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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.
Let Our IT Resources Work for You
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.
Start putting our IT resources to work for you!
Working Green – Bottom-Line Benefits of Secure Remote Access
Posted in: C-Level, Green Technology by thirdoctet on June 5, 2008 | No Comments
Growing public concern about global warming and other environmental issues is spilling over into the business world, where companies are increasingly looking to make their operations more “green” by minimizing their environmental impact. The reasons range from scarcity of resources to the boost to corporate image to potential cost savings by using more environmentally sensitive activities.
Sun Microsystems and VMware Announce OEM Agreement to Add VMware Virtualization to Sun x64 Server and Storage Portfolio
Posted in: Green Technology, Industry News, Virtualization by thirdoctet on February 28, 2008 | No Comments
CANNES, France VMworld Europe, February 27, 2008 Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced an OEM agreement to expand their virtualization offerings. Starting today, Sun is offering the VMware Infrastructure product suite on Sun hardware systems with full support from Sun. This helps enable customers to capitalize on the high performance, scalability and energy efficiency of Sun’s x64 servers while leveraging VMware’s ground-breaking virtualization solutions to improve asset utilization, operational efficiency, and business agility. The agreement also benefits systems integrators and channel partners by providing a fully supported, seamlessly integrated solution from these two leading technology providers.
“When it comes to innovative design, performance and scalability, Sun is an x64 industry leader,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Microsystems. “With today’s announcement we’re expanding our virtualization portfolio and giving customers who want VMware virtualization software a great hardware platform for maximizing their utilization and their IT investment.”
“The benefits of lower capital and operating expenses, business continuity, security, and a greener datacenter are driving strong demand for VMware virtualization software on Sun x64 server and storage systems,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “This new milestone in our ongoing relationship with Sun gives customers what they want: a combination of advanced technologies that deliver strong business value.”
Sun and VMware will continue their robust qualification program of VMware products on Sun systems. The companies will also work to ensure that the Solaris Operating System (OS) will continue to be a first-class guest operating system on VMware virtualization software, and VMware Infrastructure will be a first-class datacenter virtualization run-time and management stack on Sun x64 systems. The two companies plan to also collaborate on system management configuration, deployment and monitoring for each other’s products.
Selected Sun x64 servers are available for a free 60-day trial as part of Sun’s Try-and-Buy program, which includes a free 60-day evaluation of VMware Infrastructure. More information on the Try-and-Buy program and eligible systems is available at: http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/products.jsp. Sun also offers its own complete virtualization portfolio that includes unified software management tools and virtualization of operating systems, servers, storage, desktops and chips – both inside and outside the box. More information on Sun’s desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio is available at http://www.sun.com/virtualization.
In conjunction with today’s announcement, Sun will showcase Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 2.0 during the VMworld Europe conference. This solution leverages VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter to allow customers to securely access centralized desktop environments over a variety of network connections. Today’s agreement ensures frontline support and allows customers to purchase the complete solution directly from Sun, including Sun Ray virtual display thin clients, Sun VDI Software 2.0 and VMware virtualization software. More information on Sun Virtual Desktop Solutions is available at: http://www.sun.com/datacenter/consolidation/virtualization/desktop/index.jsp.
For more information on the VMware/Sun relationship, go to http://www.vmware.com/sun.
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.
Sun and Fujitsu turn their own data centres into green showrooms
Posted in: Green Technology, Industry News by thirdoctet on August 21, 2007 | No Comments
Sun Microsystems this week highlighted how server consolidation and other efforts reduce energy costs, while Fujitsu Computer Products of America has plugged in a new hydrogen fuel cell generator to supply some of the power to its offices in Sunnyvale, California.
Server sprawl, rising energy costs and global climate change concerns have made the finance people at many businesses finger their IT departments as the biggest energy waster in the company. Datacentres across the US consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, roughly 1.5% of the total US electricity consumption, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. But those same finance people need to see a favourable return on investment (ROI) before approving a datacentre upgrade.
Already, Hewlett-Packard has consolidated 85 of its datacentres worldwide into six, while IBM will replace 3,900 servers in its datacentres worldwide with 30 mainframe computers.
Sun is touting its Eco Innovation Initiative of building energy-efficient datacentres in Santa Clara, Blackwater in the UK and Bangalore, India.
In Santa Clara Sun reduced its server count to 1,240 from 2,177 and its storage hardware count to 225 from 738, all while achieving a fourfold increase in computing power. The upgrade reduced Sun’s electrical use to 500 kilowatts, from 2.2 million megawatts, and earned Sun a $1m (£500,000) rebate from the local electrical utility, Silicon Valley Power.
But even Sun had to convince its finance people to approve the project, said Dave Douglas, vice president of Eco Responsibility at Sun.
The realities of green computing
Posted in: Green Technology by thirdoctet on August 3, 2007 | No Comments
Many companies are touting their green business practices, and while e-cycling and other green programs are increasing, e-waste remains a major global issue. More and more lately, IT vendors trumpet their electronic-waste recycling and “takeback” programs where manufacturers accept responsibility for the full lifecycle of goods they produce. Better yet, we’re told, is the rapid trend toward “green computing” with electronics being produced using fewer toxic substances and materials that cannot be recycled.
‘No Cooling Necessary’ Data Centers Coming?
Posted in: Green Technology by thirdoctet on | No Comments
Panelists in a discussion on green data centers here Aug. 1 at the fourth Always On Stanford Summit were asked whether they thought the future might bring data centers that no longer need cooling equipment, thus cutting back substantially on power draw. Somewhat surprisingly, the answer—across the board—was “yes.”
Now there’s a concept: data centers that are so completely self-contained that no one has to worry about power intake or cooling system failures. It turns out that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and undoubtedly other companies are already doing research and testing in this area and, in fact, are beginning to come out with no-cooling-necessary components, if not full data centers, at this time.
Solar powered servers for the masses
Posted in: Green Technology by thirdoctet on July 26, 2007 | No Comments
Next week, Greenest Host in San Diego is going to start offering carbon-free Web services to consumers. The company plans to start selling Web hosting services for about $14.95 a month. The trick is that its servers and other systems are powered by solar panels or batteries charged by solar panels. Read more…
Is ‘Green’ Software Possible?
Posted in: Green Technology by thirdoctet on | No Comments
As Kermit the infuriating frog puppet once said “It’s not easy bein’ green” – especially as a software developer. OK you can do all things that everyone else does – buy a Toyota Prius hybrid or even cycle to work (as long as you avoid Lycra and silly helmets). You can scribble notes on recycled paper with a pencil (made of wood from managed forests) and turn your machine off standby. You can even diligently recycle your printer ink cartridges and offset your energy consumption by planting a few trees.
But none of this has anything specifically to do with making software or the effects it has on the wider world. Unlike hardware builders, software developers can’t build greener products by using alternative materials. Which raises the question – can you write green software? Read more…
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…