As IT evolves to support everything from virtualized desktops to mobile and social networking, new advances promise to change the way the business side of the house gets the job done. Here's a look at some of IT departments' game-changing technologies and how they affect the everyday worker.
Virtualization stalwarts and start-ups alike are aiming for the desktop. A baker's dozen.
1. Take a SWAT team approach
The scenario is typical: The lights on the network management consoles are a soothing shade of green, but a top revenue-generating application is crawling. Business users have swamped the help desk with calls and trouble tickets. Everyone there is calling the network team to figure out the problem.
US-based Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin found that moving away from tape toward continuous data protection let it cut costs and provide more reliable backup and recovery. Here are some lessons the law firm learned along the way:
Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, a US law firm, knows what competing against the big guys is like. Although it has just 135 lawyers and 400 employees overall, its client list includes such heavyweights as Citigroup, Google, HP, the Oakland Raiders football team and Sony Online Entertainment.
Say goodbye to the tower.
Metro Health Hospital, a healthcare system serving 130,000 patients across Michigan, is already using what some consider the desktop of the future. The hospital has rolled out server-hosted virtual desktops to every employee no matter where they are or what client device they use.
Aviall Services, a Dallas-based Boeing subsidiary and provider of after-market supply-chain management services for the aerospace, defense and marine industries, successfully implemented a new storage scheme that doubles its storage capacity, increases performance and prepares it for future services.
Like other public companies that handle credit cards, TiVo faces a double whammy: meeting the requirements of the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the Payment Card Industry data security standard. Through a savvy combination of proactive auditor relations, automation and simplification, however, the company has cut significantly the time and effort it spends dealing with compliance issues.
Everybody knows virtualization isn't just about VMware anymore. Many users are past the rush to server virtualization and now need to increase the benefits of the move. They need not only to improve efficiency, performance and management, but also to find ways to extend the technology to their desktop, storage and mobile environments. That's a heavy burden. Product choices can be overwhelming, and a starting point difficult to find. Get on your way with promising products from these 10 companies:
Carriers building IP-based next-generation network infrastructures are faced with the tough task of guaranteeing service levels and uptime requirements in a huge, global, but less-than-deterministic network environment.
The public network is getting interesting again. In the early '90s, the buzz was about the Internet's rise and the advent of frame relay. Today, it's about PBT, T-MPLS and next-generation networks, such as Verizon's FiOS and BT's 21CN.
Lawsuits are a fact of life for organizations today. Recent surveys show that the average U.S. company faces 305 suits at any one time; that number jumps to 556 for companies with US$1 billion or more in revenue.
The new data centre, marked by cutting-edge technologies such as virtualisation, Web-centric computing and autonomic computing, promises new efficiencies in hardware, software and staffing. But as more organisations move to the new paradigm, cost savings is rising as the prime benefit. Users and analysts say a business can cut overall operational costs anywhere from 25 per cent to 90 per cent with smart implementation of these seven new data centre technologies.
