IT Solutions Blog

Business Storage Capacity Management

Whether you run a small or medium sized business, or whether you are involved in a larger company, storage capacity management is at the heart of your business’ IT concerns. The days when a business could get by with storing files on individual desktops (or on a single server, for that matter,) are long gone. In our time of PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents and large image and video files, keeping tabs on your storage capacity is a never ending challenge.

Further complicating this problem is the fact that the demand for digital storage is actually rising faster than the capacity for storage itself. The demand for digital storage is rising as much as 50 percent every year. And, while capacity is growing, performance is lagging way behind, growing just at a tenth of the pace that capacity is.

Fortunately, there are solutions. There are ways that a business can get a handle on its storage capacity management. It depends, at least in part, on the size and type of business. The challenge is to implement an effective solution within budget and without overbuying.

Storage Capacity Management for Small Businesses

Small businesses can’t afford to hire an IT professional just to handle their storage capacity management. In fact, many smaller companies don’t even have an IT professional at all. Fortunately, there are a number of relatively inexpensive and easy to use products available for smaller businesses.

One example is a single storage server device that you attach to your network. This is, in the most basic sense, a barebones computer with a large hard drive installed. The storage device is a central repository for a small business on a network. These devices can range anywhere from $500 to more than $2000, depending on the capacity you desire. Some have wireless networking capabilities built in, while others require a hard connection to your network. These devices are, for the most part, plug-and-play and will automatically identify themselves in a Windows network.

This sort of model fits best in an environment where you don’t have a full-time IT staff person, and where you probably don’t already have any servers.

Storage Capacity Management for Medium Businesses

When you hit around 50 employees, or when you have a smaller number of employees who routinely all work with large files, you may need something a little bit bigger. At this stage, you’re a good candidate for Network Attached Storage (NAS). NAS lets you provide a single repository for multiple servers to access data. So, you might have three or four different servers, at least one of which has critical data. A NAS device provides you greater reliability, scalability and flexibility than a simple locally attached hard drive.

This kind of solution is best in companies who have their own IT person, or who have a service provider contract and routinely have an IT person on site.

Utimately, the storage capacity management solution you choose will depend on the specific size, needs and processes of your business.

HP Storage Essentials

 • Simplifies end users’ ability to analyze and share information

• Enables unified end-to-end storage and infrastructure reporting of assets for faster informed decisions
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• Reduces report generation cycles from weeks to minutes

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How to Lower Data Center Costs without Impacting Service Levels

Down economy or not, IT managers have never had a blank check with which to meet an organization’s needs. As time goes on, IT managers have to deal with increased demand for computing and information services, all while being asked to cut costs and create grater justification for expenditures.

One of the areas IT departments are asked to cut back in is operational costs for their data centers. There are a few steps involved in reducing data center costs while maintaining the kinds of service levels your organziation has come to know and expect:

1.    Look at Energy Management. One of the areas most data centers can reduce costs in is the area of energy management. You can set the temperature of your data center to 24 degrees Celsius, in most cases. Another way to reduce your energy costs is to use outside air to cool the data center, as blowing in outside air is much less expensive than air conditioning. Even implementing a server-based energy management solution will save you significant money in the long run.

2.    Rationalize data center hardware. You need to get a clear picture of the equipment you've got in your data center and what each piece does. Doing so can save you as much as ten percent of your hardware costs. You want to make sure that the machines you have are being used effectively, and you want to get rid of those that aren't. In turn, this will lower your support and maintenance costs, and it will also open up new possibilities for virtualization.

3.    Consider virtualization. Virtualization will help to control energy costs, but it will also reduce your capital expenditures and maintenance costs. Effective use of existing technology can reduce energy use by 80 percent or more, and it can also reduce floor space requirements.

4.    Renegotiate. On a regular basis, you need to renegotiate all of your purchase contracts. This will include lease agreements, hardware contracts, maintenance or support contracts, software agreements and anything else. Get rid of the ones that are too expensive, and talk to vendors about lower payment schedules for the rest.

5.    Manage people costs effectively. The largest single cost for most data centers is its people. Review your staffing levels. Take a look at the specific skills that your data center will need for the next 24 months. Make use of outsourcing if it's an option for your business.

6.    Be patient. If possible, delay the procurement of new data center assets. Instead of purchasing new equipment, extend the life of existing servers by renegotiating their service contracts and maintenance support.

7.    Be ready to justify your expenditures. The days when IT sort of had free reign because executives were dazzled by technology have been gone for over a decade. Still, some things you just have to have. Make sure you're ready to justify every cost, especially during times that are on the rough side economically.

 

Lower Operational Costs Through Process Automation

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3 Biggest CIO Blunders

Today’s CIO has to be more than just a great administrator. Of all executives, the CIO is in the unique position of needing to keep fluent in a highly technical field while at the same time dealing with the normal business details that all corporate officers have to deal with. On top of that, the IT budget for any given company is often one of the biggest pieces of the pie, particularly for companies that deal primarily in information.

To stay in the game, a CIO needs to be able to handle people as effortlessly as her staff handles technology. At the same time, she needs to avoid some of the most common and most destructive blunders.

Here are three of the biggest blunders a CIO can make:

Allowing corporate culture to conflict with IT structure.

In other words, allowing an environment to be created in which the behavior of people stands at odds with organizational or systemic design. When people butt up against systems or structures that don’t work within their own habits, behaviors and thinking processes, one of two things is going to happen.

One possibility is that they aren’t going to be happy and, eventually, create morale concerns. When people can’t adapt a system to their own view of the world and the way it works, they become intensely dissatisfied. Productivity falls and unrest ensues.

The other outcome isn’t much better. People will, by their very nature, attempt to fit systems to their own preferences, rather than adapting their behavior. Thus, they won’t utilize the full functionality of the system, or they’ll use it in a way that negates the benefits of having the system in the first place.

Failure to analyze and support IT’s business contribution.

IT is a cost center, not a profit center. Accordingly, even in the most progressive organizations, IT rarely gets all of the budget support it asks for.

As CIO, it’s your job to build the case for your organization. You need to be able to explain to the CFO how the new IP telephony system will reduce costs, while at the same time being able to explain to your network director why you’re requiring her to cut her data center operating costs by ten percent.

Weak non-operational functions.

You might have the best team of server engineers and admins in the world, but if your vendor management sucks you’re going to be vulnerable to downtime. Your department needs to excel at architecture, planning, project management, customer relations and the like.

Keep your people involved in key processes, from project initiation to end-user implementation. Even your security admin needs to take an occasional visit to user-land.

Non-tecnhical training and education play a huge role here. Making sure your managers have had project management and financial training will not only make your organziation that much stronger, it’ll make your job that much easier.

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6 Principles for Enterprise Storage Provisioning

One of the biggest challenges facing the enterprise is storage provisioning. With so many stakeholders maintaining interest in your enterprise’s storage, you need to understand and follow several important principles. These principles will help you in a number of ways, not the least of which is helping to make sure that your company is able to do business efficiently and without a significant interruption of service in business-critical areas.

Here are several principles to follow when it comes to enterprise storage provisioning:

1.    Communication is primary. Those stakeholders each have a vested interest in what happens with your storage. Keeping the lines of communication open, not just between IT and departmental stakeholders but also between individual stakeholders, is essential to creating the right kind of provisioning approach. By building a provisioning team out of those stakeholders, you spread responsibility and ownership for the storage function.

2.    Standardize when possible. The harsh reality of IT today is that environments are heterogeneous. Whenever it’s feasible, though you should try to standardize between classes of storage. The key here is not to impact the functionality of a given solution, and not to force hegemony where it really doesn’t belong.

3.    Keep data storage security at the top of your priority list. Whether it’s something simple like making sure that your organization’s password policy is implemented on your array element manager, or whether it’s something more complex like SAN infrastructure security, you need to practice due diligence in this area. Make sure that the interfaces for your enterprise storage management system and the interface for your SRM package are on a management network, isolated from the rest of the enterprise’s computing resources. Don’t ever let those management functions out onto the public network.

4.    Use updated storage provisioning tools. If you have a maintenance contract for your storage management solution, you may be eligible for free upgrades. As is usually the case with management software, newer editions usually have a more intuitive interface, more useful configuration wizards and a greater capacity for automation.

5.    Don’t forget to provision a sizable amount of storage for the virtualized servers. Do what you need to give the virtual server team the tools it requires to dissect the storage pool into smaller units of storage that can be accessed by individual virtual machines. This will let your storage admins not have to deal with provisioning each and every new virtual machine. Unless you have an application that needs to directly be able to communicate with the array, stick with the VMs.

6.    Look into thin provisioning. Thin provisioning is a great way to improve storage utilization. By using thin provisioning, you can offer sizable chunks of storage space to the server that will only actually be allocated when it is being used.

Above all, always check your provisioning decisions against your business purposes. Your storage needs are a means to an end, and only one element of what makes your company able to do what it does.

Don't Be Outpaced by Your Data: Tips and Tricks for Ensuring Data Resilience in an Increasingly Virtualized IT Environment

 Don't be outpaced by your data! Download this presentation for tips and tricks in an increasingly virtualized IT environment. 

 

World Class Storage Performance Management

Keeping your storage performance up to par can be a challenge, especially in a heterogeneous enterprise environment. More and more, you need to have an architecture for your storage needs that is compliant with industry standards, can be deployed quickly, is agile enough to manage and monitor, and that can be adapted to your changing needs. Identifying what you want out of your storage performance management system is the first step in achieving world class storage performance management.

Here are some of the things you need to look for when you consider a storage performance management solution for your company:

•    You want a solution that integrates with your environment. Many solutions today can manage your storage needs in an end-to-end capacity. Ideally, you’ll choose a solution that can integrate as diverse areas of storage performance as Microsoft Exchange as well as your Unix environment. In the end, this will increase the productivity and the manageability of your storage solutions.

•    Automatic network discovery is important, too. You need to be able to look at the big picture from your storage performance management solution. Choose a solution that will map everything from DAS to NAS to SAN, as well as your backup topology. Many tools will provide you with a graphic representation of your objects, zones and paths.

•    Remember the business reasons behind your concern for storage performance. You need to be able to monitor and to report on business applications. Whether it’s Exchange, Sybase, MY SQL, Oracle or another database, you need to know how it’s  handling things. Clustering solutions, such as Microsoft Server Cluster or VERITAS Cluster should also be able to be monitored from within your solution.

•    Make sure you have access to the performance data you need. Your solution should have the capability of producing reports, both stock reports and custom reports. It should be able to produce them in a variety of formats, from spreadsheet to PDF to HTML.

•    A solution that uses industry standard architecture makes support simpler. Try to find a solution based on Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S),the Common Information Model (CIM) and the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards. This will give you multi-vendor storage support.

•    Your storage performance management solution should be able to monitor and manage things end-to-end. From the application to the objects to the storage subsystems to file identification, the solution should be able to monitor your applications and identify potential trouble spots.

•    Infrastructure backup management is extremely useful, too. This will allow you to keep tabs on your overall backup process, and to get a handle on where you stand in terms of recoverability. Ideally, your storage performance management solution will be able to connect directly with your backup solution.

While you might be hard-pressed to find all of these features in a solution that can support your particular environment, you should get as close as you can to achieving the specifications on this list. In the end, it will increase not only your storage performance but the efficiency of your entire enterprise.

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6 Ways a Solutions Provider Can Boost your Business

One of the best ways to reduce capital IT expenditures, increase your service levels and increase the efficiency of your IT department and your company as a whole is by using an IT solutions provider. A solutions provider gives you all of the benefits of having your own dedicated IT infrastructure management team without all of the costs. Solutions providers get rid of the day-to-day burden of IT systems management in that they assume responsibility for everything from application deployment through updates and daily support. This frees you up to meet your core business needs and to do what your company does best.

Here are 6 key areas that a solutions provider boosts your business:

1. Cost. Using solutions providers reduces the cost of administering your IT functions. In many cases, outsourcing applications can reduce the cost of ownership for the application by as much as 50%. Applications costs become as reliable and simple as your monthly service provider bill.
2. Expertise. When you implement an in-house solution, you either need to hire an expert to administer the solution or train existing personnel to handle the solution. A solutions provider, on the other hand, has staff that do nothing but deal with your particular solution. They’re true experts, up to speed with what’s going on in the field. When you use a solution provider, you save significantly on personnel and training costs, as well.
3. Reduced capital expenditures. By using a solutions provider you eliminate the need for huge capital infrastructure investments. You also reduce the need for ongoing costs to upgrade  or maintain your solutions. You can have the latest and greatest best-in-class solutions, administered by an expert, without the expensive and extensive cost of application development or infrastructure equipment upgrade costs. This lets you take control of the total cost of owning the technology.
4. Rapid deployment. When you roll out a new implementation on your own, it can take months to finish. Your service provider, on the other hand, already has the implementations running. You simply need to plug in. Training end users on the solution becomes the most time intensive task in the implementation process.
5. Increased predictability and reliability. In most cases, a solutions provider can give you a higher level of performance than what you can get on your own. In addition, when you have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place, you can guarantee things like uptime and security.
6. Unlimited Scalability. Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to utilize a solutions provider is scalability. If you hit the limit for what your current infrastructure can handle, you’re looking at a time-consuming and often costly upgrade process. When you utilize a solutions provider, you don’t have to worry about all of that. You simply contact the solutions provider, increase the provisioning of your solutions and you’re good to go.
   

In most instances, it just makes good sense to utilize a solutions provider for at least some of your business IT functions.

Data Center Optimization: Three Key Strategies

Advances in server and storage technology, along with a growing number of tools and methodologies, have dramatically improved the pathway to data center optimization. The challenge for IT managers is to carefully plan where to start, how to move forward and how to measure results.

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How to Support a Heterogeneous IT Infrastructure

Today’s enterprise is a hub of heterogeneous technologies. You have a wide array of servers running on a vast range of operating systems. You have infrastructure from a number of vendors, because you want to use the best tool for the job. There are dozens of unique applications, specialized databases and purpose-specific tools, all of which come from different vendors.

Heterogeneity comes at a price. An enterprise that has been designed to match specific business needs can be complex and expensive. Support for such an environment is a challenge, at best.

Further complicating this mess is the fact that most enterprises are fighting for their IT budgets. Upper management wants IT to cut costs, yet demands more and more from them in return. They want a greater return on their existing assets, not long-term programs that have a better ROI. Truly, IT staff and management are having to figure out ways to do more with less.

This is true in the area of support, as well. With a heterogeneous infrastructure, support costs can be through the roof. You might have a Sun help desk contract for your Solaris boxes, a service-level agreement with Cisco on your network equipment, to say nothing of your Microsoft support costs. These costs add up, and in a time when every dollar has to be justified, can in some ways be a drain on other IT priorities.

One way to deal with heterogeneous infrastructure support is to begin relying on solutions providers. When you use a solutions provider, you don’t have to contract with every individual software or hardware vendor. You find a solutions provider that can cover multiple technologies, who can become familiar with your enterprise, and who can competently provide the support you need. Yes, you’ll still have to turn to manufacturers or specialized vendors for some technologies, but a solutions provider should allow you to remove at least some of the burden of supporting your heterogeneous infrastructure.

Another option, of course, is to move more toward a homogenous environment. This will save you not only costs in terms of support, but also in terms of capital expenditures. There’s no reason to buy an IBM server if you can meet your business needs with an existing Windows box. In this model, you may sacrifice some functionality in order to save on costs. Still, some enterprises don’t necessarily need the specialized features or performance of the best-in-class solution, and you may be able to get along just fine in a more homogenous environment.

The key is, no matter how you try to address the problem of heterogeneous infrastructure, that you don’t reduce service levels in the process. If you are forced to make changes, do so in such a way that you can still give your users what they need in order for your business to function. Herein, of course, lies the challenge. In some cases, you may find that your company is willing to make certain sacrifices in order to reduce heterogeneity.

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The Intelligent Help Desk^TM is your single point of contact helping to streamline the delivery and management of support services across multiple network computing architectures and information system manufacturers.

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Business Continuity Planning for the Enterprise

Your enterprise rises and falls on its data, and the ability of your enterprise to keep functioning even in the face of catastrophic loss is what will separate you from your competition. To this end, your enterprise must have an effective and efficient business continuity plan.

An effective business continuity plan will describe how your enterprise will recover its business functionality after a disruption or disaster. Whether you’re talking about hard drive failure of a critical system or a data center flood, you need to be able to keep the enterprise machinery humming right along. Even if you’re not in a high-risk area, where you need to be concerned with earthquakes or hurricanes, there are still plenty of threats to your enterprise. If you don’t plan effectively to address them before they arrive, your business could fall.

Business continuity planning for the enterprise is going to cover a number of important issues. It should address rebuilding servers and workstations. It will involve installing and configuring operating systems, application software and user data. It may include repairing or replacing network infrastructure, telephony systems or any number of other systems.

Here are the characteristics that a good business continuity plan for the enterprise will do:

•    Provides appropriate protection. You need to be able to match the level of protection to the business value of your data. This means that different types of information will get different types of protections.

•    Tailors solutions to your enterprise. Your company has specific business needs and processes. Your business continuity plan can’t be taken from a textbook.

•    Reduces risk. A business continuity plan should meet requirements set by trade groups, regulatory agencies and even your business’ leaders and owners.

•    Increases your company’s resilience. You want your company to be protected against natural disasters, equipment failure and corruption of data. A business continuity plan for the enterprise helps you d just that.

•    Improve uptime. While a business continuity plan doesn’t always have an immediate effect, going through the process can help you implement a strategy that’s comprehensive enough to address minor issues that lead to downtime across the enterprise.

•    Utilizes solutions appropriate to your environment. There are many technological solutions to any given business continuity problem. In some cases, you might need a simple tape backup. In other cases, you might need a fully cloud-based data backup solution.

•    Identifies new areas of efficiency. Business continuity planning for the enterprise gives you a good reason to look under the hood and see how your company’s infrastructure really works. This process lets you identify areas of improvement in the here and now, not just avoid future difficulties.

Business continuity planning for the enterprise isn’t glamorous, it isn’t cheap and it isn’t easy. However, by going through the necessary steps, you can come out the other side with an information technology infrastructure that is more stable, more robust and more able to handle the challenges it will face in the future.

Business Continuity White Paper

A comprehensive business continuity solution includes not only the capacity to recover operations after a major disaster, but also the capacity to remain on line during minor disruptions. Server virtualization software has brought great relief to IT organizations searching for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions with a low cost of entry.

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Does Cloud Computing Make Good Business Sense?

Whether or not cloud computing makes good business sense isn’t really the question. The question should be more like, “In what ways does cloud computing make good business sense” in any given organization. While cloud computing isn’t always the best solution for every problem, it does address a number of significant issues facing IT today.

There are several areas you can make a business case for cloud computing, and there are also some challenges that face an IT department who attempts to implement cloud computing solutions.

Deployment

Take, for example, the issue of deployment. A recent article in InfoWeek noted that a company like Eli Lilly can, using the cloud, deploy a new application server in a matter of minutes. Under older models, this kind of deployment would typically take more than 50 days, and require many hours of work from IT and other specialists. They can also put up a 64-note Linux cluster in about five minutes, where it used to take more than 100 days. The ability to rapidly deploy necessary computing solutions via the cloud is one of the most compelling reasons to implement cloud computing, and one of the ways that cloud computing makes good business sense.

Capital Expenditures

There are other business benefits to cloud computing, as well. Using service providers in a cloud computing model reduces, from day one, many capital expenditures. Rather than having to budget large chunks of money on servers and infrastructure, not to mention specialized personnel to handle those servers and infrastructure, a company can bring a solution with very little upfront investment. This increases ROI from the start.

Personnel Resources

It’s in the area of personnel and training issues that cloud computing really shines, however. Cloud computing solutions let you have access to true experts. These aren’t your own staff who went to a two-day training seminar on how to use a new solution. These are dedicated personnel who know the solution backwards and forwards, in and out, because it’s what they do all day every day. No matter how competent your own staff may (and should) be, there’s no replacement for a dedicated support infrastructure.

Provisioning

Provisioning is another area in which cloud computing makes good business sense. When you use a cloud computing model with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) from your service provider, you don’t have to worry about reconfiguring your infrastructure on the fly to meet immediate demands. Instead, the service provider deals with allocation and provisioning so that you don’t have to.

Cloud Computing Challenges

The biggest downside to cloud computing is its barrier to entry. This barrier to entry isn’t financial, however, it’s often social.  You need to be able to not only convince your company that cloud computing is a worthwhile, reliable and even beneficial solution, you also have to deal with implementation. Still, if you can overcome the cultural hurdles, you can begin to present your business case and increase your IT’s overall productivity and effectiveness.

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