Outlasting the Competition: Why High Availability is Critical to Midsize Businesses
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(Source: Oracle)  Today, businesses of all sizes compete head-to-head for customers, suppliers,partners and - importantly - market share of mind. In order to compete successfully with larger, better-equipped organizations, midsize businesses are looking increasingly at the benefits of implementing fail-safe database management and storage systems. This white paper identifies the key decision factors in making the move to a high availability solution, and how clustered database software from Oracle - Oracle Real Application Clusters - provides midsize businesses with a fault-tolerant, scalable and cost-effective solution to their growing needs.
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Forklift leads to unplanned downtime Say what you will about cooling issues, disgruntled admins and memory failures. There are times when it's the guys in shipping that cause the most harm to a data center.â¦
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(Source: Tibco)  Every day, millions of individuals within large organizations make small, yet important business decisions based on their experience and whatever information happens to be available at the time. With little time to spare, these decisions are often taken with an incomplete view of the situation, as 'good information' is all too often still difficult to find. Faced with a backlog for new enterprise reports, out-of-control 'spreadsheet marts', and a plethora of custom applications all trying to accomplish similar goals, CIOs and business managers alike need to consider a new approach.
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MANHASSET, N.Y., Feb. 5  /PRNewswire/ -- Downtime isn't an option in the high-stakes, high-profile world of online events. If the audience can't get in, the hosting organization can't realize its revenue goals -- or bank on the trust of would-be attendees in the future.
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As companies ramp up open-source deployments, expertise is in high demand and short supply. The costs of developing talent can add up.
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Computerworld recently conducted a survey of more than 100 IT executives to understand how IT leaders are balancing the supply of IT services with business-driven demands to maximize business value. Learn what your peers had to day about the effectiveness of the approaches they use. Their answers may surprise you.
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(Source: Dell & VMWare) Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical to managing risks in a successful business.  Between 60-90% of companies that don't have a proactive disaster recovery plan find themselves out of business within 24 months of experiencing a major disaster.  This VMware white paper discusses how to make disaster recovery cost effective with virtual infrastructure.
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As small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) save more data and rely on it more, they are turning to networked storage even under the burden of limited budgets and IT expertise.Regulatory requirements, more sophisticated applications and reliance on Web-based supply chains all are forcing small businesses to collect and store more information, according to IDC analyst Rick Villars. They may not have enough data to fill an enterprise-class storage system today, but they want systems that let them add more capacity as they grow, he said.EMC is aiming at this growing market with its Clariion AX4, a platform that can scale from a few terabytes of storage to 60TB and take advantage of many advanced EMC storage management applications designed for large enterprises. The company was set to announce and ship it Tuesday.Swervepoint, a provider of promotional gifts in Middleton, Mass., has less than 1TB of data between its two locations but wants to be able to add storage capacity without buying new servers.&quot;We should buy our servers for the server qualities and buy storage for our server needs,&quot; said Kevin Phoenix, principal in charge of operations and administration.The 15-employee company&#39;s main concerns about networked storage are cost and complexity, and the AX4 eased those worries, Phoenix said. Swervepoint, which counts EMC as one of its own clients, has been a beta tester of the AX4 and purchased a unit. It came with management software that was easy to use, said Phoenix, who said he handles IT for the company but is not an IT specialist.The AX4 comes with at least 3TB of storage and can be expanded by stringing together as many as five systems with 12 drives each. Each AX4 can be ordered with either a Fibre Channel or a iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) connection, meeting demand for IP (Internet Protocol) connectivity among SMBs, according to Barry Ader, senior director of Clariion marketing at EMC. Smaller companies tend not to have expertise with Fibre Channel, which is typically used in large enterprises, he said. On the AX4, there is no price difference between the two interface options.The systems will come with 750GB drives at first, but 1TB drives will be available starting in March, opening the door to the AX4&#39;s top-end storage capacity of 60TB, Ader said. Within the full AX4 system and even within each enclosure, users can mix and match SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives. Companies can use management tools including snapshot, failover, business continuity and Microsoft Exchange replication capability with the AX4.By mixing SAS and SATA drives, users can set up a tiered storage system in which the more critical data is on better-performing, more expensive SAS drives and less critical on lower-performance SATA disks, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT. Support for enterprise-class software is another benefit of the AX4, which goes up against SMB storage products from competitors including Network Appliance and Equalogic, King said. In particular, its support for virtualization software from EMC&#39;s VMware subsidiary appears to be stronger than in competing products, King said.
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On tap for the new database management system: improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, manageability and what Oracle dubs "diagnosability."
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'Shorty' kicks blades out of the data center and onto the floor The mid-market push has definitely been heating up for tech vendors in recent weeks. We've already seen Dell, IBM and Hitachi touting their simplified server and storage lines with SMB-aimed gear, and frankly, we're starting to recite the hard sell for companies with limited budgets and expertise in our sleep.â¦
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Early Internet entrepreneurs envisioned a day when consumers would devour short bites of entertainment on their computer screens delivered over the Internet by fat broadband pipes. When the companies failed, executives blamed it on ...
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There is something rather antiquated about many of the server clusters used today by engineers, scientists and media fiends. Their high-powered computing machines are often cobbled together over many days
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Explore powerful options available to mid-sized companies
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(Source: 3PAR) Here's an information-packed white paper from TheInfoPro (TIP) that delivers findings from one-on-one interviews with Fortune 1000 storage professionals. The paper explains how the deployment of tiered storage has driven the need for data migration in Fortune 1000 companies, and why those enterprises are now looking for more mature storage solutions that minimize complexity while harnessing the full value of tiered storage. It's must-read research for IT strategists who are looking to meet their business drivers for low-cost storage and high availability.
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Bye bye to Buy! Buy! Another day, another silly survey, this time claiming that nearly two million UK small businesses are "putting their data and productivity at risk by using old technology to run their business". Why? because they replace their PCs rarely or never, and miss out on all sorts of good things, such as happy staff, cheaper running costs, and smaller "footprints" and lower repair bills.â¦
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A small company learns to think big -- meeting the needs of its enterprise-class customers -- by building an infrastructure it can count on.
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There's little question that more and more storage and computing will move out into the cloud over time. The question--well, one of them anyway--is where the economic scale points lie.