Posts Tagged ‘virtualization’

Five Steps to Better Storage Management

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

The challenge before most storage system administrators is pretty straightforward: where are you going to put your data? While the answer may seem obvious, think about the trends affecting your storage management environment. The amount of data being created is growing rapidly, and your company’s requirements are poised to skyrocket. Incremental datacenter changes won’t provide a real solution, especially if floor and rack space are already at a premium.

There is no simple solution for handling rapid data growth, but this doesn’t leave you without alternatives. You could use Hitachi Data Systems solutions, for example, to streamline your storage management operations through virtualization and use the five tips below to help you get started on a plan to adapt your datacenter:

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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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Does Application Performance Put Your Brand at Risk?

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Fight the initial temptation to think only about customer-facing applications. What happens inside your company can still have an impact on your interaction with the public, making it a contributing factor how your brand is perceived. Slow applications, even those that are only experienced directly by your employees, can result in lost opportunities, substandard customer experiences and a frustration that can drive them to your competitors.

The scenarios are both familiar and predictable. We’ve all spent time on the phone with a customer service rep and heard some version of: “Please bear with me. The computers are just really slow today.” An awkward period follows, consisting either small-talk attempts that fall flat or an uncomfortable silence. For self-service applications, you don’t have to worry about how to keep a customer entertained, but you do risk losing a frustrated customer who has no interest in waiting for a system to respond.

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Are You Backing up Too Much Data?

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Regulatory requirements, prudent business practices and the fear of disruption make enterprise-wide backups a necessity in today’s business environment. And you don’t want to cut out what might be important. After all, you want anything that can make a return to business as usual to be available. You can have this while accelerating your backups and not compromising how much important information you store. It’s time to de-dupe your datacenter.

Few businesses aren’t touched by some kind of compliance structure. Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, the anti-money laundering provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT and PCI are just a handful of the rules that can influence your datacenter. If your company is publicly traded, you may also have to implement and demonstrate certain disaster recovery capabilities, and businesses in the legal and financial services fields need to navigate archiving and document retention regulations (e.g., from the New York Stock Exchange and National Association of Securities Dealers).

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Datacenter on Demand: Why You Need Virtualization

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Datacenter resources tend to be constrained by platform. Capacity planning can help you stay in front of demand, but increased utilization can require specific equipment investments. Meanwhile, you have other systems on the floor that are under-utilized. With virtualization technology, you can make storage and computing power a portable commodity in your datacenter. Rather than add equipment, you can borrow resources across platform to meet anticipated – and unexpected – demand.

Capacity planning is an important part of any IT strategy, but it is driven by the resources available. If you are forecasting utilization for a storage environment, for example, you need to anticipate peak utilization and growth rates for the specific platform. Even if other equipment in your datacenter is dark, you may still need to make an additional investment. As a result, you have some infrastructure investments that perform well (in terms of utilization per dollar spent) – and others, simply, that don’t. This inequity can make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness with which you use your IT budget and can lead to expenses that seem unnecessary.

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