Posts Tagged ‘ROI’

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Simplify Installing a Server Center While Growing Your Business

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Secure data storage is essential for most businesses – whether the data is related to sales figures, customer information, client records, or something else altogether. While many business owners look for data storage from dedicated server centers, many recognize that there are benefits to maintaining a small – or large – server room of their own.

Setting up a dedicated data center can be challenging. It’s important to think about the racks that will house the server units. Ensuring that every unit has adequate power is crucial – and being certain that the equipment will not overheat is critical as well. Factor in the need for scalability, the importance of having software that’s easy to use that will help you monitor the data center, the amount of system security required, and the need to maximize up-time, and installing servers can seem daunting.

It doesn’t have to be.

Whether you are installing servers, storage devices, and networking equipment for the first time or are expanding your current setup, there is one tool available that can simplify the process. APC’s InfraStruxure will allow you to meet all of the requirements that your IT team has established. You’ll be able to reduce costs, increase efficiency and availability, and reduce the amount of power necessary to keep your equipment running. More than that you will be able to ensure that you have a system that’s scalable – whether you’re just creating a server environment or you’re expanding the storage and availability of an existing data center.

No matter what field your business is in, efficiency and reliability are top priorities when creating a data center. Similarly, regardless of your industry, it seems safe to assume that you’re looking to keep costs low. Knowing that you’re able to scale your data center to meet your needs and easily manage your servers, storage devices, and networking equipment lets you get the most out the system you establish – allowing you to focus on what’s more important: keeping your business running smoothly.

Posted in Application Delivery & Optimization, Uncategorized | 212 Comments »

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Is a Next-Generation Firewall in Your Future? Should It Be?

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

Security and performance are always difficult to balance. The need to secure your network and applications is obvious, but to do so at the expense of performance impedes productivity. If security prevents employee efficiency, your company risks assuming a completely new set of costs. Traditional firewall solutions have done little to help with this situation.

To address this challenge, a new type of firewall is entering the market. Called “next-generation firewalls,” they sweep traffic efficiently for intrusion prevention and maintain an awareness of applications going through it for policy enforcement and identity-based application use. This new approach to firewalls is powerful, dynamic and intelligent, providing a new level of functionality and security without compromising application or network performance.

Long considered something for the future, next-generation firewalls have already come to market, and they’ve had a few years to mature. Palo Alto Networks, for example, is considered to be the first IT equipment manufacturer to move into this space, having come to market in 2007 with its first product. Now, Palo Alto has moved into the industry-leader position, with more than 2,200 customers and a comparatively mature next-generation firewall solution.

NetworkWorld reports:

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Posted in Endpoint Security & Management | No Comments »

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Use Unified Communications to Supercharge Employee Collaboration

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Even if your employees are accustomed to working together, something always seems to get in the way, right? Teams spread out across offices and time zones may try diligently to share ideas and collaborate, but conference calls are inconvenient, and collaboration software usually seems to fall short. So, technology impedes productivity, and overcoming this barrier can unlock lots of potential in your organization.

The way to do this is to implement a unified communications solution, such as ShoreTel’s, in order to help your employees connect with each other, share documents and build off each other’s ideas to help your company maximize its ROI on talent and technology.

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Posted in Unified Communications | No Comments »

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Top Five Business Reasons to Implement Virtualization

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

It isn’t easy to manage a heterogeneous infrastructure. If your datacenter is packed with disparate systems and cross-platform integrations, you need to maintain a variety of skill sets in your IT department – and it could take multiple groups to identify and resolve problems with your infrastructure. It’s easy for even the most easily managed problems to become taxing for your organization. A virtualized infrastructure – using Citrix XenServer, for example – can take the sting out of cross-platform management.

It’s a business decision first, so here are the top five business reasons to move to a virtualized infrastructure:

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Four Signs It’s Time for Application Virtualization

Monday, October 25th, 2010

There’s always room to streamline your application management processes. Traditional approaches tend to be cumbersome and time-consuming, and they leave openings for risks such as non-standard software installation and suboptimal access control. Application virtualization solutions such as Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp can be used to remedy many of these problems, and the TCO and ROI cases are well established.

But, when it’s time to present your plan to move to a virtualized application environment to the executive team, you need specifics – it has to be clear that there are direct and tangible benefits to application virtualization that can be realized fairly quickly. Start by looking at your existing operation for indicators that it’s time to virtualize. Here are four to get you started.

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Are You Overspending on Backups? It’s Time to Dedupe

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Most companies commit too much of their budgets to backups, and trends in data growth mean this problem will only get worse. As more systems generate more data – with company growth and expansion contributing – your storage requirements will become increasingly expensive, ultimately diverting resources from projects with ROI potential to storage management operations that don’t deliver much incremental value. In the end, this could cost your organization opportunities in the marketplace.

Adding people and equipment isn’t the answer. While these two tactics address the challenge of managing data, they produce an ongoing expense problem – essentially, the only solution available becomes spending more. It isn’t a sustainable approach, as you’ll probably hear at some point from your CFO.

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Posted in Archiving & Compliance | 3 Comments »

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What Your Executives Need to Know about Unified Communications

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

Company leaders, especially CFOs, are right to be skeptical about any proposed IT investment. Unless you have roots in the datacenter, it can be tough to understand – and quantify – the benefit of a particular IT solution to the company. The gap in knowledge unfortunately means that CIOs and IT directors hear “no” too often, even if most of the rejections are prudent. Excellent opportunities are missed, and the problem is neither financial nor technical. Rather, it’s an issue of communication: IT leaders need to make their proposals easier to follow, especially when the overall business benefit is substantial.

This is especially true of unified communications solutions.

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Posted in Unified Communications | No Comments »

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Are You Over-Powering Your Virtualized Infrastructure?

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Your energy use may be higher than necessary, and it could be putting your equipment at risk. This probably seems counterintuitive for a virtual server environment; after all, a reduction in equipment should lead to a reduction in power. Yet, after virtualizing, you may have energy inefficiencies relative to your underlying physical infrastructure. This provides an opportunity for continued cost savings and risk mitigation, by optimizing power consumption for your newly architected virtual server environment.

The primary measure of energy efficiency in your datacenter is power usage effectiveness (PUE), reflecting total energy consumption relative to your physical equipment footprint. In a physical server infrastructure, energy consumption and costs are distributed over a larger set of hardware, much of which has loner latency periods. This drives a lower PUE. The equipment utilization efficiencies of a virtual server infrastructure, however, lead to less dormancy because of consolidation. Energy consumption relative to underlying equipment thus increases, elevating PUE.

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Beat the Heat: Optimize Cooling for Increased Server
Density

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Server and storage virtualization bring clear IT efficiency advantages to your datacenter. You can consolidate servers, reduce your equipment footprint and cut both new purchase and maintenance expenses. To make a virtualized environment effective, however, you need to be aware of the new set of risks you face and how you can overcome them.

Among the major challenges in a virtual server environment is the threat of heat – and the attendant importance of cooling – in your datacenter. Virtualized or not, this is a concern, but how you address it, and indeed the nature of the risk, is different when virtualization-driven efficiencies are at work in your company.

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Posted in virtualization | 2 Comments »

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Bring Expectations in Line with Reality

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

End users and customers sometimes have unrealistic expectations. They expect applications to respond immediately and resource-intensive processes to be completed at the blink of an eye. The real world doesn’t work this way, of course. But, it’s worth asking yourself if there is a place in the middle. Are you leaving some performance opportunities on the table?

The network always gets the blame when end users are forced to click and wait. It’s intuitive for them to think the pipes are the cause, because they stand between the user and the application. The real bottleneck, however, could be further upstream. Before digging into your network to see if there are ways to improve performance, you need to make sure you’re looking in the right place. There’s a chance your applications – not the network – are the real reason for your users’ frustrations.

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Posted in Application Delivery & Optimization | 12 Comments »

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