READ Storage ARTICLES

Making your datacenter eco-friendly can bring your company major benefits and put you ahead of the environmental trend.

If the cost to implement a green datacenter is holding you back, consider how much you're spending right now on energy output. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , data centers used an estimated 12 billion kilowatt hours of electrical power in the year 2000, expanding to 23 billion in 2005.

You have your RAID arrays, your storage area network, your service-level agreements, your compliance records, but do you have a clear view of your overall storage goals?

To put it another way--a way your CEO and key business partners will understand--is your storage infrastructure working hard enough to bring strategic value to your company?

From the largest multinational down to the humblest mom and pop e-business, companies are facing explosive demand for storage. E-mail. Mission-critical applications. Data retention and compliance. Digital content. Availability and data recovery. The list at times can seem endless.

The surge couldn't happen at a worse time for IT managers, many of whom are facing flat or only slightly increased budgets. Even so, data managers are allocating more of that shrinking pile of money to storage concerns. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, 40 percent of enterprises said they plan ...

What - Differentiating the Technology

While you might think "a data center is a data center" or at least that all Tier 2 or 3 data centers are alike, that's only partially true. Sure, many providers tout familiar features such as N+1 UPS, redundant networks, or "five nines" availability. Then there are the terms that most marketing people have abused when ...

Traditionally infrastructure was, and still today, often provided to companies internally and by 3rd party providers. These providers, such as small businesses or internal IT Departments, would deliver actual hardware including cabling, architectural design, network configuration & setup, load balancing, hosting of phy...

For further context, take this working example of a very common infrastructure scenario. An industrial company that makes, manages, and operates the manufacturing of widget X. The company has a primary office space in an office building in a major metropolitan area. In that office there are approximately 90 employees. ...

You can perform the most basic internal monitoring on a Linux dedicated server at the operating system level. There are a number of command-line tools that can be accessed via SSH (Secure Shell), including the following:

dmesg - Typing this command outputs kernel messages from the system log. Most messages will occur at boot, although some may produce output periodically. Most messages are benign, but some kernel-level errors may appear here.

GET REAL ABOUT YOUR RISK TOLERANCE

How long can your business "be down" without access to its computer network or key applications? Many business owners and leaders tend to cheat or guess when answering this question, usually in order to reduce the cost of implementing a protective measure or because they underestimate the scope of what is involved. Thi...

Consolidation process starting... now...

During consolidation phase you should definitely choose few vendors you trust and stick with them. This approach could lead you to great cost savings because you're buying equipment from a few vendors that can bundle offered technologies together and give you a better discount. Let's say that you buy servers, storage, ...

One of the demos of the service cloud showed how monitoring social media could result in better, more efficient provision of service. The idea behind this is that many consumers no longer go directly to the company whose products or services are giving them issues, but to the social media universe. I always tho...

In any event, the Salesforce.com solution - in a way similar to many other solutions, although perhaps more completely - can identify those service-related customer conversations and allow companies to offer advice. Better yet, they can learn from customer advice for situations they may not have anticipated. Pa...

Data is key to all your marketing efforts. Whether it is segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, lead routing, or marketing analysis, if you don't have clean and consistent data, your efforts will be built on the shakiest of foundations. However, when thinking about your marketing automation efforts, data manageme...

However, some minimal upfront efforts to understand and improve the quality of your data can greatly improve your effectiveness as a marketer.

Cloud services have been firmly established as a viable option for a wide variety of critical business processes, including email, archiving, storage, productivity applications, and even mission-critical enterprise applications.

But if you aren't running your applications in-house, you're dependent on another company's ability to stay up and running, provide security, and deliver services to you without downtime. The first step towards achieving that level of assurance is in the selection process, making sure that you have a strong provider th...