Thursday, 09 September 2010 07:57

If you were shopping for a good business desktop to power your operations, the Acer Veritron X498G may be a good choice. Its target client is the business professional who wants stability of technology environment in a small size. The stability and security may come at the cost of upgradeability and performance, but niche customers may not mind paying this small cost.

This computer is a tiny piece of equipment at 4 inches wide, 15.6 inches deep, and 10.5 inches high, but it packs a number of benefits. At just $699, customers get an easy-to-use and modular design. It also comes with a suite of utilities that ensure trouble-free management and security for all essential applications and operations.

The Intel Core processor powers the Acer Veritron X498G. It offers up to a 500GB SATA hard drive and up to 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM, which is installed in two of the four memory slots.

The large number and variety of interface ports is a unique feature of the Acer Veritron X498G. Ten USB 2.0 ports and three audio ports, along with serial, VGA, eSATA, microphone, headphones, two PS/2, and DVI-D ports provide a range of options that cover most business needs. The PS/2 ports also allow connection of a keyboard and mouse so that the USB ports are available for other uses.

Thursday, 09 September 2010 07:57

VMWare was founded in 1998 in Palo Alto, California. It provides virtualization software and its desktop software runs on various OSs.

The company offers products and solutions aimed at providing greater efficiency and higher performance. Their services range from data center solutions like virtualization management and server consolidation to desktop solutions like Desktop as a Service.

Their virtualization platform VMWare vSphere promises operations that are faster, more efficient and a whopping reduction of up to 70% in IT spend.

Thursday, 09 September 2010 07:57

Building tomorrow’s data center may well be as easy as selecting a meal from a menu. Take a look at what Microsoft has brought to the table.
A web platform called Azure which provides a company with a full course buffet. Azure empowers a company to build their own data centers with the components they want from a clutch of benefits like flexibility, low investment, high security and maintenance that virtually guarantees almost 100 % uptime.
The platform also can handle any size and scale of business – be it a company catering to worldwide clients or small start ups.
In strategic partnerships with companies like HP and Fujitsu, Microsoft is deploying Azure with an appliance based approach which marries software and hardware equally.

It is a fact that cloud computing delivers a whole bunch of advantages to a company by way of performance, business efficiencies and less downtime. It is also a proven fact that the other side to cloud computing is the security and legal issues. For a company to trust an outside agency with confidential data it is necessary to have highly secure systems in place. While agencies and laws dealing with compliance do exist, they are still operating in grey areas. Nobody is crystal clear on what happens to data trusted to a third party cloud service provider.

Thursday, 09 September 2010 07:57

The software giant Microsoft is teaming up with Fujitsu, as well as U.S.-based computer makers Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP) to expand its cloud presence with an Azure-based appliance. Currently, the appliance is designed for large-scale deployments at the vendor’s sites, but Microsoft has indicated that it is working to offer smaller-scale deployments as well as versions of the appliance that can be deployed at the customer site, rather than at a remote location.

The recent economic slowdown, along with increasing fears of a “double-dip” recession as hopes for a speedy recovery begin to wane, is forcing many companies to reconsider their budgets. Additionally, the costs of traditional IT deployments such as data centers are tipping in the direction of operational expenses rather than capital expenditures. In other words, the ongoing costs of operating a data center are beginning to eclipse the initial capital cost of constructing the data center (or, at least, of purchasing the IT equipment). These conditions are setting the stage for the potential emergence of the cloud as a powerhouse in IT. By outsourcing their IT requirements to the cloud, companies can completely eliminate capital expenditures and simply purchase IT resources on an as-needed basis, taking advantage of the economies of scale that cloud-computing providers are able to exploit. In addition, the cloud is gearing up for the potential entry of various levels of government (particularly the Federal government) as cloud-computing clients, since these governments are struggling to cut costs to ease their growing budget woes.

Thursday, 09 September 2010 07:57

Dell has shaped the PC industry ever since the first Dell computer hit the market in 1986. The company prides itself on being driven by R&D and on delivering tailor-made solutions to its clients through cutting-edge designs and strategic partnerships. Today, the company boasts shipments of 110,000 systems each day to customers in 180 nations.

In an attempt to support its decision to increase its data center and technology services business, Dell has entered into many alliances.

In 2008, Dell completed an acquisition of EqualLogic for $1.4 billion. EqualLogic was a leading provider of SAN, or storage-area network, solutions. At that time, Michael Dell, Dell’s chairman and CEO, stated that “virtualization and iSCSI are two keys to simplifying IT.”

Darren Thomas, Dell’s vice president of storage, also said that “[c]ustomers face extreme challenges with data growth. Their ideal solution is secure storage that uses existing infrastructure…that’s EqualLogic.”

In 2009, Dell and Perot Systems entered into a $3.9 billion agreement, with Dell acquiring Perot. The acquisition created a comprehensive IT solutions entity. Together, the two companies enhanced both Dell’s IT services portfolio and Perot’s global reach.

2010 may bring more acquisitions for Dell. The company is spreading its reach across all categories. Such acquisitions could aid Dell’s plans to double its $16 billion data center business in the next three years.

Thursday, 09 September 2010 07:57

IT hosting has gone through numerous phases, with the latest being cloud computing. This growth pattern started with ISP 1.0, which gave a user access to the Internet. Then came ISP 2.0, which gave access to servers at the Internet access point. Colocation, or ISP 3.0, allowed the user to maintain racks for the equipment at the Internet access point. ISP 4.0, or ASP, hosted traditionally designed applications on servers at the Internet access point. The cloud, or ISP 5.0, is a dynamic Internet-optimized infrastructure that plays host to the applications.   

Now, industry pundits say that this phase is due for a huge shakeup. According to James Staten of Forrester Research, cloud computing falls short of meeting the requirements for a large business. He calls it “a disruptive innovation” and says it is best suited for small and start-up businesses.   

The one huge advantage that cloud computing offers is the speed with which a user can gain access to services. But companies like Akamai Technologies, Amazon.com, Mosso Software, and Force.com offer services suitable for large-scale operations and true cloud providers.   

The Pew Research Center conducted the fourth iteration of its “Future of the Internet” survey, which found that most people see the future of cloud computing as a hybrid existence where some functions will be hosted in the cloud and some will remain on the desktop. Most users may not even know where their data “lives,” according to Charlie Martin, a correspondent and technical writer.