A combination of economic pressures and rapid changes in technological advancement is causing companies to consider how to combat these factors without compromising the security of their systems and successfully managing the stress on their IT departments.

The arrival of Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the way we do business, allowing  organisations to share resources, information and software across a growing multitude of connected devices. 

The current economic downturn has meant that business executives are looking for a high level of service and innovation for a low cost from their IT department.

Cloud computing, when properly considered, can be highly cost-effective, scalable and fast.  This allows it to provide a way to increase capacity, quickly, without investing in new infrastructure, staff training and licensing for new software.

There are different types of Cloud services available, each of which have their own advantages and disadvantages enabling companies to decide on the most appropriate for their business needs.  They are as follows:

Public Cloud – A hosted, multi-tenant solution.  This offers the most leverage and best flexibility but the service provider owns all of the physical infrastructure and assets.

Private Cloud – The company hosts the resources in its own virtualised environment.  This enables better provision for security and privacy compliance but is expensive to set up.

Dedicated Hosting – Both virtualised and non-virtualised single-tenant computing, hosted off-site

Hybrid Hosting – This is a mixture of Dedicated & Private built into one solution, using a secure private network to connect to dedicated servers providing both security and flexibility.

Cloud can potentially save businesses time and money however properly considering your needs and options is greatly advised to ensure added value.

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The Dell DVS Simplified solution with Citrix VDI-in-a-box software is an easy, repeatable solution that will be sold through Dell’s global sales team and channels, reaching millions of customers who want to take advantage of the significant business benefits that desktop virtualization offers, such as enhanced mobility and streamlined IT management.

Leveraging the all-in-one Citrix VDI-in-a-Box software, Dell and Citrix have created a simple integrated hardware VDI appliance that is pre-certified to support defined numbers of desktops. Based on the unique VDI-in-a-Box grid architecture running on Dell servers, the Dell DVS Simplified VDI appliance can be easily installed to create and rapidly scale a virtual desktop deployment in response to business needs, making VDI easily consumable by light IT  organizations that may have previously lacked the resources and datacenter infrastructure needed for desktop virtualization.

For more on this visit our source: http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2321674&ntref=hp_promo_VDI_Dell

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Tanker drivers delivering fuel to petrol pumps across the UK have voted for strike action. According to Unite, the union behind the ballots, the dispute is over safety and growing instability in the fuel industry.

Strike ballots took place amongst drivers in the seven major UK fuel distribution companies. In five of these (Turners, Norbert Dentressangle, Wincanton, BP and Hoyer) a majority voted to take industrial action.

DHL drivers voted against strike action but did vote in favour of action short of a strike. Members in Suckling voted against strike action and action short of strike.

When the UK was facing similar strike action in 2008, Andrew Sinclair provided Continuity Central with a useful checklist of some contingency measures that business continuity managers can take to protect against possible future fuel shortages. An edited version of the list is reproduced again, below:

Step one - Don’t panic. This is an industrial dispute, not a long term loss of supply capability: but given the situation, it is wise to be prepared.

Step two - Use less fuel. If a shortage does develop it makes sense to use less fuel if you can. There are a number of simple measures any driver can take which can result in significant fuel savings. For example, make sure vehicle tyres are properly inflated. If they’re not, you’ll be using more fuel than you need to. Plan ahead. If you need to travel to meetings or work, investigate if you can alter the timings to avoid the rush hours. Reduce your speed to conserve fuel – allow more times for journeys to ensure you can do this.

Step three – Investigate alternatives to travelling. For example : audioconferencing, videoconferencing, web meetings, instant messaging collaboration tools, etc. If you haven’t got such tools ask if others in your neighbourhood do and whether you could hire from them rather than travel. Most local authorities have videoconferencing capabilities which they may be willing to allow local businesses to use (of course in this situation they could be making more use of such facilities themselves thus not having any spare capacity). Talk with your IT department or service provider about the collaboration tools available on-line.

Step four - Determine which of your staff are critical and ask them to consider car sharing, assuming this is practical for them. If a fuel shortage does begin to bite, it may be advantageous to operate a mini-bus to ensure that critical staff can get to and from work. Ensure that all public transport options have been considered.

Step five – Utilise work from home plans; and discuss with your IT department the feasibility of expanding this option to as many employees as possible. If they can’t work from home, can any of your staff work from an alternative office, closer to their home than their normal place of work?

Step six – Confirm with your suppliers the steps they are taking. If your business is dependent on a regular supply of materials or products which normally come by road, ask your suppliers what steps they are taking to ensure they can continue to deliver. Look at your supply chain and assess if you could forward order now, to save problems later. Can you find an alternative source of materials locally? To reverse this, if your business depends on you supplying others, could you forward deliver any materials in order to protect both you and your customers?

Source - Continuity Central.com  http://continuitycentral.com/feature0965.html

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This week saw Dell release its new PowerEdge 12th Generation Servers, as with other recent hardware launches, cost saving, speed and efficiency are at the top of the priority list.

The 12th Generation Servers range includes the PowerEdge R820, R720, R720xd and R620 rack servers, the M620 blade server, the T620 tower server and C6220 based on a shared Dell infrastructure server built on the Intel Xeon processor E5 product family.

Some of the cost saving aspescts include Fresh Air Cooling which means that you can run the servers at higher temperatures and cool with outside air, so using less power to regulate the server environment. Then there is the Open Manage Power Center which monitors and controls the power consumption of your systems to decrease your power and cooling cost.

Other notable differences are a large memory footprint and bandwidth, PowerEdge Express Flash Storage, PowerEdge Select Network Adapter, PERC CacheCade which enables automatic and dynamic movement of hot data sets to and from SSD’s, maximizing application performance and increasing throughput and uptime.

For more info go to www.dell.com

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Mitel and VMware now offer the ability to use a softphone's unified contact center application through a virtual desktop client. Mitel has integrated its Contact Center softphone client with VMware View 5.0 so that when you log into View, you also log into the corporate phone with no additional software or configuration.

Companies already use virtual desktops and virtual PBXes, but due to the fact that voice data can't have any lag, unified contact centers are separated from the desktop environment to ensure that the real-time voice packets aren't choppy or delayed.

Industry watchers have said that if the system works as well as Mitel claims, it could become a standard unified communications option within 18 months.  Over time the system could save costs and work levels for businesses in their IT departments as all they would need is a thin client and a headset.

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Message Continuity, a cloud-based business continuity service for Microsoft Exchange enterprise users was released by Google back in December 2010. This month Google has announced that it will no longer be providing this service.  Whilst Google has promised that existing contracts will continue to be serviced until their renewal date,  some early adopters may only  have a few weeks, or even days, to source an alternative Microsoft Exchange business continuity service. Google’s decision not only poses a huge problem for Message Continuity users,  it also raises doubt about ever relying on the public cloud mega-companies for any services which may be critical to your day-to-day activities; or for business continuity.

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The wireless network will start to be installed this month in Westminster and will be followed by Kensington and Chelsea. The service will be powered by equipment attached to lampposts and other street fixtures and is set for completion in March, in time for the Olympics.

With other networks such as The Cloud and BT Openzone already available, London will be catching up with other major cities such as Paris and New York who already offer wi-fi in parks and other public spaces.

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This comes as part of the plans to boost the economy, by creating 100mbps networks in 10 urban areas. It has been said that the plan will enable cities to compete with other top ‘digital’ cities in across the world.

Those eligible to bid include the capitals London, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff along with Manchester, Bristol and 8 other cities.

Cities that are bidding for money from the urban broadband fund will be expected to show plans of high speed mobile connectivity citywide and how their new status will improve growth in the city.  They will also be expected to contribute to the cost.

Individuals who have criticised the plan have suggested that the money should be spent improving broadband in rural areas, a process which so far has been quite slow.

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EMC has released a survey which has revealed that the UK is not even nearly giving Disaster Recovery the focus it needs.

According to the survey 78% of UK organisations have experienced data loss in the last 12 months. This is higher than the European average of 54%.

To put an effective DR plan in place, senior company members must be made aware of the effects any serious incident could have on the IT infrastructure of a business. 

Data must be split into ‘sets’ in terms of importance. For some data sets it may be acceptable to have two days worth of downtime, whereas for others it is unacceptable to have two seconds.

Should a disaster occur, not having realistic objectives on Recovery Time or Recovery Points are some of the worst ways in which a company can be caught unawares along with not ensuring consistency in backups.

Organisations must always be questioning what could realistically go wrong within their IT environment, and what affect those events would have on the rest of their business. Companies are often under the impression that their DR plan is sufficient for their business needs, when in many cases it needs to be seriously addressed.

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