ITEC

Boost Performance & Stay On Budget In The Face Of Shrinking Storage Space

Tough economic times are prompting IT shops to scour their infrastructures for the most efficient ways to reduce costs, improve performance, and reduce risk. Because the amount of managed data continues to grow even in a suppressed business environment, storage is rapidly becoming a priority area of focus.

In many cases, relatively small investments in storage can return significant savings. Before diving in, however, it’s important to keep some challenges in mind.

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Looking for insight in to the latest technology developments? Check out ITEC-TV, a weekly 25-minute webcast featuring ExtremeLabs principal research Tom Henderson from Indianapolis and ITEC GM Bill Sell in Boston for an irreverent look at the issues of the day. Frequent guests and reports from the field help round out these reports in a fast-paced manner. Joining Tom and Bill this week is Computerworld’s Content Director for New Media Products and former eWeek editor Eric Lundquist. Sign up now for updates on ITEC-TV. ITEC-TV runs live every Wednesday afternoon at 4:00 PM Eastern.

Check out the free archives of past episodes:

Episode 4, March 18, 2009: Recap if the IDC Directions Conference in Boston; IBM buying Sun?

Episode 3, March 11, 2009: Live from Las Vegas and the Symantec ManageFusion conference

Episode 2, March 4, 2009: All About Innovation – reports from DEMO, CeBIT and iRoadShow

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Altiris is digested and the future CEO defines focus.

For some reason, Symantec's corporate yellow color always reminds me of a blanket. But unlike some companies that seem to plot global domination at every turn, Symantec seems happy with its three cornered blanket. Executives expect to do more in the areas of security, backup, and storage management rather than take on new markets. Growth by improving on its strengths, rather than by chasing new markets.

Symantec bought Altiris, according to executives, because you can't have a secure server or client until you manage it properly, and you can't properly manage a non-secure server or client. It actually makes sense, and the Altiris technologies can help Symantec's reach into their three-pronged market of security, backup, and storage management.

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First appearing in 1995, the "wiki" approach to creating interactive and collaborative Web pages quickly became the star format for social networks, but too often business also-rans. Part of the problem comes from top-down managers uncomfortable with underlings making changes without authorization, and from stories of update wars on the most famous wiki, Wikipedia, the encyclopedia written by users. But successful corporate wikis abound, including SamePage from eTouch Systems. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for fast, and wiki wiki is nonsensical, like saying "fast fast" or "run run." The word sounds cute and friendly, another strike against the technology being accepted in the board room.

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A new piece of malware is making its rounds, this time targeting consumer routers and DSL modems. First discovered by the folks behind the DroneBL DNS Blacklist services, Psybot ignores PCs and services, and attempts to exploit linux mipsel routing devices with a router administration interface or outward-facing SSH or telnet daemon. Such devices with weak usernames and passwords are likely to fall prey. Up to 100,000 hosts are believed to be infected as part of a botnet at the moment.

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Many companies are hesitant about embracing cloud computing. While the concept allows companies to store data off site, enabling startups to build their businesses without significant investments in equipment, many companies don't want to give up control of their data. Business Week reports that in many cases, IT companies are introducing a new idea--private or internal clouds that give a company complete control over their information and the security to protect it.

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Decide Whether You Need To Consolidate

Companies grow, mergers happen, times change. Whatever the cause, many enterprises eventually find themselves poring over a roster of data center locations and wonder just how many are actually needed—especially when the economy turns south. But deciding on whether and how to pare down the number of facilities can be a challenging process.

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Convergence & Efficiency Increase In A Tight Economy

According to the Blade.org consortium, three "mega-trends" are now reshaping the landscape of enterprise computing. The first of these is network convergence of all storage and data communications onto Ethernet, thereby eliminating today's diversity of connector and switch types. This plays well in a down economy because a unified Ethernet infrastructure bringing technologies such as iSCSI and eventually FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) onto a single fabric will reduce total operating cost. Also consider that many blade chassis need a Fibre switch to fit into an existing Fibre-based SAN environment. If data centers can leverage 10 Gigabit Ethernet in this role, it will reduce overall complexity and lower the barrier costs on blade adoption.

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Semantic technology addresses the data-explosion problem by providing more intelligent ways to search, sort, and filter data based on business and user relevance. So, what is Semantic Technology? Here is what Tim Berners-Lee stated as a vision back in 1999: "I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

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Netbooks, wireless, and SaaS make a great team.

George Peppard said as his character Hannibal Smith on The A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Several trends, if not a plan, are coming together in interesting ways in technology for small businesses. Mix equal parts of online applications, netbooks, and constant wireless networking together, and you get new ways to do more work in more places for less money.

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