized under “Data Center Management”

New found agility, reduced CAPEX and OPEX and centralized IT infrastructure management are driving the adoption of private clouds. But as organizations enter them their dark side of management complexities becomes more plainly seen. This is where HP's heightened integration with Microsoft Systems Center 2012 with its Virtual Machine Manager component comes into play. (read more)

Enterprise shops are like their small and midsize counterparts in that they share a similar desire to speed up and simplify backups in their respective environments. However the techniques required to meet these demands requires the use of backup software that is more sophisticated beneath the surface, easier to use and reduces operational expenses (OPEX). The enhancements found in this week's release of Symantec NetBackup 7.5 strike a good balance in accomplishing those exact objectives. (read more)

Today is the last business day of 2011 and with it DCIG brings you our top most read and referenced blog entries. Each blog entry is compelling, yet timeless. What we find ironic about these blogs is that even as topics like "cloud," "deduplication," and "virtualization" generate a great deal of buzz, simple blog entries on storage, backup and data center labeling outperform them due to their foundations for IT leaders and practitioners. (read more)

Before DCIG announces its top three blog entries of 2011 tomorrow, this year we thought we would do something different and take a look at some other blog entries that garnered a great deal of attention throughout 2011 but not quite enough to reach the Top 10. That being the case, an honorable mention for these blog entries was in order. Further, what is notable about these entries is that, with the exception of one, they were all published in 2011. (read more)

Today I continue to reveal the Top 10 most read blog entries on DCIG's website in 2011 with these four (4) entries typifying the two extremes of topics that DCIG's readers tend to read the most. At one end of the spectrum are two forward looking blog entries on topics that every organization are examining now: the cloud and virtual server backup. At the other end of the spectrum are two older blog entries on the topics of cable labeling and encryption for which organizations continue to need relevant information. (read more)

In the product and investing world, $1 billion dollars is interesting. Interesting markets draw new and existing companies. Derrick Harris of Gigaom believes Amazon's latest filing indicates they will have exceeded $1 billion dollars in revenue for Amazon Web Services by year end. $1 billion dollars creates a lot of interest by existing and venture backed product companies. (read more)

Early in October I wrote a somewhat disparaging blog entry about my initial impressions of the iPad that I had just purchased. Since then my perceptions and opinions about the iPad have changed significantly. The most notable change has been in my understanding of what problems the iPad was designed to solve. Rather than it being designed as a product to generate information, it is designed to consume and manipulate it. (read more)

IBM briefed DCIG on the details around its October Active Cloud Engine product announcement on Wednesday, November 16, of this past week. The briefing covered three functional areas, two products, one statement of direction and ironically nothing about the cloud. However, IBM deserves kudos for making a big change to its scale out NAS (SONAS) product during its Active Cloud Engine product announcement. (read more)

Virtualization is sweeping through data centers of all sizes and, as it does, it introduces levels of complexity that organizations are ill-equipped to handle. To mitigate this, reference architectures are emerging as a technique to standardize which hardware and software are deployed, under what circumstances, and how it is managed. (read more)

Over the past few months my wife and I have contemplated the purchase of some type of tablet (either an Android or iPad.) It was only after a great deal of debate and a fair amount of research that we finally broke down and purchased one opting for the iPad. But after only a few weeks of owning it, I already find myself using it very rarely and having a bit of buyer's remorse because while it is really cool toy, it remains exactly that: a really cool toy. (read more)

Enterprises have been hearing about the value and veracity of public cloud for years even as Symantec has been getting feedback on its value proposition from its public cloud customers. The message that Symantec has received is that "ripping and replacing" is not an option. Rather enterprises want and need revolutionary infrastructure with evolutionary products and prices. (read more)

Independence Day on July 4th in the United States is only a few days away but as it approaches storage companies are cautiously celebrating their independence. As they do they are either looking to survive or aggressively looking to be acquired to avoid becoming a footnote in the annals of history with Pillar Data Systems becoming the latest storage company to join the ranks of the acquired that now pledges its allegiance to a new master. (read more)

Here are the million and, in many cases, the multi-million dollar questions that every enterprise of almost any size or consequence is making or will be making now or in the next few years, "Are Dell and HP serious about enterprise storage?" Or are they inclined to treat storage as they have in the past - a bolt-on accessory to a server sale? (read more)

Charge back is one of those pesky little details that every IT person hates to address as it can be painful to implement and then equally cumbersome to administer. Yet the upside of implementing it provides data centers the ability to justify their costs as well as opens the door for them to have conversations with their clients as to what additional service offerings they want. (read more)

The start of every decade new trends emerge that do more than influence opinions and behavior for a few months or years. Instead they are megatrends that fundamentally shape and mold an industry for the entire decade and influence innovation that will come in the decades to follow. Right now four such megatrends are emerging that are reshaping datacenters as a whole and are changing how hardware and software are being delivered to them. (read more)

As the economy rebounds, midsized companies looking to expand their business must usually first grow their datacenter. However datacenter growth introduces new levels of complexity that cast a long shadow over future business expansion as managing this technology can take the focus off of the business. The Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX400 server changes that model. (read more)

In a recent podcast HP Storage Strategist, Brad Parks, states, "Over the last 18 months HP has been beating the converged infrastructure drum." Well, that's great but more important than just beating that drum, HP needs to continue to provide evidence that all of its divisions are marching to that beat. This week HP StorageWorks division fell in step by enhancing the products in its storage portfolio to better deliver on HP's broader vision of delivering a converged infrastructure for all size enterprises. (read more)

Once upon a time, data center management was a task reserved for really large enterprises that had thousands of square feet of data center floor space and teams dedicated to supporting it. But now almost any size organization can have a significant number of physical and virtual machines (VMs) deployed in a relatively small data center with only a few people to manage it. This situation dictates that these organizations put in place data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software so they can achieve the levels of efficiency and reliability that they expect without compromising either availability or support. (read more)

This last week while doing some research I ran across the term Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software for the first time. Intrigued, I spent a little time investigating what it was only to discover that for the most part DCIM is a new name for an old friend (or nemesis, depending on your experiences) - Storage Resource Management (SRM.) But this is one of the few times where a change of name may stand to do everyone a lot of good from the vendors who are providing DCIM software to the organizations who are buying it. (read more)

Ever since Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intel announced the formation of VCE, The Virtual Computing Environment Company, on November 3, 2009, there has been a fair amount of debate as to how VCE will operate. Many of the questions focus on what benefits VCE will deliver to enterprises now and what enterprises should ultimately expect from VCE in the future. Having recently attended the EMC Analyst Days Event in New York on January 17th and 18th, it is much clearer as to what VCE is delivering today and how it is laying the foundation to help make enterprise private clouds "Great" in the very near future. (read more)

Ask any VMware administrator what the implications are of using a non-certified storage solution in their VMware environment and they shudder to think of the consequences if they call VMware support. But identifying a unified storage solution that is also VMware Certified is more complex than small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) may expect. (read more)

This is it. The last day of 2010. So time to reveal what the top three most viewed blog entries on DCIG's website were in 2010. (read more)

Last week Tuesday I began to reflect on the most read blog entries on DCIG's site this past year in terms of the number of page views they received. In that blog entry I covered the blog entries that came in at numbers 8, 9 and 10 on DCIG's site in 2010. Today I want to pick up by covering the blog entries that come in the middle - from #7 down to #4. (read more)

More storage capacity and faster performance in new storage systems is anything but new these days. If anything, in this day and age enterprise organizations want to feast on these features PLUS options that keep them lean by enabling them to more efficiently use these resources, requiring less time to manage them and quickly integrating them with their emerging virtual environments. It is these features and more that NetApp served up to enterprises earlier this week. (read more)

Once upon a time virtualization was just a concept on most organization's roadmaps. Today it is a rarity that I talk to an organization that does not have a large percentage of its infrastructure virtualized. But this is creating new management challenges, one of which is keeping applications and their underlying virtualized infrastructure in proper alignment. (read more)