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Introducing Microsoft Online Services
Posted in: Application Delivery, C-Level, Deskside, Green Technology, Messaging, Offers, SaaS, Storage, Third Octet News, Virtualization, Words by thirdoctet on July 28, 2010 | No Comments
In today’s competitive global market, businesses need technology that enables flexibility and cost-effectively adds value to their organization. Internet-based hosted services provide a way to meet these objectives. They deliver feature-rich productivity tools to users while helping to relieve the burden of managing and maintaining business systems—freeing up IT departments to focus on initiatives that can deliver true competitive advantage.
Microsoft has a long history of developing and delivering innovative software and services for businesses and individuals. Designed to meet your unique business needs, our software-plus-services vision brings together the best of rich on-premise applications and flexible online services to give you ready access to the latest messaging and collaboration tools – without costly deployment and time-consuming maintenance. Microsoft Online Services reliably delivers 99.9 percent scheduled uptime and carries a financially backed service level agreement.
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Microsoft Online Services gives your business the powerful productivity capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting —all hosted online and all up and running quickly and easily without the upfront costs of an on-premise deployment. The suite of productivity tools enables your workers to communicate and collaborate effectively, while enabling your IT team to focus on more business-critical tasks. And with services hosted by Microsoft, you can have peace of mind knowing that experts are managing your IT and that your services will be available when you need them.
Features and Benefits
Microsoft Online Services makes it easy for you to leverage and rapidly deploy familiar Microsoft server products as flexible services. These hosted services—the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite—include the following:
Provide employees access to e-mail, calendar, and contacts from virtually anywhere, at anytime, on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices—while helping to protect against malware and spam. Exchange Online can be rapidly deployed, flexibly expanded, and is designed to be securely administered using a powerful yet easy-to-use Web-based console.
Share documents, contacts, calendars, and tasks in a single location. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, SharePoint Online delivers rich collaboration capabilities that enable team members to flexibly and efficiently collaborate, find organizational resources, search your intranet site, and manage content and workflow.
Connect with colleagues and customers through real-time meetings, training sessions, and events using only a PC with an Internet connection. Hosted Web conferencing services from Microsoft Office Live Meeting give your employees the power to collaborate wherever they are, to set up project meetings, brainstorm ideas, and collaborate on whiteboards without the cost and hassle of travel!
Enable users to find and rapidly connect with the right person from the applications they use most. Office Communications Online provides streamlined access to rich presence and instant messaging capabilities that are centrally managed by IT and work seamlessly with a range of Microsoft Office system programs.
How It Works
Each Microsoft data center, located strategically throughout the world, houses a highly reliable complex of equipment that provides seamless connectivity to the Microsoft Online suite of services. This global network of geo-redundant data centers provides around the clock access to your business-critical collaboration services, and helps keep your data safe.
With Microsoft Online Services, your IT staff retains control over the services offered to your end users. Microsoft Online Services work seamlessly with Microsoft Active Directory, so you can continue to manage user policies centrally and control which services are available via your existing users. A single administrative panel—with consoles for provisioning, usage, monitoring, and support—enables simple and centralized management. And your users can enjoy the convenience of a single sign-on to access all their hosted services.
Visit www.microsoft.com/online today for your free 30 day trial, or contact us for more information.
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NetApp automates VMware snapshots, storage provisioning
Posted in: Industry News, Storage, Virtualization by thirdoctet on February 17, 2008 | No Comments
By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer, SearchStorage.com.
Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) is adding a SnapManager software module for virtual servers and automated storage provisioning as part of a series of upgrades to its software portfolio.
The new SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure (SMVI) software module is similar to NetApp’s SnapManager modules for applications, such as SAP and Oracle. The products create an interface for setting data protection schemes that is meant to run in the idiom of the application being protected and through an interface on the application server itself. SnapManager products also run on virtual, as well as physical servers.
NetApp has supported snapshots of virtual servers, but these updates make the snapshots more complete and granular, according to NetApp vice president of solutions marketing Patrick Rogers. “SnapManager support means snapshots will operate inside the hypervisor environment, and snapshot and recover the entire VM, similar to the way SnapManager does backup and recovery on SQL and Exchange servers,” Rogers said.
NetApp is also adding a Provisioning Manager. This application allows administrators to create storage policy groups with predetermined settings, such as RAID levels and snapshot schedule, and automates provisioning of new hosts according to their assigned policy groups. There are no predefined limits to the number of policy groups supported. “It’s similar to provisioning VMware and other virtual machines,” according to Rogers.
For now, Provisioning Manager won’t automate virtual server provisioning, something at least one NetApp customer said he’d like to see soon. Tom Becchetti, storage engineer for a large medical manufacturing company , said the ability to delegate certain provisioning tasks after automating the initial setup of volumes will come in handy. But where it would really work best, he added, is for rapidly provisioning virtual hosts.
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IT Executives ‘Slam’ Storage Vendors for Not Being Green Enough
Posted in: Green Technology, Storage by thirdoctet on September 25, 2007 | No Comments
Eighty-eight per cent of North American IT departments say storage vendors should be doing more to improve the energy efficiency of their products according to a survey of IT executives. And 60 per cent said their own organizations were interested in finding more energy efficient ways of managing data storage resources.
The survey of 324 North American IT executives, part of BridgeHead Software’s annual Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Audit, clearly shows the growing interest in green and energy efficient technologies. While it reveals a greater demand for greener products from vendors, the survey also hints at a nagging feeling among organizations that they themselves are not doing enough in this area – 74 per cent said they felt better management of their storage resources could reduce energy consumption.
In North America, concern over power costs (67 per cent) was the most common reason organizations gave for wanting to improve the energy efficiency of their storage. Second was concern over power capacity issues (59 per cent), followed by environmental concerns (35 per cent). In the UK the reasons were power costs (73 per cent) and environmental concerns (57 per cent), with power capacity coming last at 35 per cent.
Patrick Dowling, senior vice president of marketing, BridgeHead Software explained that many organizations were holding too much data on power hungry disk based storage systems. “There is nothing wrong with demanding more energy efficient solutions from vendors, but many organizations could improve energy efficiency by cutting the data they hold on spinning disk,” said Dowling. “Sixty-one per cent of organizations in our survey said that between 30 and 50 percent of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again. While they may need to keep this data for legal or regulatory reasons, they can save power by moving it off to tape, optical disk, removable disk or other systems, which do not consume power unless being accessed. Organizations should be defining and implementing archiving rules to move old or infrequently accessed data off of primary storage.”
BridgeHead’s research reveals that many organizations are starting to use archiving for specific types of data such as emails, motivated by compliance and disaster recovery concerns, but few organizations are archiving for energy efficiency or cost considerations. And a lot of archiving activity is currently championed by finance and other business departments outside of IT’s control. But to really get the major green benefits of an archiving strategy, BridgeHead believes there needs to be an IT-driven move away from point solutions or isolated archive appliances toward an enterprise-wide approach, managing archiving of all data types across the whole organization.
“Only when you start taking an enterprise-wide approach to archiving, will the volume of data you’re taking off the primary store, make a real difference in terms of energy savings,” said Dowling.
EqualLogic Seeks Own IPO In VMware’s Wake
Posted in: Industry News, Storage by thirdoctet on August 15, 2007 | No Comments
VMware’s initial public offering may be getting the lion’s share of attention, but it isn’t the only vendor to buck up the courage to go public. Storage startup EqualLogic has registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its own initial public offering of common stock.
The moves comes as the explosion in data growth, the proliferation of server virtualization and the need for data protection and disaster recovery tools to preserve information continues to drive the storage market.
EqualLogic refused to answer questions about the IPO because it is in its registration period.
WD’S New Green Hard Drives Reduce Energy Consumption
Posted in: Green Technology, Storage by thirdoctet on July 24, 2007 | No Comments
Following the wave of energy saving hard drive’s, Western Digital is joining the pack by offering up their own green hard drive. Based on extensive customer input toward supporting ENERGY STAR 4.0 compliance and incorporating the latest in engineering technology, WD has delivered the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. Read more…
Server virtualization: The case for iSCSI
Posted in: Storage, Virtualization by thirdoctet on July 23, 2007 | No Comments
According to International Data Corp., about 80% of virtual servers are connected to SANs. And, today, virtually all of them are Fibre Channel SANs. However, iSCSI-based IP SANs may have inherent advantages in the context of server virtualization environments. Read more…