Among the most common reasons for data loss are IT system failures (76 percent); human error (41 percent); and external threats and attacks (35 percent). An earlier CA study suggests that data loss events cost companies an average $160,000 every year.

Nearly half of the 300 businesses will increase cloud spending on data protection measures over the next year, compared to only 14 percent who will cut spending. The results indicate the market for enterprise cloud storage is about to enter a period of rapid growth.

“This survey reveals that one of those benefits is improved data protection—which remains a huge challenge in conventional, non-cloud environments”, data management chief Bill Mann says of the study’s results.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://betanews.com/2012/05/16/enterprise-it-turns-to-cloud-storage-to-fight-data-loss/

With Centrix WorkSpace iQ IT decision-makers gain fast access to unparalleled intelligence on users, applications, devices and IT consumption patterns to ensure technology investments are fully optimized to user environments. The latest version of WorkSpace iQ introduces:

• WorkSpace Designer for Citrix– project teams can quickly and easily analyze the existing end-user computing infrastructure in preparation for employing the right combination of Citrix desktop virtualization technologies. The WorkSpace Designer covers initial analysis through detailed capacity planning for Citrix XenDesktop and XenAppinfrastructure deployments, including:
  • Initial analysis of users to determine the best virtualization choices for desktop delivery based on their work-style.
  • In depth analysis of application usage, including the ability to sort applications by total use and filter by business groups, locations and sessions.
• User Virtualization Overview Report– provides unique insight into user workstyles, enabling project teams to design and deploy user virtualization in the most effective method. Capabilities include:
  • User consumption patterns of both applications and data, including total data storage by user and data transfer metrics.
  • Unparalleled login statistics.
• A ‘One Click’ Data Summary Report that makes it easy for customers and partners to integrate the application and asset usage intelligence captured by WorkSpace iQ with other desktop and IT management systems in use, such as software licensing tools, to support wider user-centric technology decision-making.

“User environments are highly dynamic. In large organizations, the scale of the user base and the diversity of technology use can make it difficult for IT teams to plan architecture or application change without impacting on productivity or the user experience,” said Paul Burke, director of products, Centrix Software. “WorkSpace iQ addresses this challenge, making it easy for IT decision-makers to understand the user environments and which application delivery options best suit their needs. The latest updates provide new capabilities for IT teams designing Citrix environments and virtualization projects that drives dramatic cost reductions and performance improvements.”

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=19939

DVS Enterprise, designed for organizations with demanding IT environments and diverse end-user requirements, will now be available with Unidesk’s innovative VDI management software. Unidesk integrates with technology from both Citrix and VMware to provide the vital management capabilities needed to simplify VDI implementations and help reduce overall total cost of ownership while enhancing the end-user experience.

With DVS Enterprise and Unidesk, IT organizations in industries such as education, healthcare, state and local government, and financial services can achieve streamlined IT management and an uncompromised user experience made possible by Unidesk’s unique desktop layering technology, even if users require different applications or personalization.

“Our goal with DVS Enterprise is to bring a robust and flexible end to end solution with enhanced levels of management and cost optimization,” said Dell’s Steve Lalla, vice president and general manager of the company’s mobility solutions group. “With Unidesk layering technology added to DVS Enterprise, we make it easier and more affordable for IT to deploy and manage virtual desktops leveraging the DVS Integrated Solutions Stack infrastructure. We are now able to give each end user a personal and uncompromised persistent desktop experience every time they log in.”

DVS Enterprise with Unidesk

DVS Enterprise, which combines the latest Dell PowerEdge 12^th generation servers, Dell storage, Dell network components, broker and hypervisor software, services and end points including thin clients, now offers Unidesk as the desktop provisioning and management software component for Citrix® XenDesktop® or VMware View™.

The innovative Unidesk “layers” approach enables fully persistent and personalized desktops, supports worry-free user installed applications, and provides enterprise-class scalability and advanced management options. The ability to share common layers across many desktops can reduce VDI storage capacity requirements by up to 70 percent^*.

“Our customers have validated how Unidesk layering technology simplifies VDI, expands use cases, and brings greater ROI to desktop virtualization implementations,” said Don Bulens, Unidesk CEO. “We’re thrilled that Dell has recognized these same value propositions, and has made Unidesk a part of DVS Enterprise. With Dell’s market presence and Unidesk’s software innovation, the many benefits of virtual desktops are finally available to all.”

“Desktop virtualization has become a disruptive force as many enterprises transition away from costly device-centric to more people-centric desktop and application delivery models,” said Chris Wolf, research vice president at Gartner. “Gartner has consistently heard from early adopters that virtual desktop deployments struggle to scale when traditional PC and application lifecycle methodologies are applied. To that end, IT decision makers should leverage modern application layering and delivery solutions in order to achieve the operating expense savings they expect, and the scalability they require.”

Customers Benefit from DVS Enterprise with Unidesk

The University of Connecticut recently deployed Dell’s DVS Enterprise solution with Unidesk in order to easily provision and manage virtual desktops for Master’s students and faculty at the School of Business.

“Dell DVS and Unidesk are a great fit for any organization looking to simplify virtual desktop deployments, deliver different types of applications, and implement VDI for a wide range of users and use cases,” said Jeremy Pollack, director of IT for the University of Connecticut School Of Business. “The combination of Dell and Unidesk has been instrumental to the success of our vPC desktop virtualization initiative from both IT operations and user acceptance perspectives.”

Availability

Unidesk is available today through Dell direct. Additional integration enhancements and service offerings are expected to be available later this year.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. Dell is committed to helping customers solve their toughest IT needs. Dell’s Desktop Virtualization Solutions provide full end-to-end solutions -– from datacenter hardware, software and services to end-user devices, including thin clients. Dell’s goal is to guide customers along a clear and predictable path for making the right business, technical, and implementation decisions for adopting desktop virtualization. Today’s announcement combined with recent announcements regarding DVS Simplified Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) utilizing Desktone’s DaaS platform, DVS Simplified with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box software, DVS Enterprise and the intent to acquire Wyse Technology shows Dell’s commitment to this goal. For more information, including a Dell and Unidesk reference architecture, please visit http://dell.unidesk.com.

How does cloud backup differ from tape backup in terms of its main pros and cons for IT organizations?

here’s a big difference between tape backup and cloud backup. First of all, when you’re dealing with cloud backup, you’re immediately getting your backups off-site, which is a really critical part of a lot of companies’ disaster recovery plans. When you’re backing up to tape, you of course have to back up locally to tape, then take the tapes out, encrypt them, ship them, [and] get them to another location. So the off-siting, in terms of tape versus cloud, is a very, very big difference.

For storage resellers looking to sell cloud services to customers, what kinds of IT organizations are good candidates for cloud backup?

There are definitely a few different types of IT organizations that I would target for cloud backup services. Organizations that just don’t have the IT staff to manage the backup can be a really good potential customer for saying, “Hey, send this to the cloud.” Organizations that have notoriously and historically struggled with tape [are also good candidates]. There is a lot of anti-tape sentiment because things go wrong with tape backups — the tapes are not recoverable, physically handling and managing the tapes can be very tricky — so organizations that haven’t yet moved much to disk are actually great candidates for cloud backup because there’s such a big difference from tape versus cloud.

What are the concerns around data recovery with cloud storage?

One of the big concerns I always hear is around having enough bandwidth to recover large amounts of data. So if you had a very large outage or even maybe lost a whole site, and you needed to recover a very big data set from the cloud, given the state of networks and bandwidth today, it would be very difficult and very time-consuming to do a large restore from the cloud. Usually what I recommend is VARs can offer the opportunity to do a quick ship of an appliance to customers that need to restore a lot of data. So if you get a call, and a customer says, “Hey, I need to restore 5 TB right now,” the fastest way to do that is to load it up onto removable media or some kind of backup appliance and ship it to them overnight. That is usually the best approach for large amounts of data.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://searchstoragechannel.techtarget.com/podcast/The-pros-and-cons-of-cloud-backups-for-storage-resellers

On the challenge

It’s about the cultural change. It’s not about where that server is or who owns the server. It’s all about the information that you need to get at. As a former division signal battalion commander, I worried about hugging that server, and making sure that I could own it.

We are partnering right now with DISA on platform-as-a-service and getting that operational, and then [followed by] software-as-a-service. But the key point that LTG Susan Lawrence always brings out is that we did some initial fork-lift operations to shift servers from one facility on an installation to another facility on an installation, but we’ve got to get away from that.

On the multitude of applications

We have taken on a rationalization effort to make sure that we can identify all of the applications that are out there because it’s not all about closing data centers.  It’s about making sure that we rationalize the applications, moving them where we need them versus having them parked on each of our posts, camps and stations, and paying all that additional cost that we really don’t need to do.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://defensesystems.com/articles/2012/04/24/director-view-miller-army-data-center.aspx

The GE HPEC CoE joins other recently established high-performance embedded computing center of excellence. Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions, for example, opened its Continuum High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) Center of Excellence (CoE) in October 2010 to focus on large-node digital signal processing (DSP) for military embedded systems.

The Curtiss-Wright HPEC CoE, located at the company’s headquarters in Ashburn, Va., concentrates on DSP clusters including heterogenous combinations of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and central processing unit (CPU) elements, A/D and D/A conversion, I/O, interconnects, fabrics, middleware and libraries.

The definition of high-performance embedded computing, or HPEC, is somewhat open to debate. Some experts contend that HPEC primarily involves software for large clusters of embedded processors. Others say HPEC simply refers to higher-performance embedded computers than typically are found on the open market.

High-performance computing (HPC) typically refers to parallel processing techniques for running complex application programs. The term applies especially to systems that function at speeds in excess of 1 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflop). Although some of the most common HPC users are scientific researchers, the military also relies on HPC for complex applications.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2012/05/ge-opens-hpec-center-of-excellence.html

Seeing more at DNSimple. Anthony Eden, the CEO of DNSimple, is using Boundary’s service to monitor traffic flowing into his DNS provider. He had tried other services, such as those from New Relic, but they didn’t give him the detail he needed to understand the traffic hitting his servers.

The new visibility let him spot interesting traffic patterns, especially related to requests coming from China. Eden explains that he didn’t know if the traffic was malicious; it just looked different. “Crafted” is the word he uses. The traffic patterns were subtly adjusted—something other DNS providers had seen as well. So now Eden is faced with a new traffic pattern and plans to keep an eye on it. Watching everything in real time means problems can be detected earlier.

Saving money. Having access to more data can also help developers update their apps quickly and save money. Another unnamed customer, who had moved applications from Google Apps to Amazon Web Services, realized immediately after the move that their app wasn’t performing well. After hooking it into Boundary, he realized the way the app accessed an external DNS provider was costing the app developer more money. So the developer switched to Amazon’s in-house DNS lookup service and rebuilt the application to optimize it for Amazon. In the process the customer estimates he saved $15,000 per month and has seen performance speed up within a few hours.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-14/how-big-data-will-change-networking

The tool, called Genome, is designed to help companies deliver more targeted online advertising and marketing campaigns. Genome is scheduled to become available in July and will let online advertisers sift through and analyze massive amounts of behavioral and advertising-related data gathered from Yahoo’s networks as well as those of interclick, a company Yahoo acquired in December.

Yahoo’s Genome announcement comes just a few weeks after Google touted BigQuery, a service that lets enterprises upload and analyze massive amounts of data on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Google’s service differs from Genome in that it is designed to let enterprises use Google infrastructure for analyzing their own data sets for different applications. Genome is targeted specifically at marketers and will allow companies to leverage Yahoo’s data sets in addition to their own.

Both Genome and BigQuery are a response to what analysts say is a growing need for technologies that can help companies manage and analyze the massive volumes of data resulting from trends such as cloud computing, mobile computing, social media and globalization.

Yahoo’s Genome announcement comes even as the company is reeling from the departure of CEO Scott Thompson, who left Yahoo Sunday amid questions about the validity of his academic credentials. Ross Levinsohn has been named interim CEO while the company looks for a replacement for Thompson.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227146/Yahoo_launches_big_data_analytics_tool_for_online_advertisers

With the majority of enterprises expected to move off Windows XP over the next couple of years and onto Windows 7 or Windows 8, both of which offer built-in support for desktop virtualization, many companies will soon look to reap the benefits that a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) can offer, such as greater flexibility, mobility, and customization–and the ability to access Windows on non-traditional devices like tablets.

But, as with server virtualization a decade ago, desktop virtualization is in its infancy and many of the kinks have yet to be worked out. As a result, there are a number of potential pitfalls. Many can be avoided by following some basic steps in planning and preparation. At the Interop Conference and Expo Wednesday in Las Vegas, speakers Tyler Rohrer, co-founder of LiquidWare Labs, and Jason Langone, federal account manager at Nutanix, offered a few ways that can help organizations avoid some of the more common VDI missteps.

1. Know what you have. Enterprises should take a full inventory of their desktop environment before embarking on a desktop virtualization plan. That will in turn provide them with the information needed to procure the right technology, in the right amounts.

2. Prepare users for the migration. When switching over to VDI, users may encounter an unfamiliar desktop. Langone recounted how his mother, who works for the federal government, is the type of user that assumes an application is gone if the shortcut disappears.

3. Don’t assume VDI is like server virtualization. Organizations that have successfully virtualized their server environments may assume that VDI will be that much easier. The panelists said that’s a mistake. They noted that, while server virtualization may involve hundreds of servers, VDI can involve thousands of desktops.

4. Realize different user groups have different needs. VDI is a chance for enterprises to efficiently move away from the “one size fits all” approach to desktop provisioning, and it offers a chance to provide desktops that are more finely tailored to the needs of individual workers

5. Persistence pays, except in VDI. When possible, organizations should opt for non-persistent VDI implementations, as opposed to persistent. The former randomly assigns a user to a VDI instance upon login, while the latter consistently assigns users to the same instance, such as “virtual desktop 17.” The advantage of non-persistence is that it’s more flexible.

6. Assess, and reassess. After a pilot project has been implemented, user feedback and data needs to be closely monitored. Key factors to watch are application response times compared to physical desktops, CPU usage, and bandwidth consumption.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/management/240000121