The software defined data center (SDDC) has been used by many companies and people since 2012. The idea of this concept involved virtualizing the components most critical to data center operations. The three angles these technologies work to simplify and combine are compute, storage, and network functionalities. SDDC can:
It’s great to have a new car, but regardless of if it’s a Range Rover, Mercedes, or Maserati, there will be problems if the oil is never changed. A software defined data center (SDDC) operates on similar principles. There may be great use cases and data pushing for SDDC, but if proper management and maintenance isn’t utilized, those far reaching benefits will never be had.
How resilient is your organization from an IT perspective? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines resilience as, “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” With the digital transformations of so many companies today, resiliency to change and disruption needs to be a priority. What does resilience mean for the enterprise today? It means having the ability to seamlessly adapt to change while enduring and responding to unplanned events such as:
In order to prevail in the globally competitive economy today, companies are continually examining their processes, operations, and infrastructure to find areas which add little or no value to the business. For enterprises today, one of those areas is data protection. Think about your backups. Yes, they can potentially “save the day” in the event of a failed server, ransomware attack, or natural disaster. The problem of course is that your backups just sits there idle, indolently waiting for a bad day to occur. Your backups are part of an expensive insurance policy that consumes a lot of resources.
Although there are many important benefits to making your enterprise more mobile, that doesn’t mean it’s an easily achievable goal. Unfortunately, for many businesses the opposite is true. We looked at 3 mistakes to avoid when implementing enterprise mobility solutions last week. This week, we will follow a similar route, by addressing several key challenges that business must overcome along the path to greater innovation and efficiency.
According to research from leading firms like Frost & Sullivan and Dimension Data, workforce mobility solutions improve company efficiency, provide your staff with a greater sense of job satisfaction, and can save you money. The benefits of providing your staff with increased mobility extend far beyond those immediate advantages though, preparing them to make the most of new and emerging technologies that can boost productivity from wherever they work.
As businesses begin to realize the many benefits of mobility, both in terms of the increased productivity and the improved employee satisfaction that it delivers, the interest in enterprise mobility management (EMM) to organize and secure those efforts increases as well. The road to EMM implementation isn’t an easy one though, as enterprises often face a road fraught with serious complication that can overwhelm or undermine their EMM initiatives, and mobility efforts in general.
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) is about recognizing the importance of the entire forest that is your network. It is about ensuring that all of your sites enjoy the same level of performance, automation, load optimization, and security that your central operations office does. This is the pretext for SD-WAN. SD-WAN is about applying software defined technology to your WAN connections regardless of distance and complexity. The goal is to optimize the experience of all of your users, regardless of enterprise location. This blog outlines four of the leading SD-WAN solutions in the market today.
Digital transformation is a transformation with no perceived endpoint, but a recurrent digital evolutionary process. It is a race, a race that is both a sprint and a marathon at the same time. It is a race with no assigned course or track, nor a checkered flag to pronounce the winner. Winning the race simply entails the ability to use knowledge, innovation, and IT agility to turn ideas into value and do it better and faster than any of your competitors.
Securing the enterprise is an evolving challenge today. In order to effectively manage today’s enterprise, you must be able to draw a complete picture of everything connected to your network. Enterprises are implementing a Network Access Control solution (NAC) to identify, assess, and enforce access control on any and all devices before they connect to the network. A NAC solution provides the basic necessity of knowing what devices IT is tasked with securing. A NAC solution can identify and profile each subsequent device wanting to connect, as well as:
The interconnected worlds of today see increased access to more things at faster speeds. Wireless networking made these processes even faster, with IT administrators able to add more storage space, computing power, and other capabilities at the push of a button.
Last week, we covered a checklist of core requirements needed to prepare for multicloud storage deployments. This included internal operations and capabilities needed, as well as important questions to ask during the process.
Last week, we looked at the top 7 multicloud success tips. Some of the tips discussed included taking advantage of visibility, optimizing predictive analytics capabilities, and preparing for the data center of today and tomorrow.
Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS) represents a change in paradigm when it comes to managing IT. When you treat IT as a service provider, you can ensure that your enterprise has exactly the right amount of hardware, software and support to fit the unique and changing needs of your business. You'll find that you are more agile and able to deal with whatever comes up. And, you'll find that, under an ITaaS model, you'll save time and money, dramatically improving your bottom line.
Last week, we published the second blog in this series, “Overcoming the Top 10 Multicloud Challenges.” We looked at 10 things organizations have dealt with, as well as misconceptions that exist surrounding multicloud. This week we are looking at seven tips all IT professionals should take advantage of to truly experience multicloud success.
Enterprise mobility is a key strategic component of any digital transformation strategy. When handled properly, it can help you better serve your customers through both mobile devices and laptops, while also helping your organization clarify its technology efforts with a “digital-first” mindset.
Last week, we published the first blog in this series, titled, “What’s Your Multicloud Strategy?” We looked into key terminology surrounding the topic and then explored multicloud strategy benefits. Some of the benefits discussed included:
As the trend toward the digital enterprise surges forward companies of all sizes are facing their respective challenges adapting to the pace of change. The expansion of mobile, social and the Internet of Things means a hike in the demand of IT as a trusted partner more than ever before.
Have you found an answer to the big question circling across the IT world—How can we create a cloud-like delivery model for our users? The answer is within “digital transformation,” which focuses on efficiently leveraging cloud computing and software defined capabilities (among many other next-gen tech solutions) to be more flexible, agile, and scalable to meet business needs quickly. There are also many opportunities being created within areas like machine learning and IoT that can skyrocket your company's ability to innovate. In order to achieve these things, a flexible and reliable IT infrastructure is a must. Deploying a multicloud strategy creates that reliability while also adding a sophisticated degree of versatility.
One of the reasons why IoT is so vulnerable to attacks is the lack of visibility in what is truly happening in your environment. This is where edge computing comes in. Edge computing is about keeping compute proximal to the physical environment where it is collected in the first place, rather than forwarding everything to the cloud (particularly processing and storage). In the same way that the client/server computing model replaced the mainframe, enterprises are beginning to realize the benefit of a distributed computing model when it comes to IoT. Client/server architecture put processing power in physical proximity of the end user. Edge computing provides a local segmented processing network for IoT devices.
Nutanix was one of the first hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. People like asking about sizing, scaling, and adding nodes during initial HCI discussions, but hyperconvergence with Nutanix is much more than that. HCI is good for everything from VDI to desktop delivery and mission critical business apps.
If your career centers on enterprise architecture, then you are literally watching history repeat itself in real time. Decades ago, enterprise resources and processing power were concentrated within the mainframe and users had to work in close approximation of it. But then, users from the outer perimeters started demanding more capabilities, which translated into more resources where they were—at the edge. This introduced the PC, which decentralized enterprises and transitioned in the era of the client server model that users loved. Once again, the technology cycle is about to repeat itself.
Flash or solid-state drive technology is seen commonly in devices such as smartphones, laptops, and servers, but it has also revolutionized the storage array landscape. Flash storage has increased in adoption due to its operational and economic benefits. Nimble Storage is a market leader in the storage space. Nimble Storage is built around reducing risk, improving reliability, and maximizing the productivity of your infrastructure and IT teams, while also giving your enterprise a competitive edge and making employees’ jobs easier.
Companies live in an environment today in which the “time to value” is diminishing constantly. In order to attain continuous profitability, IT managers and their staffs must focus on strategic value added projects rather than dissipate their time with routine maintenance of the existing infrastructure. Multiple studies point out that routine maintenance is currently consuming as much as 80% of IT budgets. Simply put, IT Managers must find a new paradigm that can deliver their organization to the promised land.
Recently I was talking to the network manager of a school district in Georgia. The district had just experienced a large scale malware attack. It started in the transportation department, which had refused to let go of some outdated machines that were susceptible to the EternalBlue windows vulnerability, made famous by the WannaCry and NotPetya malware encryption attacks last summer.
Software as a service and many other digital business models have never been the same since the possibility of leveraging hybrid IT. Thanks to it, an organization can deliver services in a more optimized, balanced, automated, granular, and flexible fashion.
According to a report by Gartner in 2016, 50% of CEO’s expect their industries to be substantially or unrecognizably transformed by digital transformation1. The underlying scope of this proclamation is that the companies that successfully compete in this new economy will have substantially or unrecognizably transformed themselves as well. These IT leaders expect change, dramatic change. They are faced with the immense task of augmenting their organizational processes and shifting the cultural mindset towards innovation. The key to success here is leveraging the power of digital technologies to create that change. There are two choices today—adapt to change or create it.
The idea economy (a term coined by HPE) represents a new paradigm, where a company (of any size) can add value and disrupt the market faster than ever—thanks to the advancement of the public cloud, mobile devices, social media, and big data analytics. Transforming your data center into an agile, hyper-connected enterprise IT environment that can handle the challenges of the idea economy will require some investment. But that investment is probably less than you might think and there are multiple ways to approach financing that won’t break the bank.
VMware vSAN is a leading software defined storage solution on the market today. Simple yet powerful, vSAN offers intelligent hyperconverged storage architecture that facilitates complete utilization of compute and storage resources, delivering them through a virtual common platform. This structural design not only initiates transformational change in how you host data, but also powers the leading hyperconverged infrastructure solutions today that is transforming data centers across the globe.
Data center architectures have continually evolved to meet the needs of mobile, social, big data, and cloud applications--and enterprise security solutions have evolved as well to support the new security needs of these applications in distributed data centers.
Today’s workers are experiencing more freedom thanks to the explosive adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. However, with an increasing amount of devices connecting to the network, IT administrators now have an overwhelming amount of information to monitor, and most of the time there are gaps in visibility to all of the devices trying to connect to the network. Aruba Clearpass offers your IT department a way to protect your data while allowing authorized users the ability to access information on the go or in the office.
IDC completed a web survey involving 83 end users that have purchased and deployed Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) SimpliVity solutions in their organizations. IDC also gathered qualitative data by conducting in-depth phone interviews with three customers using SimpliVity in production environments. This post aims to share the results of those surveys to show you what customers are saying first hand.
New buzz words tend to come and go, especially as enterprise storage vendors promote their offerings to prospective customers. A few years’ back, we started to hear a lot about scale-out storage vs. scale-up storage. The popularity of scale-out storage has since grown, as have the questions about the difference between scale-up, scale-out, and related terms like hyperconverged and converged infrastructures.
Popping up on prime time television and local news reports, ransomware is so commonplace it has practically become a household phrase. The frequent attacks have made it a focus area for many enterprises because high-profile attacks against them have risen dramatically in the past few years.
As we discussed in our white paper, “Augmenting and Enhancing Your Existing Network with a Hybrid Cloud,” there are many advantages of a hybrid cloud model such as greater levels of redundancy and elasticity. To acquire the advantages that a hybrid cloud offers requires a lot of planning and preparation. We have compiled a comprehensive checklist to aid you in the preparation of your deployment.
The face of data storage in enterprise data centers has changed in the past few years with the rise to prominence of solid-state, or flash, storage. This advancement of storage technology has now become so widespread among enterprise IT infrastructures around the world that 49% of organizations surveyed by the Enterprise Strategy Group indicated they already use flash technology, and another 38% have made plans to or are currently investigating the technology.
Last week we published part one of this two-part blog series, “How to Successfully Navigate Enterprise Storage Sizing and Pricing Issues.” This week, we will focus on challenges related to how to think about enterprise storage and how to evaluate it.
Today’s IT leaders are at a crossroads. Behind them, there’s a long legacy of hardware and software deployment decisions that have served the business well for years. But new business requirements and application development methods have begun to test the status quo, and as they seek to modernize, they will face several difficult decisions. IT leaders can either commit to the cloud, go all in with on-premises infrastructure or evaluate something entirely new.
Despite the growing popularity of cloud-based workloads, many companies’ own enterprise data centers keep thriving and growing. Among these on-going investments is the need to upgrade or replace an organization’s current enterprise storage. Often considered the central cog in a data center network, enterprise storage plays a key custodial role in housing many organizations’ mission-critical data assets.
In case you missed it: HPE announced some major news for the IT industry with the acquisition of Plexxi, a software-defined network provider, and will be rolling out its new product offerings at the end of this month. What does this acquisition mean for enterprises?
Mainstream support ended for Windows 7 in 2015 and it will be entirely phased out by 2020. Windows 10 is the new standard for companies seeking to have the most current, up-to-date operating system. Many large organizations looking to upgrade usually either wait until they have a hardware refresh cycle or it winds up being a long process involving Microsoft Model-Based Testing (MDT) or something similar. With Horizon View, it becomes a lot easier to upgrade because you can build out a brand new desktop pool based on Windows 10 and then deploy that pool to all your users overnight or even within minutes instantaneously with insta-clone technology. VMware Horizon view is the go to for deploying Windows 10 in the enterprise.
With an increasing number of enterprises investing in digital transformation and the software defined data center (SDDC), IT leaders are getting accustomed to managing overwhelming large volumes of data and business applications. With this shift, network security is proving to be a foundational (and required) layer when it comes to building the data center needed to drive business of today.
Did you know that 34% of IT Decision Makers reported they are concerned with adopting containers due to a lack of full visibility?1
One of the biggest struggles with managing an enterprise data center is the need for various tools with multiple interfaces to manage the different systems associated with IT. This struggle is compounded with the fact that each of these data center systems do not talk to each out of the box, and complex integrations begin to take over. HPE Synergy addresses this challenge by delivering an infrastructure that can manage the technical, as well as the organizational side by combining storage, compute, and network equipment into one.
Containers are best known for their role in simplifying application development, providing a disposable, reusable unit to modularize delivery, and bring consistency to virtually every development stage. They have demonstrated an ability to move DevOps forward by transforming the way development and infrastructure teams operate, and they have helped these teams move ever closer to continuous delivery. However, managing containers presents an entirely new challenge for most organizations. Containers, by their very nature, rely on shared resources. These may range from operating systems and application files to hosting resources including memory and CPU. When left unchecked, container use can lead to sprawl and may result in resource drain. With hooks into so many different areas, there is a strong incentive to know precisely what these containers are doing, what resources they are consuming, and how they are utilizing the network.
Despite the growing popularity of cloud-based storage, many enterprises have seen that their data centers keep thriving and growing. Companies that seek increased governance, security and protection of their data continue to invest in their own on-prem data center environments, especially when it comes to storage.
VMware is a leading software and services company focused on cloud computing and virtualization. It also develops and accredits some of the most prestigious certifications in the industry. These certifications are referred to as VCDX certifications. VCDX stands for VMware Certified Design Expert. This is for those that have earned a top tier certification from a VMware panel. For example, Cisco CCIE has always been recognized as a highly coveted certification in the networking discipline and VCDX is the equivalent in the virtualization space. Some people even think of this like getting a Ph.D. in virtualization. There are only 269 VCDXs across the globe. There are not very many VCDXs in the New England region and Mark Gabryjelski, WEI's Virtualization Architect & Ambassador, is the only VCDX in New Hampshire. He is VCDX #23.
With the rise of digital transformation in today’s modern workplace, traditional Wide Area Network solutions are unable to keep up with enterprise demands. A growing number of organizations are moving their data and applications to a cloud environment, which means they are increasing their bandwidth use - resulting in network congestion and rising costs, as well as growing security concerns. It is for these reasons SD-WAN (software defined wide area network) is a compelling and attainable alternative; however, most SD-WAN solutions are not as secure as enterprises need them to be, with add-on security offerings that pose a risk by creating a fragmented solution.
Containers are the next level of virtualization and they are here to stay. There are many reasons enterprises adopt containers. The top three reasons include:
Many organizations are intrigued by the concept of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). The biggest lure? You may no longer have to pay capital costs to set up and staff a secondary data center in order to recover systems after a disaster. In the days before cloud, having dual data center sites was one of the few ways to ensure rapid recovery of systems after a disaster. However, due to its cost, it was an option typically reserved for large companies or those in highly regulated fields. Disaster Recovery as a Service now makes secondary storage available to many small-to-midrange organizations, and what’s more, DRaaS providers offer many different variations on the theme of cloud-based recovery. [click to tweet]
If you are considering the idea of a Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solution for your enterprise, consider this, VMware debuted as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for HCI in 2018. It’s solution is also the fastest growing HCI solution in the world today. This should all come as no surprise for those familiar with the company behind the industry’s leading virtualization platform. VMware has paired the hypervisor that transformed data centers across the globe with their software defined storage solution, vSAN. Combined with their unified management solution, vCenter, VMware has created an HCI solution that accounted for 33% of HCI market revenue in the first half of 2017, making it the largest software vendor in the market.
Within the last few years, there has been a dramatic shift in how enterprises manage their data. Many are leaving the in-house servers behind as their only source of data management and using some mixture of cloud computing. [click to tweet] As it sounds, multi-cloud model uses multiple cloud computing and storage services within a single architecture.
As companies grow and cloud models change and develop, whether you have AWS or Azure, most people aren't finding that they use one single cloud provider and stick with them. They use clouds from multiple providers, creating a hybrid cloud environment with multiple data centers. When you mix public clouds into this strategy, whether it be AWS, Azure, or Google, it is important to realize that every time a cloud connection is made there is usually connectivity back to your sites as well. You have that increased traffic flow and you have to consider how you're connecting, managing, and securing it.
By now you’ve heard about VMware vSAN—a software defined storage (SDS) solution that combines direct storage devices across a vSphere cluster to create a shared data area distributed across an enterprise network. With vSAN, the user is able to decide on the storage requirements, performance and availability and makes sure the policies put in place are upheld. These are not the only benefits of using VMware vSAN. Keep reading to discover four ways your enterprise can benefit from it.
VMware’s vSphere, the composition of vCenter and its ESXi hosts used to run workloads and containers, has experienced dominance in the IT landscape. There has been talk for years about extending a vSphere environment into the world of public cloud and not being required to run all of this separately through other means. There are many ways to achieve a cloud strategy, and fortunately, VMware accomplishes all of this with vSphere. This post focuses on one of the ways to achieve this type of public cloud strategy with VMware Cloud, which offers VMware on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is a full SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) offering covering compute, storage, and networking capabilities.
With the expansion of the Internet of Things, the BYOD movement and emerging wireless technologies, you may be realizing its time to invest in a more modern approach to networking security in order to stay competitive, and secure, in the global environment.
The truth is that data center management has never been more challenging, and it’s only getting harder. Increased data center complexity produces an alarming rate of challenging problems. Complex infrastructure issues are impossible to effectively manage with traditional analytics and support methods. Conventional tools aren’t smart enough to recognize why complex problems occur and how to resolve them. Data centers are unable to run at optimal levels with excessive manual tuning and guesswork. Fortunately, there is a new tool for the data center.
Hybrid IT and flash storage are an impressive match. With hybrid IT’s structure combining a mixture of on and off premise resources, it delivers services in a more optimized, balanced and automated fashion, while flash storage has the ability to offer agility and impressive backup and disaster recovery capabilities. The two together can provide:
In last week's post we discussed the Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform—what the platform is and how it integrates with the modern enterprise. We talked about how it supports a “Zero-Trust” security model and explained the story that ties in with its creation with an interesting use case involving Cisco and WEI.
When it comes to upper level executives and their IT security teams, there seems to be a disconnect when it comes to the level of support IT needs to protect the enterprise. In order to better prevent a security breech from happening, it’s important that the C-level executives are aware and on the same page with your enterprise security team. Only 12% of C-suite executives expect a major, successful attack on their organization in the next 90 days. In addition, two out of five CEOs, other C-level executives, and non-executive directors feel they are not responsible for the repercussions of a cyber-attack. Any breech that is caused by the void between these important roles has serious costs associated with them.
How much visibility do you have into your organization’s network? How confident is your IT team in its ability to accurately map out the network, which is a necessary step in data center migrations. According to a white paper from IDC, a mere 18% increase in network visibility can improve security breach preventative measures by over 40%. Many organizations know there are devices on their network that are unaccounted for, but many do not have a way of even guessing how many devices that is, let alone strategizing how to secure them.
When was the last time you gave your storage solutions an in-depth and thorough review? Whichever enterprise storage solution you use for your organization, it’s important to make sure that the brain of your operations is working smoothly and data is flowing where it’s needed, when it’s needed.
A leading workforce management company addresses unique security and connectivity challenges with a custom machine-to-machine network solution.
What storage solution can be found in both the enterprise and personal cell phones? Flash storage. It’s a flexible and compact option that does away with the traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). While it is becoming more common to see flash in both the enterprise as well as consumer electronics, the similarities stop there. In this article, you will discover how HPE’s Nimble flash storage is not just any other solution on the market and why you should choose their secondary flash array.
The WEI engineering team thrives on solving our customer's toughest technology challenges. Often times these challenges are the first of their kind--meaning there are no google searches that will lead to a solution, the forums haven't covered it yet and the vendor/supplier teams are racking their brains to solve the unique challenge.
If a disaster were to hit your enterprise, would your data be protected? This information is the backbone of your organization so hopefully the answer to the questions is yes. However, if your disaster recovery plan is not what you would like it to be, or if it’s missing all together, it’s not too late to protect your data in the event of disaster.
If you have ever heard someone refer to a device as “smart,” then you have been exposed to IoT. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a buzzword thrown around not only the business world, but everyday life as well. It is both “the future” and “the now,” but what exactly is it? According to Network World, “The internet of things, at its simplest level, is a network of smart devices - from refrigerators that warn you when you’re out of milk to industrial sensors – that are connected to the internet so they can share data.”
Apple is one of the greatest comeback success stories for technology. Since the mid-1980s, the Mac computer grew from owning only five-percent of the computer market to dominating it today. While loyal Apple users demand the ability to use their devices in the workplace, enterprises and IT have pushed back since their products are expensive and not easily adaptable to the enterprise mobility setting. As Apple grows and continues to dominate the market, IT is shifting its thoughts on the use of these products and devices in the organization.
Some things are meant to be together. Think of your favorite foods like peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, bacon and eggs. When it comes to IT, one can argue that the partnership between HPE and Arista is meant to be as well. In today’s datacenter in which the traditional worlds of computer, storage, and cloud fuse together, this collaboration between these two innovative giants is melding the world’s leading servers and storage with high-performance networking solutions into a single deliverable platform. Together they are collaborating to create new architectural best practices designed to take enterprises to the cloud. The result is the ability to scale large cluster growth, lower costs, and drive high compute efficiencies. Their shared vision of delivering secure Hybrid IT solutions built on industry-leading software defined infrastructure is indeed one that can help in a world in which change is the only constant.
As an IT solutions provider dedicated to innovation and solving our clients’ technology challenges, we are pleased to announce our recent recognition by CRN on the 2018 Solution Provider 500 (SP500) list; WEI was ranked at #109 on the prestigious list.
We want our data and we want it now! That is the mantra of Enterprise Storage today. Businesses today are data driven and as part of the digital transformation process, companies are finding innovative uses to utilize their data. Those companies that can best employ their data to spur greater innovation will achieve a competitive edge over their competitors.
Wi-Fi has come a long way since it was first introduced. Originally, wireless connectivity was used for basic services such as checking email, but technology has changed and more devices now connect to wireless networks in order to perform their job tasks. With this evolution of the workplace, Wi-Fi has needed to adapt to support the growing number of devices and applications. How can Wi-Fi meet the needs of the modern workforce?
Over the years, the public cloud has been promoted as the panacea of innovation and reduced costs where companies could host their network infrastructure and service their workloads. In doing so, many companies have found out that not everything is ideally suited for the cloud. Latency prone applications, data sovereignty, and security compliance are just some of the challenges that have reduced the luster of the public cloud recently. As a result, two-thirds of enterprises are scaling back or discontinuing their use of public cloud services and shifting workloads to on premises private and/or hybrid cloud environments.
Chances are since you were a kid you were fascinated by speed, whether it be athletes, cars, or planes. Speed is impressive—especially in the modern cloud-first data center architectures of today. It is expected. The legacy single gigabit network infrastructure of yesteryear is over. Increased adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet servers coupled with applications using higher bandwidth is accelerating the need for dense 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet switching. In fact, it is no longer unusual to see hosts generating 10Gbs of traffic or find 25/40 gigabit Ethernet switches at the edge of today’s enterprises. In fact, according to a study in 2017, the combined market for 25Gbe and 100GbE will account for over half of all data center Ethernet switch shipments by 2021. Shipments of 100Gbe switches reached 1.3 million ports and $661 million in revenues in the fourth quarter of 2017 for the U.S. alone. In Hollywood, sixty may be the new fifty, but in today’s datacenter, twenty-five is the new ten.
Mobile applications and devices are seeping into every aspect of our personal and professional lives. To keep up with the changing times and the demands of consumers and employees, it’s important for enterprises to leverage the mobility trend to their advantage.
The ability of an enterprise to keep up with changing technology depends on the skills of its IT employees. The pace of innovation can be overwhelming even for the most experienced professionals, but this isn’t the only challenge organizations face. As companies understand the importance of digital transformation and take it on within their company, the demand for IT professionals with the required skillsets to transform legacy driven data centers into hybrid infrastructures is skyrocketing. As a result of this move towards hybrid IT, the demand is outpacing supply.
We are excited to share the news that Jennifer Burl, WEI’s Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility, was named to CRN’s prestigious 2018 Women of the Channel list. CRN editors select the Women of the Channel honorees based on their professional accomplishments, demonstrated expertise, and ongoing dedication to the IT channel.
Think about how much data your company created in 2016. According to IDC, the world collectively created about 16.3 zettabytes (yes, a zettabyte is a billion terabytes). They also predict that the world will create 10x that amount by the year 2025. Approximately 90% of that data will be stored in file and object storage. While consumers have traditionally created the bulk of the data up to now, enterprises will create 60% of the world’s data in 2025. At that time, ten percent of all data will be created by IoT. This brings with it a number of challenges as a result of this exponential growth.
When discussing the ongoing digital transformation that companies are implementing on a global basis, enterprise architects articulate the benefits of hybrid IT and the software defined data center. The process of digitizing business services and delivering them through highly scalable redundant multi-cloud ecospheres is generating agility and flexibility that companies need to compete in a hyperactive competitive global world. However, the necessity to harness new technology is not restricted to enterprise infrastructure only. Just as the makeup of the data center is transforming itself, the nature of work itself is also changing.
Last week we began a discussion on the steps you need to take to prepare your enterprise for containerization; now we continue the conversation with the rest of the actions you need to take before you can deploy a containerized approach.
Goldman Sachs describes the Nutanix software-driven enterprise cloud as a “once-in-a-decade infrastructure story.” Goldman Sachs does not toss out lofty acknowledgements like that haphazardly. Their research shows that companies are moving to hyperconverged systems to escape the legacy silo dominated IT infrastructure of yesteryear that is holding them back in a dynamic digital world. They see Nutanix as being a large benefactor of this movement due to its leadership and innovation. Nutanix and its Enterprise Cloud solution are positioned for success. This is further substantiated by Gartner, who recently recognized Nutanix as a leader in its magic quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure.
Have you heard the term “containerization” thrown around a lot recently? It’s a hot topic in the IT world, but what exactly does it mean and how can you prepare your enterprise to take advantage of what it has to offer? Continue reading to learn all about it and the steps your enterprise needs to take to deploy containers in your organization.
Two months ago, Gartner devoted a Magic Quadrant for the Hyperconverged Infrastructure market and placed Nutanix as the leader in the upper right-hand corner. On top of its recognized leadership status, Nutanix serves as the #1 HCI market share leader. The recognition of the HCI industry is of no surprise as Gartner predicts that 20 percent of business-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier infrastructure will transition to hyperconverged infrastructure by 2020. HCI is a new type of IT framework architecture that combines compute, storage, networking, and software-defined intelligence into a single system that reduces data center complexity while increasing scalability.
At WEI, we’re always looking for ways we can step up and can give back to our local communities, from gathering clothes for those in need to volunteering at a soup kitchen. One recent initiative to serve our community has been to host a food drive in partnership with a local non-profit, End 68 Hours of Hunger’s Salem Chapter. Earlier this month we wrapped up our annual drive for them, and the results were astounding—a testament to the generosity of the wonderful group of people working at WEI!
Data plays a critical role driving decisions today for your company and your competitors. Having the ability to access your data as quickly and efficiently as possible can provide a competitive edge in a crowded and disruptive marketplace. The demand to acquire the data you need, when you need it, is why many companies are turning to all-flash storage systems that are smart, fast and efficient. Your enterprise storage system is about more than just storing your company data. It is about making your data work for your business and the customers it serves.
A hyperconverged infrastructure provides enterprises with the ability to expand their network into the virtual realm. This setup combines the functionality of traditional hardware into manageable software functions, all of which are controlled through one tool. This ability to use services as a software allows enterprises to respond more quickly to internal and external environmental changes, plus it offers the security, capacity, and customization ability needed to be successful.
When discussing hybrid solutions and digital transformation, there is often some confusion between Hybrid IT and Hybrid Cloud. While there are certain striking similarities, it is critical to understand that there are also very important differences between the two and how enterprises use them within their organization.
There seems to be a lot of hype these days within the IT industry. IT manufacturers herald “this time it’s different,” with every new generation of products. Each subsequent generation of products boasts the same claims such as lower support and maintenance costs, reduced TCO and greater ROI, and greater agility, flexibility and scalability in deployments and management. Newly introduced generational products in the IT industry often do deliver these promised benefits to some extent. However, the overwhelming amount of industry buzz often times makes it hard to sift through accurate claims concerning enterprise equipment. This is especially true concerning enterprise data storage.
The digital landscape is changing at a rapid pace, and with change comes an increase in the need for cybersecurity measures that protect businesses. Although technology is providing exciting opportunities, it also brings with it challenges that enterprises must learn to overcome.
Those who are pursuing the latest architype known as hybrid IT in order to revolutionize their enterprise and complete the digital transformation of their organizations know the dream. The dream is to free ourselves from the isolated silos of the traditional data center and obtain the flexibility of a free flowing ecosphere in which workloads are matched with the right platform that both optimizes the user experience and maximizes ROI at the same time. Hybrid IT is about obtaining an unparalleled degree of elasticity in order to migrate applications at will amongst hosting structures (cloud and on-premises). This agility not only delivers infrastructure plasticity, but peace of mind as well by delivering on the ability to achieve near absolute levels of business continuity and disaster recovery.
What was once a far-fetched dream, the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices, have permeated our lives, personally and professionally. In order to compete, enterprises must acknowledge this shift and implement infrastructure that supports it.
It is a truly amazing world in which we work today. While the flow of capital is still essential for businesses to grow, materialize, and sustain them, it is ideas today that feed the global economy. Today’s businesses rely on innovators and visionaries. The delivery method for these ideas and revolutionary concepts is IT. IT is a part of nearly every business today because they depend on one or more essential apps to either communicate with their customers or manage their business. Just as the flow of capital is attracted to the most fluid and efficient markets, customers, and business transactions, tech stacks are attracted to those businesses with the most innovative, efficient, and flexible apps and technology. Those that can simplify and streamline the transaction experience will have an advantage over their competitors. In order for your business to make the most of any web related advantage, you need an adaptable ecosphere that is conducive to the constant evolution of those apps through DevOps.
At WEI, social responsibility goes hand in hand with traditional measures of corporate success. WEI encourages all employees, no matter their title or position, to spend time volunteering, organizing, and participating in civic programs; we genuinely care and support our diverse, growing community. We firmly believe that when you invest time in the community, you invest in a happier, healthier, brighter future, which is why we created the WEI StepsUP program.
Although Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is not a dominant solution yet, all signs indicate it will be soon. In fact, Gartner predicts that in five years it will be reaching $5 billion in spending. According to Gartner, there are five keys as to why so many organizations and IT leaders are turning to HCI.
Digital-ready networks represent the future of enterprise growth and innovation with the use of technologies such as cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, social, and big data and analytics. But there is more to being digital-ready than just using these technologies; it requires your enterprise to view it as an essential business strategy for success.
Hybrid IT is many things. It is a new approach to the enterprise that requires new architectures, skills and toolsets. It also brings a whole new verbiage with it. These are terms that your management and staff need to become accustomed to because hybrid IT incorporates a number of new technologies. Many of these concepts are a divergence from the traditional IT structure of which we are all conversant. For those unfamiliar to this new approach to managing enterprise IT, we present to you a glossary of the primary hybrid IT terms.
What exactly is digital transformation and how can an enterprise benefit from it? That is a top question among executives, and for good reason. According to a 2017 IDG Role & Influence of the Technology Decision-Maker Study, 72 percent of IT Decision Makers reported their organization is still exploring a digital first approach.
Imagine for a moment that you are calling technical support for a traditional storage solution. You are first greeted by a customer service representative whose job is to take basic information about your problem at hand and forward it on to the appropriate technical support technician or engineer. The representative will ask for the usual product ID numbers, your name, contact information, and remind you of the expiration date of your current service contract. Once your customer profile is established, the barrage of questions begins:
Mobile devices, cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) are changing the way industries, including higher education, conduct business. Two major benefits to mobile-first technology strategy include the ability to provide more flexibility and promote collaboration between individuals – two main points of interest for the millennial generation entering the workforce.
For automobile owners, nothing probably generates as much uncertainty as the “Check Engine” light on the dashboard. A stream of questions commences through your mind once that ominous amber light announces its presence.
Are you considering switching your enterprise from a legacy hardware infrastructure to a more streamlined system? Are you afraid of the enterprise security risks that come with using a cloud-based technology? While the anxiety is understandable, there are proactive measures you can take to ensure the security of your data. Keep reading to discover the pros and cons of each deployment option as well as our cloud security recommendations to protect your information.
gnIn Part 1 of this blog series, we discussed the unprecedented amount of money being allocated to cybersecurity in the coming year and beyond, as well as how money, without a core foundational strategy, could be simply money that is tossed to the wind. In Part 2, we will look at the remaining three of the five core principles that can make a meaningful difference concerning the your enterprise cybersecurity and users.
It is the start of a new year - that time in which we break down the complexities of life into more manageable elements in order to strategize for the year ahead and attempt to improve upon our efforts of the year prior. This also applies to your company’s enterprise cybersecurity strategy. According to Gartner, worldwide cybersecurity spending reached $90 billion in 2017.
When we talk about cloud computing we are usually referring to the public cloud. The concept of the public cloud is revolutionary. The idea of ridding ourselves of our hardware centric data centers to a more flexible, scalable, and resilient world of the cloud is indeed liberating. Internal IT can spend their time matching business needs with solutions rather than allocating their time to maintaining hardware that will only have to be replaced one day. It is wonderful to contemplate and visualize all the ways the cloud can make your job as an IT manager so much easier.
If your data center is on an evolutionary track from siloed and hardware-centric to agile and software-defined, you’re aware of converged and hyperconverged infrastructures. If you haven’t yet been introduced to composable infrastructure, welcome to the next gen step in your data center modernization journey.
With the advancement in technology, employees are no longer stuck working at their desk in order to access the information they need to do their jobs. This freedom allows greater flexibility and productivity, but it also opens the door for enterprise cybersecurity threats and the potential for unauthorized access to proprietary information.
There are a number of compelling reasons to migrate your services and resources to the cloud such as cost savings, agility, scalability, and redundancy. Another reason is to escape the entrapment of vendor lock in. Ironically however, some enterprises find themselves moving to the cloud, only to constrain themselves with the same restrictions that plagued them in the traditional datacenter. Others are finding themselves in a problematical situation of competing organizations that muddle the cloud landscape.
Ransomware was a top concern for enterprises around the world in 2017 and continues to be one moving forward. Organizations around the globe are increasingly dependent on technology to help reach business goals, but it comes with risk. Cybercriminals are masters at exploiting technological weak spots to hit companies where it hurts the most.
As a society, we love to put entities head-to-head against one another. Automotive enthusiasts have debated Ford vs. Chevy for decades. Every year college football fans debate which conference is stronger: Big Ten or SEC. When it comes to IaaS cloud computing, the inevitable debate between Azure and AWS separates the room between enthusiasts of each provider as well. Unfortunately, deliberating between the two in hopes of distinguishing a clear winner is kind of like debating who the greater basketball player is between LeBron James and Michael Jordan. It kind of all depends on your point of view and what you value.
It feels like every time we turn around there is a new cybersecurity threat to report that organizations need to protect themselves from. Malware is an unfortunate reality of living in a digital world, but there are many lessons we can learn from these attacks to safeguard sensitive material.
It’s been two weeks since the IT world was rocked by the news of the CPU vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre. It’s making headline news due to how far the vulnerabilities extend—to nearly every processor manufactured over the past 20 years—as well as the potential impacts in mitigating these vulnerabilities. Every server, computer, tablet, phone or any other computing device with a modern CPU is potentially affected. (See WEI’s Customer Advisory about Meltdown and Spectre in this blog post.)
Happy New Year! As we say hello to 2018, we can reflect on the massive progress technology made throughout 2017. The cloud came to a new level of maturity, cybersecurity incidents rocked the world and organizations embraced hyperconverged infrastructure as the future of data center modernization. But what lies ahead? Read on for a look at cybersecurity predictions for the coming year.
Have you ever looked at your dog or cat staring out the window of your house towards the horizon? Ever wonder if they contemplate what may be beyond their visible perimeter? It used to be that internal IT did not have to contemplate what lay beyond the perimeter. Network security was fairly simple – create a wall of security around the data center and its resources, along with the users and their desktops scattered throughout the building. Traffic passed through the perimeter firewall while users passed through the front building entrance to access the network. It was a page out of the medieval castle defense playbook in that unauthorized users, unknown devices and external threats were kept at bay outside of the walled perimeter.
WEI recognizes that a successful business has a significant role in the community and WEI shows this with its WEI StepsUp corporate responsibility initiative. This past holiday season WEI carried out its Random Acts of Kindness initiative. This initiative was started by WEI’s founders, Belisario and Leslie Rosas. Every holiday season, each employee is provided fifty dollars to be used to carry out a “random act of kindness.” Random acts of kindness can be grand or small gestures, such as lending a helping hand to someone in need. There are two guidelines:
