AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Entries with Label: Data Center Maintenance
A Potential Sun Acquisition - Impact on Service
Friday, March 27, 2009
Posts like Bill Snyder's Tech Bottom Line on IBM's potential acquisition of Sun, make a valid point: In the long run, this may be good for IT innovation, and it may give new life to the R&D department at Sun, allowing them to produce more of the quality technology we expect from Sun. But that's a topic for others to debate, and they are!
Consolidate Support Vendors?
Monday, April 06, 2009
The inability to predict a specific end date for the recession puts major stress on already strapped IT budgets. In past downturns many companies hunkered down and just held back on purchases until the economy started moving again. That strategy will not work this time. This recession will require IT to tighten the belt and really do more with less.
The Near-Term Impact of Oracle Buying Sun
Friday, April 24, 2009
Oracle's acquisition of Sun is a big deal in the IT industry as two big players come together. What is Oracle's intent? How will they leverage MySql? What will happen to Sun's hardware and storage device groups? There is speculation and chatter from the acquired company's employees, the competitors, pundits and of course from the customers.
A Letter to Ralph Szygenda, the CIO of General Motors
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Dear Mr. Szygenda, I just finished reading the Q&A Mary Hayes Weir of Informationweek conducted with you regarding your responsibilities in leading GM's IT department through the bankruptcy and restructuring.
Wrest Control of Your Data Center Back From the OEM
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
In the past few weeks I've met with a number of really big, exceptionally successful companies. These companies are leading edge in nearly every way—innovative data centers that employ virtualization, and deliver high availability, mission critical services on a global scale, and yet in one specific way, they are not revolutionary at all. They are still being held hostage by the OEM when it comes to software support contracts – resulting in unrealized cost savings and under-performing service on servers and storage systems.
Take Full Advantage of System Monitoring
Thursday, August 20, 2009
According to analyst research the average hourly cost of downtime ranges from $28,000 in manufacturing to $2.5 million in banking and finance to $6.5 million in the brokerage industry. With uptime and data center performance of critical importance proactive systems monitoring needs to be a de facto element in any data center strategy. Yet, still companies are risking performance levels and business efficiency by not fully leveraging monitoring to improve their data centers.
A Couple Quick and Easy Green IT Steps
Monday, October 12, 2009
Last week Akibia’s team was busy attending some of the premier industry events, including AFCOM’s Data Center World down in Orlando and an ASCDI event in New York City. Both were great events and featured a number of compelling topics for the data center – from cloud computing, to virtualization to strategies for green IT.
Sun Makes More Changes Amid Uncertainty
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
As we await the European Union’s ultimate decision on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, a number of questions exist making customers uncertain of buying new Sun products or maintaining existing Sun relationships. With Sun and Oracle unable to give clear answers regarding the acquisition close date, how the server group will be integrated in Oracle and what will happen to Sun’s support team, the outlook is murky. As a result many of the prospects Akibia speaks with are evaluating ways to migrate off of SUN platforms and to more stable server and storage environments. There is much speculation concerning which competitor will benefit the most from this move away from Sun – some say IBM and HP according to this Wall Street Journal update.
Has the Sun Set on Flexible Support Options?
Thursday, February 18, 2010
As the dust has settled on Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, some interesting questions remain for companies thinking about their support options.
Why HP is Worried about TPM’s
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Recently HP’s anti-third party maintenance data sheet crossed my desk. Why is a multi billion dollar hardware behemoth worried about third party support providers? The fact that this datasheet even exists is proof that a large number of forward-thinking, innovative companies are looking to third party maintainers for customized, high-value, lower cost data center support services. In fact, more than two-thirds of all companies leverage a third party maintainer for IT support today.
Reviewing Oracle’s Changes - Has the Sun Set on Sun Systems?
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Now that Oracle’s acquisition is complete and their changes for Sun hardware and support have been announced it is time for customers to determine whether Sun’s products and support will work for their environments over the short and long term.
Informationweek Survey of Sun Customers - Demonstrably Worse Service
Thursday, August 19, 2010
An interesting survey from InformationWeek’s Analytics team points to dissatisfaction among the legacy Sun customer base.
How to Ensure a Successful Monitoring Implementation
Monday, October 25, 2010
When considering embarking on a monitoring solution, it is probable the scope of need is already defined because “something” occurred. Was it a down server that cost the company revenue? Was there a staff reduction and increasing technology requirements? Did an office move and customers are complaining things are slow? Or a server was down and the CTO was the first to notice? Embarking on a monitoring initiative for your department or company, on the surface, is a fairly straightforward task. But, digging deeper in the world of monitoring, above and beyond functionality, there are several keys factors to consider for success.
AFCOM Data Center World - Day 1
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
The show and the organization brings together a myriad of datacenter professionals, ranging from private, public (gov’t, education) and not for profits institutions, who come together both to share their experiences in educational sessions, network, and, for the vendors, market products. While the event covers a wide range of topics, much of the focus is on what is referenced as the “facilities side” (physical/to include building infrastructure) of the datacenter with an emphasis on power, cooling, and related “environmentals”, managed with a different skills set than what we bring on the “IT side”.
AFCOM Data Center World - Day 2
Thursday, March 31, 2011
My experience on Day 2 of the AFCOM conference has oriented on datacenter operations process and financials. As a general theme, IT managers are preoccupied with effective execution and managing costs. A couple of observations...
