Migration Without Mishap

Server migrations come in just about every size, shape and variety — you can change operating systems, hardware platforms, vendors or do any combination of the three. But whether you seek to increase capacity, upgrade to the latest technology or standardize on a particular hardware or software platform, the ability

Revise Your Technology Refresh Strategy

High on the list of certainties, right after death and taxes, is the knowledge that the computers your company bought just three months ago are already obsolete. But when is the best time to upgrade? When developing technology refresh strategies, enterprises are caught between the pull of new technology and

Seven Best Practices for Managing Data Storage

Despite the strategic value of data, many enterprises have yet to establish robust storage management strategies that keep important data readily available, the cost of managing it low and its access safe and secure. Given the huge proportion of corporate data that resides in unstructured or semi-structured form — such

Expansion Planning For Systems Growth

Something scary is happening in the world of computing. Even though everything is getting smaller and more powerful, we’re faced with increasing demand for power to run systems, keep them cool and house them. Although disk drive capacity requirements double every year, if companies require more drives, the issues become

Is It Time for Diskless PCs?

Although Oracle, NEC, Wyse and other major vendors have long promoted diskless PCs, the technology has failed to establish a beachhead within enterprise IT shops. This appears to be changing with the release of Microsoft’s Vista operating system. Vista offers virtualization features specifically designed to make diskless PCs — also

Continuous Data Protection: Securing Data

It’s virtually a no-brainer. Your data is backed up the instant you make a change to it — any change, no matter how small. You can retrieve it immediately. That’s right; no need to hassle with locating and accessing the right backup tape. And the expense is easily justified by

Five Critical Criteria for Server Virtualization

Virtualization is the topic du jour among IT professionals. As CIOs continue to search for more efficient – and cost-effective – ways to manage the data center, the promise of being able to do more with fewer resources is spurring a large proportion of enterprises to test the virtualization waters.

Data on Demand

Ramiro Perez doesn’t like to wait around. As purchasing manager for Copart Inc., a $500 million automotive services firm based in Fairfield, Calif. helping insurance companies process and sell “total loss” vehicles, his job is all about efficiency — and that’s as much about making sure his organization doesn’t waste

The Heat Is On

A strange thing happened when St. Louis, Mo.-based Sisters of Mercy Health System began populating its data center with new servers. “We ran out of power capacity,” says Bill Hodges, director of the data center at Mercy, the ninth largest Catholic healthcare system in the country. Mercy found that the

Implementing a Tiered Storage Strategy

The cost of storage continues to decline even as the capacity of individual drives increases. But rather than move all data to the fastest — and most expensive — devices, most enterprises are implementing a tiered storage strategy, in which data is delegated to devices according to its importance. “Ten