InformationWeek.com | 8 Things To Think About For Windows 7

InformationWeek.com recently posted an informative article with eight things enterprises should think about when considering Windows 7.

Here are the listed considerations:

1. Remote usage features
2. Information security
3. Advanced group policy management
4. Netbook friendly
5. Runs on all virtualization platforms
6. Software as a service (SaaS) friendly
7. User enthusiasm
8. Clarity of Microsoft's release and support dates

Click here to read the post in its entirety.

Emerson set to Acquire Avocent for $1.2 billion

InformationWeek.com has reported that Emerson is planning to acquire Avocent for $1.2 billion. The purchase will enable Emerson to offer total infrastructure management solutions to data center customers.

Emerson's Network Power unit offers data center solutions including: power systems, energy management and precision cooling. Avocent provides a mix of data center hardware, software and embedded technologies. The companies see the combination as a "powerful combination," according to Avocent CEO Mike Borman.

David N. Farr, Emerson Chairman, CEO and President said in a statement: "Combining Avocent's technologies, relationships and installed base with Emerson's power and cooling presence allows us to offer a more compelling solution to our data center customers' most pressing challenge -- energy efficiency."

St. Louis-based Emerson Electric Co. reported data center-related revenues at about $2.6 billion of its total $25 billion in FY 2008 sales. The company is set to acquire Avocent Corp. for $1.2 billion (22 percent more than Avocent stock's last closing price).

Click here to read the full story on InformationWeek.com.

Salesforce.com and Cisco offering joint "Customer Interaction Cloud" for SMB customers

Salesforce.com and Cisco today announced that the companies will offer small and midsized companies a hosted, Web-based customer service offering. The service, called Customer Interaction Cloud, is based on Cisco's Unified Contact Center technologies. Salesforce will offer it as part of its Service Cloud 2 suite of hosted customer service solutions.

The offering, which will be available in early 2010, will combine Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco's VoIP-based Unified Contact Center, and is targeted to businesses with between 30 and 300 sales representatives or call-center agents.

The companies released a statement: "Through this offering, Salesforce.com and Cisco are addressing a growing demand for cloud computing-based customer service solutions in the SMB market."

Read more about this joint offering, and other Salesforce news (new 5-minute upgrade for Service Cloud) on Techworld.com.

Guest Blogger Mike Klein: Cloud Storage - Faster, More Secure, and More Reliable than Traditional Tape Backup

With so much talk about “cloud computing” it’s hard to separate the hype from reality at times. However, as one of the leading managed data center operators in the Midwest, we’re seeing a definitive trend with our clients moving towards “storage in the cloud” or online backup and data storage. Whether you’re backing up to an unknown location “in the cloud” or to a trusted data center such as Online Tech, the advantages of online data storage over traditional tape backup are worth considering.

For many, online data storage is less expensive, faster, more secure, and more reliable than the tape backup systems used over the past several decades. Here are a few of the advantages to consider:

Backup Costs – Rapidly declining storage and Internet costs has driven down the costs of online storage over the last 12 months. When you consider the real cost of a tape backup process including the hardware, maintenance, personnel costs, tape pickup and drop off, and offsite storage, online data storage can offer a far more cost effective alternative.

Security – Tape backup puts critical data on to a physical medium, which then has multiple points of human contact. Each of these points of contact introduces risk. It’s not unusual to see tapes in an unsecured holding area waiting for daily pickup, or a tape transported in a trusted employee’s car, all of which have physical security implications. Online backup transports the data over a secure, encrypted VPN tunnel from its source into a secure data center with no human contact, eliminating the physical security risks associated with tapes.

Recovery Time - In most disaster recovery plans, recovery time is the critical metric around which backup systems are designed to. Tape recovery often presents a significant bottleneck with the amount of time it takes to get backup tapes transported to the recovery site, mounted and the data transferred back to hard drives. Online data storage can dramatically reduce the recovery time with near instant data recovery. The data is already loaded and readily available for access at an alternative site over the Internet.

Reliability – Experts estimate that anywhere from 10% to 40% of tape backups fail, depending on who you talk to. Yet everyone agrees that the risk of lost data from tapes is real. For most IT managers, losing even 10% of their data in a disaster recovery scenario would be catastrophic. On the other hand, online backup stores the data to RAID replicated hard disks at the remote data centers, eliminating the physical and media problems associated with tapes.

Certainly, tapes have an advantage in certain situations. If multi-Terabyte data sets need to be written on a regular basis and stored for extended periods of time to meet regulatory requirements, tape backup may be more cost effective than online storage today. At the same time, daily backups and continuous data archiving where the data needs to be readily accessed, both lend themselves readily to online data storage.

So look for more and more companies moving their backups and data storage “to the cloud” as online data storage continues to become an easier and more cost effective alternative for backing up servers or archiving data into secure, high availability data centers.

- Mike Klein
President, Online Tech
http://www.onlinetech.com/
Read more about “The Seven Tips for Moving to Online Data Storage”

Dell acquires Perot Systems for almost $4 billion, increasing its healthcare footprint

Dell is significantly increasing its footprint in the health IT arena with its newest purchase of IT solutions provider Perot Systems for about $3.9 billion.

Dell's acquisition of Perot Systems has been approved by the boards of both companies. Perot will become Dell's services unit once Dell buys all of Perot's outstanding Class A common stock at $30 per share. It will continue to be led by its current CEO, Peter Altabef.

Dell just announced two weeks ago that it would be offering its own electronic medical records (EMR) system. Click here for more on that story.

HP offering Samsung Solid-State Drives on ProLiant G6 Servers

InformationWeek.com reports today that HP will be offering Samsung's 60 and 120 GB solid-state drives (SSDs) as an option across all HP ProLiant G6 rack, tower and blade servers. They will also offer the SSDs with select G5 servers.

While they are significantly more expensive, SSDs offer lower power usage while adding the advantages of better performance and reliability -- arguably lowering costs over time.

HP VP of marketing Jim Ganthier said in a statement that combining Samsung's SSD technology with HP ProLiant servers "delivers energy-efficient server platforms to enable customers to slash their power usage and reduce costs."

According to the article, SSDs are the best bet for high-performance applications including "video-on-demand, virtualization, Web serving and online transaction processing. ...Because SSDs cost much more than HDDs and have far less storage capacity."

For more information on the power consumption and performance of SSDs, visit the entire InformationWeek.com story here. They also offer an independent report on the state of enterprise storage (registration required).

Starting in May of 2009, IBM also began offering SSDs with its Power6 processors.

Adobe acquiring Web analytics company Omniture for 1.8 Billion -- in cash.

InformationWeek.com reported that Adobe will acquire Omniture in its fourth fiscal quarter, ending in November. The article, entitled: Adobe To Acquire Omniture For $1.8 Billion, explains that the companies' products would be combined under the merger to "create tools for building Web sites and making them more effective as advertising venues."

The same day Adobe posted lower earnings in its third fiscal quarter, Adobe announced its plans to pay $21.50 per share for Omniture common stock -- 25 percent more than Omniture's closing stock price on Tuesday.

Omniture would be run by it's current CEO Josh James as a separate unit, while Adobe would gain Omniture's 5000-plus customers.

Read the full article for more information.