-
Data Center
Branch Maintenance via Out-of-Band Management
Out-of-band management, aka OOBM, plays a vital role in modern IT operations of all sizes and scales. Indeed, OOBM might be judged “mission critical” for headquarters operations and data centers alike. But OOBM is tremendously important for satellite IT operations, as well, most notably for b… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Stay Connected with Out-of-Band Management
During a security assessment, auditors always ask this one question: “How do you manage your devices?” The answer should be: “out-of-band management.” Is that your answer? If not, you may have issues that need immediate attention. What Is Out-of-Band Management? Let’s get started wi… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Systems Management and the FCAPS Standard
Managing systems and networks ultimately means understanding what they comprise, what they can do, and who’s allowed to use them. In IT, systems and network management is an important discipline with a long history, with many approaches and tools to implement them. FCAPS Sets the Management Sta… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Tips for Proper Out-of-Band Network Design
Out-of-band (OOB) networking provides a separate, independent pathway in and out of systems and networks. OOB doesn’t depend on production networks to access equipment, perform management and monitoring tasks, make repairs, or access data for legal or technical reasons. But what’s the proper… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
How Impactful Is VMware’s New Core-Limited Licensing?
This week, VMware announced new licensing restrictions for vSphere, which I wrote about here. I wanted to get more understanding for how impactful this change would be for existing customers. On today’s ActualTech Media EcoCast, I asked our audience for two pieces of information. The first a… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Data Center
VMware’s Licensing Change Redux: Better the Second Time Around
The year was 2011. I was comfortably ensconced in my office at Westminster College watching as VMware brought out a marketing executive to discuss the company’s revolutionary new licensing program. As soon as I saw that it was a marketing person giving the news about a change in licensing, I thoug… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Data Center
Report: Cloud Spend Tops Data Center Spend for First Time in 2019
“Trend” stories have some value, in the same way virtual machine snapshots have some value: they’re helpful, and often quite helpful, as long as you understand their limitations. (And always remember: a snapshot is not a backup!) You know the end-of-year trend articles: “Top Stories of 20… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Ripcord Unleashes Robots to Transform Your Paper Documents
In recent years, enterprise-class organizations have been increasingly finding that big data analytics is allowing them to capitalize on business insight that’s hidden within their seldom-used data. One factor preventing such processes from being as effective as they could be, however, is the over… Read More
By Brien Posey -
Data Center
5 Things To Know About Office 365 and Microsoft Azure
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: when you start SaaS-ifying and cloud-ifying your IT operations, things change. Lots of things. This isn’t your father’s data center anymore—network traffic patterns change, security requirements get a lot more complex, and your data suddenly expands beyo… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
HPE Nimble dHCI Combines Benefits of Both CI and HCI
As I was wandering around the floor at VMworld 2019, one product in particular caught my eye—mainly because it seemed like an oxymoron. Intrigued, I had to find out more. That product was in the HPE booth, and is branded “Nimble Storage dHCI.” I asked the booth worker what the “d” stood… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
The Great Slack to Teams Migration: 1 Year Later
On a fateful day in August 2018, we made the decision to extricate ourselves from Slack and jump headfirst into Microsoft Teams. I’ve previously written about our early experiences here and here. It was September of 2018 when we officially cut over from Slack to Teams, but we’d been doing a… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Data Center
Tape-based Backup vs. Cloud-based Backup: Which Is Better?
Linear Tape-Open-based storage, or LTO, has long been the economic favorite for data backup and archiving. Much of the world’s backup data resides in portable, remotely stored tape drives, at the ready in case disaster should strike. So it’s highly likely that you have existing investments to pr… Read More
By Brien Posey -
Data Center
Making the Right Choice for Hybrid Storage
The cloud is fundamentally transforming information technology. Businesses in every industry are looking to cloud-based services to augment or replace traditional on-premises IT systems, and facilitate digital transformation. And most of those companies are pursuing hybrid cloud approaches—63%… Read More
By Brien Posey -
Data Center
Overcoming 'Alert Fatigue' With AIOps
"Alert fatigue" is a real thing for IT admins. You need to monitor your environment at all times, watching for current—as well as potential—issues. But too many alerts can quickly turn into a “boy who cried wolf” scenario: so many alerts come in that you start to tune them out. At that po… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Without a Clear Recovery Plan, Backup and Replication Is Not Enough
The mainstream adoption of the public cloud has made it possible for organizations of almost any size to acquire true disaster recovery (DR) capabilities for critical workloads. There are currently any number of solutions available for failing workloads over to the cloud. Even so, the failover proce… Read More
By Brien Posey -
Data Center
HPE Wants to SaaSify All the Clouds
Will you be satisfied if everything is SaaSified? You’ll eventually be able to find out thanks to HPE’s GreenLake. HPE GreenLake is a service from HPE that enables a consumption-based model for the services offered under the program. As time goes on HPE is adding more products and services… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Data Center
Not Your Father’s Data Protection
Creating backups has been a key component in IT operations since the very beginning. Early on, backups were introduced as a way of preventing data loss stemming from hardware failure. Today, regulatory requirements and threats such as ransomware make backups more important than ever. However, as cri… Read More
By Brien Posey -
Data Center
360in180: Scale Computing Goes Small to Get Big with Hyperconverged Infrastructure
There’s an interesting strategy at play in the world of hyperconverged infrastructure from Scale Computing. Whereas a lot of its competitors are looking to go big in all things, Scale's looking to go big by going small. I had the opportunity to talk to Scale about a recent announcement. This w… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Data Center
For Disaster Recovery, Look Beyond the Hyperscalers
Choosing a Disaster-recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider can be a daunting task, especially if your organization is using DRaaS as a first step into cloud services. There are many choices, from large providers such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, to much smaller or more focused providers.… Read More
By Greg Stuart -
Data Center
Serverless is Where Savings are in the Cloud
Many of us to expect, or at least hope, to save on infrastructure spending by moving to the cloud. Sticker shock from monthly cloud bills has dispelled that myth for many. Or is the problem not that cloud savings are a myth, but that we haven’t figured out how to realize those savings? Consider… Read More
By Dan Sullivan -
Data Center
Is Data Protection a Responsibility That’s Worth Your Team’s Time?
Is data protection a responsibility that’s worth your team’s time? Or could that be handled by someone else, so your team can innovate? When it comes to information technology, there are currently two competing factions that are completely at odds with one another. One side is fully invested… Read More
By Brien Posey