More access required, but what about control?

More tablets and smartphones are entering the market, some could be competition for the iPad and iPhone, but the future will tell on that one, with this adoption of information hungry devices and their users we have a number of new issues!

We want high speed connectivity wherever we are how will this be possible and how many accounts will we need? The carriers have good coverage with 3G data these days but at times we drop into the dark ages with edge or worse connections, this will improve with the adoption of 4G technologies such as LTE, but how long do we need to wait?

Wifi is available from coffee shops, bars, etc. but how many different accounts do we need? Many are free, but we have to register and login each time we are there! Where is our ubiquitous wifi coverage from a single or federated organisation?

Many of us are now using our own devices for work tasks, how are these controlled if they have business data on them, how is there access and security managed if they connect to the enterprise network? What other threats do they bring along with them?

Lots of potential issues going forward into 2012, let us see what 2012 brings to help with these challenges.

What does 2012 hold in store?

What do you think 2012 has in store? Well it will mean more use of mobile computing devices with more extensive use in the enterprise of the iPad but also enterprise focused new devices such as the Motorola ET1.

Apps have become a part of the smart phone users life with apps to do just about anything! But the interaction with those apps is changing with Apples Siri and a variety of other voice control options coming soon for other platforms.

With the number of mobile devices now needing data connections to function 2012 will be the year for mobile data, with users swallowing up more data than ever with higher speed cellular options such as LTE coming on the scene and the building of wide area wireless networks in metropolitan areas, rather than having another coffee just to use the WiFi!

The devices will also expand into areas currently not touched such as Police and other emergency services for in the field reporting and improved communication, even video conferencing on the move.

What do you think will be a key factor of 2012?

Technology is changing so fast and virtu

Technology is changing so fast and virtualisation has now become mainstream, we have VMworld next month, why not take a look at Tintri in advance http://ow.ly/6sG2A

Virtual storage another way!

When we look at building a production VMware environment, whether it is for server or VDI virtualisation we look at an expensive and complex SAN to support the large volume of data required and the high speed reads needed to ensure our VMs perform.

Tintri have taken an alternative approach with a solution designed as a storage system built for VMs, the appliance connects to the hosts using NFS over 10G ethernet, no complexity of multiple VMs across LUNs, just 8.5TB of storage available to the hosts connected and managed directly from vCentre Server.  The use of both 1TB of flash storage and spinning media with inline deduplication the system is designed to provide the highest level of performance with high volumes of IOPS and ensuring the most use of flash storage.

The current solutions are 8.5TB in capacity in a 4U package, the next release in September provides replication too.

Take a look at www.tintri.com it could be exactly what you are looking for.

Working with data centre virtualised services

I am currently working on a data centre proof of concept around the provision of application services delivered on virtual platforms, using VMware as the virtual platform and a mixture of operating systems as the hosting environments.

The bottleneck in the solution for the customer was the IO, there are extremely high performing server solutions and excellent NAS or SAN solutions to use as the storage mechanism, but what about the connectivity between server and storage, servers with each other, or the outside world?

Using the NextIO vNet solution set we can remove the bottleneck using PCIe as the conduit providing centrally managed 10Gb Ethernet connectivity, FIbre Channel and iSCSI links to SAN or NAS. Not only improving performance but also reducing complexity with only two PCI connections to each server rather than 6-10 with alternative solutions.

When you need to have a scalable and cost effective data centre solution this must be the best way to go.

DR but not as we know it

With a traditional DR solution the rebuild process is normally a time consuming manual affair with a great deal of manual intervention and procedures which need to be followed carefully.  The reconstitution of operating systems, configurations, applications and data across a number of servers and server types creates a complex and time critical situation with a variety of teams involved.

It really needs to be much easier than this with a straightforward and simple way to orchestrate the instigation of the DR plan with choices of Physical to physical, virtual to virtual, physical to virtual or virtual to physical migration if required. Using FalconStor RecoveryTrac 2.0 it is!

RecoverTrac works in conjunction with FalconStor CDP. FalconStor CDP is a data protection solution that provides unified backup and DR capabilities, providing fast recovery to any known good point in time, and RecoverTrac is the empowering technology behind automated recovery. Thus, FalconStor CDP must already be protecting application servers and replicating data across data centers before RecoverTrac can add any value to the recovery process.

RecoverTrac can perform both local recovery (bare metal recovery) and remote recovery of servers. For remote recovery, RecoverTrac can handle many-to-many site mappings. For example, two data centers, one in Boston and one in Chicago, could be replicating to a joint remote site in Miami. Or in a different configuration, a single production data center in New York may need to segregate and split its recovery groups into two separate remote DR sites in different cities based on load capacity.

Many DR solutions focus on replicating data to a remote DR site, leaving IT departments burdened with the complex task of reconstituting servers, applications, network configurations, and replicated data into a functional set of data center services for business continuity. As described in this white paper, RecoverTrac not only replicates data, but stages the recovery of complete services by fully automating the resumption of servers, storage, networks, and applications in a coordinated manner.

RecoverTrac is the first DR automation solution to bring service-oriented recovery to both physical and virtual server infrastructures. RecoverTrac tool automates complex, time-consuming and error-prone failover/failback operations of systems, applications, services and entire data centers, making FalconStor CDP and FalconStor NSS among the most comprehensive disk-based data protection systems available for backup and DR.

Why has nothing happened to noticeboards?

We have all stood reading noticeboards, at school, university, hospital, doctors, at work and always with ripped posters that have not been changed for months and sometimes years, information that is so out of date, no one with the responsibility to maintain it or in most cases the time.

But if you had a library of health and safety posters, environmental posters and dynamic content such as current weather and travel information wouldn’t that be better? With new content created and available in minutes, even animated or video content rather than static images or text.

Imagine how you could keep employees informed of their business and involve them, distribute information to visitors or customers, even advertise local services!

This can all be done with the complete end-to-end solution of monitors or freestanding displays, wired or wireless connection, central content management and content creation.

The end of traditional backup to tape?

We are all familiar with the need to backup our data with many organisations spending a fortune on software and tape to protect data through backup processes, commonly run at night and protecting specific files and directories, plus databases and email repositories.

A new option is through continual data protector (CDP) using an appliance on each site with local disk storage the solution takes complete disk snapshots of protected servers,desktops or laptops, these are incremental by byte and are then replicated to another site. If you do not have a second site an alternative is a cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR) service maintaining copies of the snapshots for retrieval in the event of a failure.

The data can be recovered when required this could be a single file, a directory or a complete system, with the ability to recover to a new server or virtual machine within 15 minutes, a complete site in around 45 minutes. This will make traditional backup redundant, but is the organisation requires backup to be done the CDP appliance and local client will intercept the backup process and mount a snapshot as a source for the backup taking the need to quiesce services and having no performance impact on the server being backed up.

If you would like further information go to our website

A step in the right direction!

We are due to have a new service available from BT Wholesale with many exchanges enabled now and majority by the end of next year.  Fibre to the Cab (FttC) or sometimes Fibre to the Curb is now in general roll out by BT Openreach.

The service offers 40Mb download with options of 2Mb or 10Mb upload, with 15Mb and 20Mb options in the future.  The service does not have the traditional contention based capacity management but a guaranteed minimum throughput with the standard being 8Mb and enhanced offering 12Mb.

The service is VDSL based with a VDSL box being supplied and fitted as a part of the installation, this VDSL circuit then connects the premises to the local telephone cab via copper and from the cab to the exchange by fibre.  This provides a number of benefits, the first being the distance the signal is carried over copper being as short as possible, the use of VDSL increasing the performance on the circuit and finally an increase in the SLA for fix from the current 5 day or 24 hours to an new enhanced 7 hour fix.

The service is available in many areas and we are actively provisioning services for customers now contact us on 0121 2700370 for more information or email sales@sdvv.co.uk

Were will all this virtualisation go?

We have all sent the rise of virtualisation in both the Linux and Windows environments, we try to get the most utilisation from the smallest footprint of servers, reducing hardware costs, power and management overhead. As the density of servers grows and the data usage for the servers and the storage infrastructure increases we are moving from two to four to six and maybe eight NICs per server with separate LAN and SAN/NAS gigabit or 10 gigabit switches.

A new area is the virtualization of the I/O infrastructure, Virtensys provide an alternative to the switches cables and NICs by using a virtual LAN and storage solution with a PCI-E card providing 40Gb of throughput to a top of rack appliance. This provides a high performance and cost effective alternative, with a clear path for future development.