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 TitleDate AddedCompany
whitepaper Making IT Invisible: NetApp Storage for Virtual Server Environments2008-01-25 NetApp
  The goal of IT is to become an invisible entity within a larger scale organization--an entity that can quickly adapt to change and scale to meet the rapidly changing needs of today's business, an entity that focuses on delivering and maintaining applications, not infrastructure. In order to achieve IT transparency, IT's visibility needs to be eliminated, since all anyone ever sees are the problems and road blocks IT creates which inhibit business flexibility, growth and potential revenue. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) speaks with hundreds of IT end-users and the majority of them share a common goal of driving down capital and operational costs, simplifying ongoing management, reducing maintenance overhead and improving asset utilization (doing more with less). With such demands, it is hardly plausible for IT to become invisible -- or is it?

To make IT invisible, consider a popular science experiment that demonstrates the different states of matter as we learn how water changes from a solid to a liquid. Conversion between these two vastly different states is called a phase transition which is exactly what IT needs to undergo to become invisible. IT needs to find ways to make the transition from a solid to a liquid. The silos that have been built within the IT organization need to be re-architected with a fluid infrastructure that connects the disparate pieces and flows with the business.

Server virtualization is one such technology that provides liquidity to IT by delivering improved hardware utilization, physical server consolidation, increased availability and lower data center operating costs. ESG believes that server virtualization is acting as a catalyst for virtualization at all layers within the data center, a concept ESG refers to as Infrastructure Virtualization. The server virtualization market is red hot and is only showing signs of increased adoption. Businesses are running production workloads on virtual machines and finding the bene

Tags: Storage Management, IT Reliability, Storage Consolidation, Virtualization		   
whitepaper IBM Systems advisor tool2008-01-25 IBM
  IBM is dedicated to helping small and medium-sized businesses find the right systems hardware while protecting their investments with flexible, scalable products that can grow as the business grows.

The IBM Systems advisor tool can help you, too. By answering a few quick questions, it can identify products that can help meet your business needs. Get started now!

Tags: Infrastructure Management, Storage Management, Data Center, Strategic Planning		   
whitepaper New Deployment Methods for Desktops2008-01-24 Dell EqualLogic
  The benefits of storage consolidation and centralized management are well known - they include lower costs, better information protection, and improved IT efficiency. Server consolidation using virtualization software is aimed at generating these same results.

A recent trend in many large IT organizations goes beyond server virtualization to desktop virtualization. There are two primary methods of desktop virtualization, each with strengths and weaknesses. A basic understanding of remote desktops and desktop virtualization will help you decide if an implementation of this type is right for your organization.

Tags: Workstations, Storage Management, Virtualization		   
whitepaper Virtualizing Storage for VMware Success2008-01-23 NetApp
  Server virtualization has made day-to-day life a whole lot simpler for systems administrators; however, the benefits have not been shared by storage administrators and backup operators, who face new challenges as the result of data encapsulation. Storage infrastructure and operational practices that were designed for physical server architectures are not well suited to meet the demands of a virtual infrastructure.

Backup and disaster recovery practices have to change radically. New light needs to be shed on the importance of data protection and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Any consolidation effort also consolidates risk. With VMware the point of risk has shifted away from servers to shared storage. A RAID failure in a virtual infrastructure is catastrophic, as it potentially impacts dozens of virtual servers and applications. Any restore operation that requires data to be copied from another form of media can take days.

NetApp storage virtualization technologies solve these challenges and alleviate the burden on storage and backup teams. This article from NetApp's Tech OnTap newsletter describes how NetApp can:
  • Cut storage costs by half or more
  • Reduce VMware RTO to minutes
  • Increase efficiency to decrease soft costs
If you've virtualized your servers but not your storage, you've only done half the job. Virtualizing your storage infrastructure is critical to addressing the unique storage needs of VMware.

Tags: Storage Management, Storage Consolidation, Virtualization		   
whitepaper IT PARTNERS Case Study: City of Phoenix2008-01-23 IT PARTNERS
  The City of Phoenix owns and operates the Phoenix Airport System. The existing data center was highly constrained, with power and air conditioning nearing capacity and very limited amounts of available rack space. Connectivity to the rest of the City of Phoenix, as well as to the Internet, was through a non-redundant network infrastructure. The Aviation Department's Technology Division selected Hewlett-Packard (HP) and VMware technologies to help address these challenges. IT Partners engaged with the city's staff to implement Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions within the Aviation Department data center and SAN replication at the City of Phoenix IT Operations Center.

Tags: Data Center, SANs		   
whitepaper Dell EqualLogic PS Series with VMware - Virtual servers meet virtual storage2008-01-23 Dell EqualLogic
  Consolidation of data center assets has become a trend in many IT environments, providing benefits such as improved hardware resource utilization, easier management,and lower costs.

For storage, consolidation is accomplished by moving data off of a direct attached storage (DAS)to inside the server onto a shared pool of storage in a storage area network (SAN).

Read this solution brief to see how server consolidation has become popular thanks to technologies like VMware ESX Server and GSX Server. These "virtual machine" products consolidate server data images onto fewer hardware platforms which improves IT efficiency.

Tags: Storage Management, SANs, Storage Consolidation, Virtualization		   
whitepaper Microsoft SQL Server and Dell EqualLogic PS Series Solution Brief2008-01-23 Dell EqualLogic
  Managing business information is crucial to the success of any company or organization - and databases allow you to manage and use an incredible variety of information easily. Because of the importance of databases within a business environment and their impact on both commerce and productivity, databases require a robust server and storage infrastructure - highly reliable, high performing, easily scalable, and secure. This solution brief discusses how Dell EqualLogic PS Series and Microsoft SQL Server deliver record-breaking performance, availability, and scalability within your data center.

Tags: Storage Management, Database Marketing, Data Center, High Performance Computing		   
whitepaper One of Oregon's Largest Counties Deploys Equallogic2008-01-18 Dell EqualLogic
  Clackamas County, Oregon, is home to more than 338,000 people. Heavily timbered, the county's geographical features include Mt. Hood and numerous rivers - the Willamette, Clackamas, Sandy, Pudding, Molalla and Salmon. The Aging Fibre Channel SAN could not scale to meet growing demands. Clackamas County replaced old Fibre Channel SAN with modular PS Series SAN for central storage consolidation and data protection. It attached stray servers to the SAN, eliminating all direct attached storage.

Tags: Server Consolidation, Storage Consolidation		   
whitepaper Irish Builders Merchant Supports Growth With New Server Suite That Uses Approximately 25% Less Energy2008-01-18 Dell
  MacNaughton Blair in Ireland has grown rapidly through acquisition, internal investments and sales campaigns. But the company had outgrown its IT system. To continue running its successful business and support further growth, MacNaughton Blair needed a new server and storage suite that increased IT capacity and simplified management processes. MacNaughton Blair deployed Dell for its solution and implemented a new, more powerful solution before the company's office move. The system, designed by Dell consultants, consists of Dell PowerEdge servers that run a combination of Microsoft and VERITAS software and Dell OpenManage, and a consolidated storage environment from Dell EMC.

Tags: Storage Management, Storage Consolidation		   
whitepaper Write Off-Loading: Practical Power Management for Enterprise Storage2008-01-18 Microsoft
  In enterprise data centers power usage is a problem impacting server density and the total cost of ownership. Storage uses a significant fraction of the power budget and there are no widely deployed power-saving solutions for enterprise storage systems. The traditional view is that enterprise workloads make spinning disks down ineffective because idle periods are too short. This paper analyzed block-level traces from 36 volumes in an enterprise data center for one week and concluded that significant idle periods exist, and that they can be further increased by modifying the read/write patterns using write off-loading. Write off-loading allows write requests on spun-down disks to be temporarily redirected to persistent storage elsewhere in the data center.

Tags: Storage Management, Data Center		   


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