Networking and Hardware Blog

Network Automation Launches AutoMate 9

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:20:31 +0000

Network Automation released its latest automation software solutions, AutoMate 9 and AutoMate BPA Server 9. The release marks the expansion of the no-code platform’s enhanced offerings.

Networking and Hardware Blog

5 Reasons Why Object Storage Will Take Over the Cloud in 2012

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:44:26 +0000

In 2011, object storage started to gain major traction in the market especially since it has been validated by companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which use this type of architecture to power their very large infrastructures.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Top 10 Reasons SMBs Fail to Back Up Their Data

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:44:40 +0000

Loss of data ranks as a “worst nightmare” for businesses of any size, but for SMBs data loss can be especially catastrophic: FEMA even estimates that 40 to 60 percent of SMBs never re-open after a data disaster. So, considering the threat of natural disasters, hardware/software failures, and worker recklessness leading to catastrophic data loss, why do some SMBs still fail to back up their data? Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code 42 Software shared with me this list of the top 10 reasons SMBs fail to back up their data.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Two Studies Show that Tape Offers Significant TCO Benefits Over Disk

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:32:54 +0000

Two recent studies have found that tape has significant total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits over disk, including lower cost per GB, lower operating expenses, and lower energy costs.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Vote for Your Favorite Products Now!

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 19:51:56 +0000

The nomination phase is over, so now's the time to cast your final vote!

Networking and Hardware Blog

Nominate Your Favorite Products Now!

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:04:57 +0000

The Community Choice Awards let YOU decide what products get chosen for acclaim and recognition. We want to hear from our readers about what they think are the best products and services are in a given category. Nominate your favorite products now, before time runs out!

Networking and Hardware Blog

EventSentry Now Lets You Monitor Your Systems from Your iPhone

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:37:50 +0000

For a number of years, I’ve admired NETIKUS.NET’s network-management offerings—particularly the company’s EventSentry product, which provides monitoring capabilities for critical infrastructure systems. NETIKUS.NET has released a new version of EventSentry (2.92), and it’s got some cool changes worth pointing out to you network admins out there. The biggest change is the introduction of an SNMP daemon, which lets you receive SNMP traps (v1, v2c, v3) with EventSentry traps. The SNMP trap daemon is also available in the tool’s free edition, EventSentry Light. The SNMP daemon is extremely easy to set up, so anybody can configure basic SNMP monitoring at no cost in a matter of minutes.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Free Tool of the Week: ScriptLogic PacketTrap IT Community Edition

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:01:00 +0000

For some time—since before it was a Quest Software product—I’ve had a soft spot for ScriptLogic’s network-monitoring and IT infrastructure solution, PacketTrap IT. So I made a point to visit with ScriptLogic’s PacketTrap team (namely, Jayson Gehri and Nick Cavalancia) recently at Microsoft TechEd. They brought me up to date on PacketTrap, including the revelation that ScriptLogic is introducing a free version of the product. And what could be better than a free version of PacketTrap? After all, according to Cavalancia, “This product rocks.”

PacketTrap IT provides centralized network monitoring, allowing the IT generalist and Microsoft technologist to solve problems associated with bandwidth, connectivity, network, and infrastructure performance that are often constant, time-consuming issues for IT departments. Through its central console, PacketTrap uses an agent-based approach to provide auto remediation; you can configure PacketTrap to automatically take actions in the event of a failure. The product boasts excellent live network mapping, as well as network performance baselining; the product learns your network’s performance idiosyncrasies to provide a malleable, realistic baseline. New to PacketTrap IT 6.0 is IPv6 support.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Simplify Your Physical/Virtual/Cloud Backup and Recovery with Acronis

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:04:00 +0000

In a market in which disaster recovery and data protection are typically provided in separate solutions, you’ve probably found yourself wishing for a comprehensive, easy-to-use solution that would just do both for you. There are a few solutions on the market that promise that kind of functionality, but one of the easier-to-use, more innovative choices is arguably Acronis’s Backup & Recovery, the latest version of which (version 11) brings its functionality into the virtualized and cloud environments.

I just spoke with Izzy Azeri, Acronis’s senior VP and general manager for the Americas, about the new version of Acronis Backup & Recovery, specifically about the product’s deep reach into physical, virtual, and cloud environments. “As the size of data continues to grow, our aim is still to help customers manage their information better,” said Azeri. “We offer an easy-to-use, easy-to-manage technology that solves all their needs in one solution.”

Networking and Hardware Blog

Best of TechEd Finalist: CommVault Simpana 9 Leaps Forward

Wed, 25 May 2011 14:03:00 +0000

I spoke with Randy De Meno (chief technologist) and David Ngo (director of engineering alliances) of CommVault at TechEd about the latest version of his company’s Simpana data protection software, which introduces a host of evolutionary features revolving around de-duplication, snapshot functionality, and virtualization. Simpana was a Best of TechEd finalist last year with version 8, but it was version 9's bevy of enhancements that brought CommVault to the winner's circle this year.

Simpana 9 now lets you de-duplicate data at the source, so that you can significantly speed up your backup times, reduce the amount of data traveling over your networks, and lessen the amount of data that you're storing. CommVault actually gives you the ability to perform end-to-end de-duplication across all storage tiers (source, secondary, archive, cloud)—a capability that De Meno refers to as “Universal Dedupe.”

Networking and Hardware Blog

Best of TechEd Finalist: EMC Isilon Provides Simplified Scale-Out NAS

Thu, 19 May 2011 11:54:32 +0000

EMC Isilon is tackling Big Data in an innovative way. Data is growing at an alarming rate, and the challenge is to find a way to easily and intelligently control and analyze that data. Enterprises need an easy-to-use, easy-to-scale, highly flexible, and immensely powerful storage solution that can be managed quickly and non-disruptively. Isilon, EMC’s recent high-profile acquisition, more than fits the bill. But just to give you a sense of its basic capabilities, Isilon can scale capacity from 6TB to 15PB in a single file system and single volume, and can deliver 85GBps of throughput and 1.2 million NFS IOPS. And by offering up to quadruple failure protection, Isilon ensures that even if as many as four nodes or drives fail at the same time, 100 percent of your data remains available. Many solutions tackle the traditional challenges of the data center—delivering centralized enterprise administration features, reliable performance, and ever-increasing capacity—but Isilon’s differentiator is that it does so while giving you a customized, flexible architecture that’s perfect for you. Isilon is endlessly scalable, letting you start small and scale out over time almost effortlessly, and the platform will remain in step with your most complex enterprise applications. And you don’t need to add storage administrators as you grow. One person can manage petabytes of data, minimizing operating expenses and keeping the staff focused on managing data—not storage.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Best of TechEd Finalist: Quest Litespeed for SQL Server 6.5 Continues a Smart Backup Evolution

Wed, 18 May 2011 14:43:00 +0000

Earlier, I spoke with David Gugick (director of product management) and Jason Hall (SQL Server presales) of Quest Software about their product Quest Litespeed for SQL Server, which provides intelligent, configurable database backup and recovery. No question about it—Litespeed is a top-tier product for SQL Server environments, widely used for good reason. You probably know Litespeed for its peerless object-level and table-level recovery functionality, but the product continues to evolve in exciting ways. I learned about some of the key differentiators that have been introduced in version 6.5. A big concept in the new version of Litespeed is its Fast Compression technology, which provides significant improvements in SQL Server backup performance. Aimed squarely at the prospect of cutting monthly storage costs, Fast Compression reduces backup times and improves database recoverability. Fast Compression de-duplicates and compresses backups on the server by leveraging LiteSpeed’s highly regarded data-compression features, the SQL Server differential backup engine, user-defined thresholds, and a multi-layered validation system to manage the entire database backup process. Fast Compression simplifies a once-difficult administration task and fixes the negative side-effects of performing nightly, full database backups when only a small percentage of the actual database has changed.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Best of TechEd Finalist: AppAssure Replay 4 Changes the Backup/Restore Game

Mon, 16 May 2011 19:41:00 +0000

Just finished interviewing Steven Toole (chief marketing officer) and Joseph Hand (senior solutions architect) of AppAssure about their Best of TechEd award finalist, AppAssure Replay 4. Promising “the world’s fastest and easiest backup and disaster recovery” capabilities on the market, AppAssure certainly offers a bevy of game-changer features.

Particularly impressive about Replay 4 is its evolution from file-based recovery to image-based recovery. Traditional backup products move files to an alternate storage medium such as tape. But what if you have to restore apps or whole servers? AppAssure wants to shatter that resource-heavy paradigm by leaving tape behind and focusing on an agent-based approach that captures an initial image of a server and then takes incremental snapshots. You might set up a 15-minute interval, collect those into a collapsed 1-day interval, and then into a 1-week interval, and so on into months and a year, until that history can be embedded into a base image. You’re getting near-continuous backups in real time—so, say goodbye to the traditional notion of backup jobs.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Best of TechEd Finalist: Xiotech Hybrid ISE Offers Stylish Power

Mon, 16 May 2011 17:59:00 +0000

Just met with Keith Hageman (storage technology evangelist) and Blair Parkhill (technical marketing engineer) of Xiotech to talk about their Best of TechEd award finalist, the Hybrid ISE Storage Blade. This 3U blade combines hard disk drives and SSDs to provide more than 60,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). The Hybrid ISE offers a stunning 14.4TB of usable capacity.

The amount of data out there is exploding, and enterprises typically respond to that by simply buying more and more SSD storage, at greater and greater cost. We’re at a turning point in the trajectory of the storage industry, and Xiotech seems to be pioneering a unique path that focuses on performance rather than capacity. Building on the first-generation ISE architecture, the Hybrid ISE fuses together hard disks (for capacity) and SSDs (for performance) into a single steel-enclosed pool of storage, into which apps place their data. The patented Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) feature permits this fusion of disparate storage types into a seamless pool.

Networking and Hardware Blog

Free Tool of the Week: Dexpot

Thu, 05 May 2011 17:49:00 +0000

At work—in fact, on the system I'm typing on right now—I use two monitors. I find that the extra real estate drastically improves productivity when I'm, for example, entering text from a Microsoft Word document into a web tool or moving data from one spreadsheet to another. I just drag items from left to right. If a journalist finds that kind of capability helpful, I imagine it's exponentially so for IT administrators.

But perhaps you don't have access to or resources for additional monitors. What's the solution? How about virtual desktop software? Even better, how about free virtual desktop software? Dexpot is a solution that lets you open more than one desktop at a time on your screen so that you can have multiple open windows. The tool also lets you easily toggle between the separate desktops for full-screen viewing.