The Biggar Picture: The Business Optimization Blog

If you’re like me, time is in very short supply. I find myself running around trying to find time and even make time where time doesn’t exist. Sound familiar?

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If there’s one thing the recent oil rig explosion off the Gulf speaks to is the underlying need for better proactive and reactive measures to protect the environment against natural disasters such as this. A case of “easy to say but hard to do?”  Perhaps, but I’ll leave that discussion to others to debate.

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Richard Napolitano, president of EMC’s Unified Storage Division, made some interesting remarks recently about the impact of server virtualization on storage architectures.  “The transition to virtualised is causing many things to be re-architected,” Napolitano said. “We love that. We love that because hard problems are where we can make money and [virtualisation] is causing problems.”

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In Heidi’s last Blog, she touched on a very important topic – one that’s generating a lot of debate in the industry and is the source of quite a bit of confusion for many customers given the often contradictory messaging that’s out in the field, the critical importance of Exchange (and other high availability applications like it) to organizations, and the budgetary challenges IT continually faces to reduce costs/maximize investments whenever and wherever possible.
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Should you virtualize Exchange environments or not? It’s a weighty question - and one that is generally not easy for a lot of organizations to answer. Rapidly changing capacity and performance requirements make Exchange a less-than-perfect candidate for virtualization, especially without careful planning.
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Ask just about anyone if they’d like to repeat 2010, and the answer you’ll resoundingly hear is “No!”  Without a doubt, 2009 was a challenging year for most markets, most organizations and most individuals – and storage markets were certainly no exception.
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I was a senior technology editor at InfoStor when EMC announced its storage virtualization platform back in May 2005. In fact, I actually covered the story, and reported on EMC’s claims that it would revolutionize storage virtualization with its networked-based offering – a solution the company said was more reliable and more scalable than competitive offerings on the marketing. This included Hitachi’s Universal Storage Platform V and VM platforms, which were introduced the previous September.
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The economy is responsible for a lot of things these days… some good and, well, a lot not so good. I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of all the negativity.
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All you have to do is click on the television or take a walk through your local retailer – and you are quickly reminded that it’s Breast Cancer awareness month. Pink ribbons adorn everything from running shoes to cereal boxes, to cosmetics, to electronics, to home improvement products, etc.
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It’s a well-known fact: This industry has a tendency to use a multitude of names to describe a single technology or on the flip side, to glom onto a single name to describe a number of distinctly different technologies. Sometime it’s unintentional – and sometime it’s not.
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