The inquisitive nature of engineers, which makes them so good at designing, developing and building products, can also lead them to become distracted by other “interesting things” like managing the very systems and tools that allow them to do their engineering....
The other day, I went to a presentation of FlexPOD and was impressed. FlexPOD is a collaboration of efforts from Cisco, VMWare, and NetApp. What it offers is a highly flexible framework to grow IT datacenters they are calling Infrastructure as a service (IIAS). If...
One of the benefits of an IT outsourcing partnership is that it can offer companies the option of working with virtual teams who can help support different types of IT and business operations, regardless of the locations of the workers. Teams and team members who work...
Are you missing out on reaching 25% of the US population with your current software engineering project? Maybe the elderly, at 13% of the population, aren't part of your target market, or maybe it's the 12% of the US population who are disabled that you aren't...
Has your organization started integrating virtual infrastructure into your overall IT services plan? If not, a quote from Star Trek may be in order, "Resistance is futile." In today’s IT world, the likelihood that your organization is running some sort of...
Two years ago, Google announced a new product: Wave. Their (and I use the term loosely, since all new Google products seem to come from the same giant, faceless Googleplex) original goal was to unify messaging – have you thought about how many tools you use to...
In the world of IT, solutions become problems with alarming regularity. The new software of today is the upgrade nightmare of tomorrow. The policies that solved problems create new ones years later. The corporate IT departments that we look to for solutions are...
IT outsourcing has become prominent in nearly every area of the economy -- to the point that its benefits are taken for granted. We're aware of the saving of money, of cloud technology providing cost effective high availability infrastructure, and so forth. The...
One of the main areas SPK focuses on for our clients is backups. I won’t go into a long lecture about why backups are mission-critical for your business because you already know they are. Even the standard backup schemes, such as Grandfather-Father-Son, have been...
One item I’ve done repeatedly while doing network consulting services is configuring high availability (HA) networks. The recommended way is Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). This requires that you have two firewalls for every location and they run in...
There are many Business Intelligence (BI) tools on the market, seemingly with similar capabilities. The goal of BI tools is to collect, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data, transforming raw data into actionable insights. A popular open-source BI tool is...
In my last blog post, I touched on my experience with Network Appliance filers and remote server monitoring. This week, I will be discussing alternative storage solutions, and how they measure up to one of the biggest players in the Network Attached Storage...
