Virtualisation For Small Companies
Nov 24, 2010
In 2011, many small companies will be looking to dip their toes into virtualisation as a way and means of cutting costs and increasing flexibility. VMware are putting a great deal of focus on this market with the updated VSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus bundles. These bundles allow an organisation to run VMware vSphere 4.1 on up to 3 physical servers each with a maximum of 2 processors (slots) and up to 6 cores on each processor. Amongst a host of new features now included are two of the main features I felt were missing from the previous versions, VMware vMotion and VMware High Availability. VMware vMotion is the ability to migrate a virtual machine from one physical host to another with no downtime VMware High Availability monitors virtual machines to detect OS and hardware failures and restarts virtual machines on other physical servers when a...
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Capacity Management
Nov 15, 2010
Handling capacity management is an issue almost all IT managers are faced with nowadays, as a result of the growing amount of data that is created and needs to be retained by the business. These can be from various sources and can include E-mail Systems such as Exchange of GroupWise Databases such as SQL and Oracle Users files including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In the past, hardware costs were relatively high, which kept the amount of data that was able to be stored down in size. However, as hardware and storage costs have dropped, this is no longer a restraint to the amount of data that can be retained. More and more IT managers are looking at ways to reduce the amount of data that is retained by its company's users. The amount of data kept has a knock-on effect for the need for bigger and faster backup devices to ensure that the data...
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iSCSI and VMWare
Nov 15, 2010
In 2011 many small-medium-sized businesses will be taking their first steps towards virtualising their IT estate in order to reduce costs and improve flexibility. This is no surprise as VMware is putting a great deal of focus on this market by reducing the price and increasing the functionality of the "entry level" Essentials and Essentials plus bundles. One of the new features now available in the VMware VSphere Essentials Plus kitbag is the inclusion of vMotion giving the ability to migrate virtual machines from one physical host to another with no downtime. A pre-requisite for the use of vMotion is shared storage such as a NAS or a SAN. If a SAN will be the preferred option , there is a decision to be made, iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage. An iSCSI SAN is now a very popular option that should be considered for providing this shared storage in a VMware environment....
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What is a Data Backup?
Nov 9, 2010
In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb is back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup (often used like an adjective in compound nouns). Backups are useful primarily for two purposes. The first is to restore a state following a disaster (called disaster recovery ). The second is to restore small numbers of files after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted . Data loss is also very common. 66% of internet users have suffered from serious data loss . Since a backup system contains at least one copy of all data worth saving, the data storage requirements are considerable. Organising this storage space and managing the backup process is a complicated undertaking. A data repository...
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Password Security and Another Alternative
Jul 28, 2010
As an IT security professional, it comes to me as no surprise that when the phrase "password" is typed into Google, the second-most-common predictive search result that comes up is " Password Cracker ”. Whether these are being used for legitimate or more underhand purposes, there is no doubting the prevalence of these tools and their seeming ease of use is worrying. There is also no lack of resources when it comes to lessons on how to use these tools. You only need to search sites such as YouTube or eHow. Password cracking is just one method of obtaining a password, but the unauthorised obtaining of passwords is by far most common cause of a successful hack. So what is the problem with passwords, and why should I care if somebody has my password? I don't have anything worth looking at. Well, this is not necessarily the problem; once somebody has your password...
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