Business data is growing at an unprecedented speed, and organizations of all sizes, across all industries, have to face the challenge of scaling up their data infrastructure to meet this new pressure. Advances in server hardware and application design have led to a potential solution: in-memory computing. Read Aberdeen's Analyst Insight report and see how in-memory computing can address two of the "three Vs" of big data.
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The proliferation of process automation, sensor networks, user-generated content, machine-to-machine connections, and mobile computing is driving the far-reaching trend referred to as “big data.” It takes new tools and techniques to collect, process, and distribute this enormous amount of information. Download this white paper and know how to overcome six of the challenges you’ll face as you strive to capitalize on big data.
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At the recent SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd event in November, SAP announced the next-generation SAP HANA platform. TEC Principal Analyst P.J. Jakovljevic was there and brings you all the details in this TEC Report. Download the report to get the latest developments to SAP HANA and how this platform can help companies gain insights into their business in real time, and may even help healthcare organizations cure cancer.
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In today’s business environment, litigation requests are inevitable, but there are tools and strategies that in-house counsel can deploy to address what’s been requested, what’s being retained, and how they can manage information in the future that will lower the costs and business impacts of litigation. This paper will look at all three aspects, and proven, workable strategies to address each. Download the white paper now.
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Asset-intensive industries have a major challenge in adapting to changing business paradigms, while keeping pace with new industry requirements and simultaneously ensuring sustainable operations. See how new technologies such as mobility can help these organizations develop a collaborative partnership with their customers to improve the efficiency of their services, benefiting the customer, the company, and the community at large.
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Enterprise applications require fast access to large volumes of information, and are pushing the performance limits of traditional storage architectures. Although it's easy to add storage capacity by adding more disk drives and arrays, it's not so easy to scale storage I/O performance. See how hybrid storage pools enable a new approach to storage architectures--increasing performance, reducing costs, and simplifying management.
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For many organizations, IT is split between two groups. The data center facility is provided and managed by facilities management, while the IT equipment within the facility is provisioned and managed by the IT department. This can lead to problems—and an outsourced solution can allow a business to concentrate on its strategy, rather than on “keeping the lights on.” This white paper discusses the importance of a holistic approach between a data center facility and the equipment within it.
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The EMC Documentum family of products covers a range of content management, case management, and governance applications, and plays to current shifts across the information management landscape. In this report, TEC's director of knowledge services Josh Chalifour looks at the directions in which EMC is focusing its products and services, and how that relates to requirements you may have for your content management initiatives.
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By 2016, smartphones and tablets will put power in the pockets of a billion global consumers. Mobile is not simply another device for IT to support with a shrunken Web site. Rather, mobile is the manifestation of a much broader shift to new systems of engagement. Download this paper and know how such systems of engagement will help firms empower their customers, partners, and employees with context-aware apps and smart products.
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In many organizations, it is workers bringing their own devices into the workplace who are forcing the hand of IT policy makers. But as new devices are coming to market faster than corporate IT can formulate policies about them, application management is quickly becoming a fundamental mobility management challenge. Those companies with the best mobility implementations will win in a world of real-time business engagement. See how!
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JurInnov’s director of information systems and security provides a detailed analysis of why development of a security-oriented corporate culture is imperative for companies wishing to keep their electronically stored information secure.
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Cloud services will be a leading driver of productivity for manufacturers over the next decade. Businesses focused on reducing costs and improving the quality of manufacturing solutions will increasingly turn to the cloud for SaaS solutions. Read this white paper by president and CEO of inKumo, Inc., and find out how this new era of technology will dramatically improve productivity and cost savings in the industry.
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To meet their recordkeeping and lot-tracking requirements, food and beverage processors must be able to rapidly identify and track every single ingredient in their products, from receipt through processing, packaging, and shipping, to the exact customer location. For this, such companies are turning to innovative software solutions. Read about the eight features a food or beverage processor must have in its ERP software.
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With recent advancements, publishers and advertisers need to know how to get the right message to the right customer and in the right place to achieve their campaign goals. This report explores the emergence of data-driven audience targeting and reveals some of the ways that publishers are embracing newer ‘actual data’ tools to create dynamic audience segments that are more flexible and truly able to meet advertisers’ needs.
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Security breaches are perpetrated by a wide variety of external and internal sources, including hacktivists, targeted attackers, and profit-motivated
cybercriminals, as well as through mundane everyday occurrences, such as missing laptops and thumb drives. To address these compliance and privacy issues, organizations have responded by adding layers of controls and integrating them with varied results. Now, those organizations realize that making security simpler is the ultimate strategy for ensuring end user adoption of new security measures and meeting multiple, overlapping regulatory requirements. This paper is a review of DigitalPersona Pro, its integrated approach, and its features and efficiencies in these areas.
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Backup/recovery solution datasheet: IBMTivoli Storage Manager FastBack. Download this datasheet for highlights, features and benefits, and handy listings of backup/DR Server system requirements and Backup Client supported platforms.
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Small and medium enterprises often find that their “short list” of storage solutions includes products from EMC and IBM. Both companies offer solid products. Hardware/software costs are, for the most part, similar. And both companies offer solid service and support. So, when choosing between these two vendors, what criteria should you use to determine which product best suits your storage needs? Download this advisory now to find out.
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The administration and management of printing can be time-consuming, often relying on manual processes. Many businesses are rethinking their approach to managing the print environment, by either adopting a managed service or implementing centralized print management tools. This can ensure the high availability, reliability and manageability of printing resources, while leaving IT staff free to focus on core activities.
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Computing infrastructure today though versatile must be used wisely. Intelligent workload management (IWM) allows for efficient consumption of computing resources while ensuring business tasks are supported by all needed resources—and that this is all done securely. IWM tools support the building, management, monitoring, and securing of workloads. See how to run your cloud computing system with leading-edge technology.
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The managed print services (MPS) market continues to evolve as vendors expand their service offerings beyond the office print environment. Today the business agenda is broader, and MPS must provide a route to business transformation as well as cost efficiency. Businesses thus must place their transformational goals on the agenda at the start of an MPS engagement. See what major MPS providers have to offer to your business.
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As the economy turns sour, and IT budgets remain flat or get reduced, doing more with the infrastructure you have has never been more important. But investing in the same old networking infrastructure, storage, servers, and bandwidth is not going to help you reach your strategic goals. Get a return on investment (ROI) analysis for one brand of network appliances that can help you reach your IT objectives.
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If your company has expanded, or gone through site consolidation, your IT infrastructure may have become a hodgepodge of outdated equipment and inefficient workflows. Employee productivity suffers, risks of disruption and data loss increase, and IT administrative overhead outstrips budget and staff resources. Discover an approach for harmonizing systems, management, and best practices across all your locations.
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Virtualization is central to twenty-first-century IT systems, yet many chief information officers fail to understand the benefits it can deliver to the data center. Storage controllers have always offered the ability to carve out pieces of real storage from a large pool and deliver them to a number of hosts, but it is storage virtualization itself that offers improvements that drive operational efficiency. Find out more.
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Of the many challenges businesses face today, managing data growth is one of the most daunting. But while there are myriad choices for storage management solutions, most legacy options cannot address changing business requirements, and the results can cost your organization money, time, and peace of mind. Discover solutions that allow you to optimize your service environment and successfully meet your business challenges.
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Despite the slowing economy, data growth continues due to the digitization of infrastructures, the need to keep more copies of data for longer periods, and the rapid increase in distributed data sources. This data growth creates a wide range of management challenges. Discover solutions that can help your company maximize its storage environment and reduce costs while improving service and managing risks.
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The National Geographic Society’s (NGS) Genographic Project is a five-year worldwide scientific study to trace the migration of humanity across the planet. After gathering over 210,000 genetic samples, NGS faced the challenge of processing the massive amounts of data collected. Learn how NGS chose a combination of solutions that helped it gather, manage, secure, store, and analyze hundreds of thousands of genetic samples.
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Five criteria usually dominate storage purchase decisions in the small and midsized enterprise (SME) marketplace: product features and functions; cost; reliability; service; and support. Using these criteria, SMEs often find that their final shortlists of vendors include storage products from EMC and IBM. Find out what criteria your SME should use to choose between these two vendor’s offerings.
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In February 2009, Quocirca interviewed 800 individuals across eight geographies about their views on, and usage of, enterprise performance management (EPM) tools and processes. The research was repeated in December 2009 and there was a clear improvement in understanding of EPM basics. However, much remains to be done. The overall increase in the EPM sub-indices does not mean there is room for complacency. Find out why.
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Managed print services (MPSs) offer organizations the opportunity to control costs, reduce the complexity of managing a heterogeneous infrastructure, and improve business processes. With many organizations striving to do more with less, MPS can cut expenses by passing control of complex printing infrastructure to the experts, and leaving the organization to focus on its core business competencies. Find out more.
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Electronic discovery, or e-discovery, is the process of identifying, collecting, filtering, searching, de-duplicating, reviewing, and potentially producing electronically stored information that relates to pending or anticipated litigation. Some particular characteristics of e-discovery need to be considered when developing search solutions. Find out what they are, as well as the truth about the effectiveness of keywords.
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IT departments rarely have the luxury of spare capacity or sufficient knowledge of all the products and technologies that the rest of the organization expects. However, IT is an integral part of most companies, and supporting diverse or specialized technologies and understanding their impact on the business is necessary. Organizations not only need third parties—they need them to be focused and cost-effective. Learn more.
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A number of bargain-basement data backup services are entering the market with a barrage of advertising. Some people may make business decisions based on price alone, but when it comes to vital needs like secure data, cheaper is not better. Would you buy the cheapest parachute? Then why settle for the cheapest data backup solution? Learn more about data backup technologies and why you should avoid cheap alternatives.
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New Avenue Solutions is a consultant for small to medium businesses (SMBs) in network setup and installation, security, data backup, and more. As part of New Avenue’s service offering, it rents rack space in a data warehouse to manage customers’ network and backup solutions. As storage demands grew, transfer rates slowed, and maintenance became increasingly time consuming. Learn how New Avenue overcame the problems.
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Most strategies for dealing with e-mail deluge involve getting more power out of the e-mail solution: greater storage or better spam filters. But what if you’ve got the problem all wrong? The purpose of technology, including e-mail, is to enhance employee productivity. Find out how online collaboration tools can help you reduce the e-mail deluge, streamline information management, and increase overall productivity.
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Is it is possible for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to achieve levels of application integration historically reserved for large enterprises with deep IT pockets? Duplication of data can be eliminated with the right electronic document management system (EDMS). Discover how an EDMS can be integrated with other core business applications to replace paper files and documents, driving efficiency and managing IT costs.
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Electronic document management systems (EDMSs) are used by companies to organize and streamline their document processes to increase productivity and efficiency. Integration between the EDMS and the customized software results in desirable improved efficiencies and savings. This integration can be accomplished using an application program interface (API) that comes along with the EDMS application. Find out how.
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The distributed replicated block device (DRBD) is a software-based replicated storage solution mirroring the content of block devices (hard disks, partitions, logical volumes, etc.) between servers. DRBD mirrors data in real time, transparently, and synchronously or asynchronously. Learn how to initialize it and configure your MySQL server to use DRBD to synchronize your data, as well as troubleshooting tips.
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As you implement a virtualized environment, knowing how to monitor and maintain them becomes yet another challenge. Monitoring network and application traffic in an environment containing one-to-many relationships between physical hardware devices and virtual application servers presents a number of concerns. Learn about the traffic flow in virtual environments, and the various visibility options and their ramifications.
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Master data management (MDM) comprises a set of processes and tools that define and manage the non-transactional data entities of an organization (also called reference data). MDM provides processes for consolidation, quality assurance, and distribution of such data throughout a company to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and use of this information. Discover the benefits of an MDM system.
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Microsoft recently researched the experience of nearly 200 companies with more than 250 PCs that have deployed one or more of the applications in the Microsoft Dynamics line of business management solutions. Among these companies, a common issue was growth via mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Find out about the pain points, and how Microsoft Dynamics can help support growth via M&A to drive business success.
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Most operating systems use logical file systems optimized for traditional magnetic hard disk drives (HDD). As a result, users adopting newer solid state drive (SSD) technology often see poor write-speed performance caused by free space fragmentation. Learn how new automatic disk maintenance technologies can improve SSD performance and extend the life of SSD devices by minimizing free space fragmentation.
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Litigators and regulators are aware of the importance of e-mail, often making it the first target and most significant of discovery efforts. Typically, discovery costs make up at least 50 percent of litigation costs, and most discovery efforts and costs relate to e-mail and e-discovery. Learn why many current e-mail archiving policies don’t work, and what you should be doing to improve your company’s records management.
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Analysts estimate that 80 percent of a company’s intellectual property is in its e-mail. Finding this information when it’s needed can be a major source of frustration for employees—one that can consume hours per week and megabytes of storage. But clearly these documents must be retained, not deleted. Learn about a searchable archiving solution that protects companies from liabilities as well as increasing storage costs.
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Can your company data survive double drive failure? How about multiple drive failure? Download this datasheet for an overview of the Pillar Data Systems Axiom RAID protection schemas.
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Reliance on enterprise data is growing at exponential rates. And thanks to internal processes and legal requirements, the period of time that data must be retained is increasing—as is the cost of retaining the data itself. As storage needs grow, the cost of deploying siloed storage systems is becoming unmanageable. Find out how consolidating resources can translate into bottom-line savings for your enterprise.
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The exploding popularity of VMware’s server virtualization has created a corresponding demand for shared storage. However, traditional storage arrays, burdened by a legacy of addressing physical infrastructure requirements, fail to optimize the unique storage requirements of a virtual infrastructure. Find out about one storage array that meets the requirements of a next-generation virtual infrastructure storage system.
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Oracle has information lifecycle management (ILM) functionality integrated in its database product, but its value still relies heavily on the customer buying various tiers of storage dedicated to ILM. It seems that when implementing an ILM solution, saving money can be an expensive proposition. Find out how one company decided to “think inside the box” and work with Oracle to solve the ILM storage problems.
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At the macro level, the fibre channel storage systems market is mature and slow-growing. However, the market is actually undergoing tremendous architectural and technological transition. This report provides a quantitative market-sizing analysis based on the direction and scope of the overall fibre channel storage systems market, and analyzes next-generation fibre channel storage systems segments and their growth prospects.
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Companies often struggle to manage large-scale e-mail environments thanks to their reliance on techniques that were already showing their age in the 90s. Nowhere is this more evident than when they try to support key messaging systems with direct-attach storage. Find out about the problems associated with direct-attach storage, and about a solution that provides a remedy.
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In evaluating the relative merits of storage vendors, one important consideration is system availability in the event of a drive failure. And because of the potential for data loss, the time during which a drive is being rebuilt onto a hot spare is critical. Demartek compared drive rebuild times for the Pillar Data Systems Axiom 500, EMC CX3-40, and Network Appliance FAS3050c. Find out which product performed the fastest.
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The rise of electronic records is having a profound effect on business litigation. Electronic records are now so important that the litigation rules in US federal courts have been officially amended to give judges and litigants more guidance on coping with records. IT managers tasked with setting policies for e-mail retention should understand the amended rules before any lawsuit is started or anticipated. Learn more.
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Data Protection Manager is designed to provide continuous data protection for servers. A virtual tape library solution with de-duplication complements Microsoft DPM 2007, and together they can meet the data protection and recovery challenges of both Windows and non-Windows environments. Find out how these technologies work together to provide continuous data protection and recovery for enterprises of all sizes.
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Unfortunately, electronic documents are rarely categorized based on records management standards or retention policies. Organizations facing numerous claims, litigations, government investigations, or audits realize that identifying, locating, and reviewing electronic data is time-consuming and costly. A solution that helps archive and search for your vital electronic data can also ease your efforts to comply. Learn more.
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Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is mandatory. As such, businesses must think seriously about their data storage security and the day-to-day encryption management of their customer data. As a merchant or credit card processor, will you be ready when the auditors come knocking? Learn more about the foolproof way that many businesses are passing PCI DSS audits.
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Enterprises are becoming increasingly aware of their fiduciary duty and legal obligation to protect confidential and personal information. As such their IT departments must find a way to effectively secure storage tiers from unauthorized access and viewing. Discover why today’s storage security technology with integrated encryption processing is the type of solution that many IT professionals are turning to.
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Collaborative tools are becoming essential to sharing data in today’s office environment. You need a solution that can grow to accommodate new projects and uses—and a storage system that is flexible enough to meet initial demands and adapt to changes. Find out how a multiple-node storage area network (SAN) can maximize the scalability and functionality of your collaboration tools, and ease storage administration.
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The University of Maryland School of Medicine had already experienced VMware technology as a way to consolidate its servers; what it didn’t realize was that the company’s solution could also address its disaster recovery needs. By combining two storage technologies—creating a common storage area network (SAN)—the school has reduced unexpected downtime from hours to seconds and has saved thousands of dollars in hardware costs.
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As the Microsoft Exchange environment continues to grow, building and managing the underlying IT infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult for Exchange administrators. Adding more and more storage can lead to frequent system downtime and slower response times. Discover seven ways your administrators can spend less time on day-to-day Microsoft Exchange management—while planning for future growth in the process.
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Unlike most other business, transmission and distribution companies do not have the flexibility to adjust their prices independently based on demand-supply dynamics. Given the practice of performance-based rate-making, these companies must continually strive to reduce cost. To achieve this, supply chain managers must create a blueprint of their processes by systematically analyzing their supply chain practices.
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Customer information system (CIS) projects in the utilities industry have earned a reputation for being disruptive to business, very expensive, and always behind schedule. As a mission-critical cash register for utilities, it pays to examine CIS more closely. Learn about the perspectives on strategic CIS assessment frameworks and how a structured solution can help you improve the agility of CIS without a huge investment.
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Canadian manufacturers are getting squeezed. Challenged by a rising Canadian dollar, forced to hold the line on prices in the US market, pressured by customer demand for lower prices, better quality, and quicker service, these manufacturers need a way to retain their competitive edge and increase bottom-line profitability. Find out why product data management (PDM) is a solution you can turn to in these challenging times.
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Data deduplication is one of the hottest technologies in storage today. However, with many different deduplication approaches from various vendors—each hyping its own unique benefits—it’s easy to get caught up in determining which factors are most important for you. Discover the different methodologies used in design deduplication solutions so you can make the right decision the first time.
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Company employees, business partners, and customers all demand secure and low-response-time access to business applications—from wherever they are. While SAP addresses this need through its enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution, when security features are added the application response time is slower. So what’s the best way to test global SOA deployments? Read this white paper to find out.
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Increasing user productivity is an ongoing challenge for many companies. While an abundance of online information and applications is available to them, facilitating fast and secure access to the information can be a complex task. An integrated provisioning and single sign-on (SSO) solution provides secure access to the network from the moment an employee starts the job—enabling full productivity from day one.
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When you connect to the Internet, you do so through the Windows Socket (Winsock) layer. While this layer is an integral part of the Windows operating system and acts as an interface between your computer and the Net, it cannot distinguish the difference between good traffic and bad. MicroWorld Winsock Layer (MWL) technology helps by sitting on the Winsock layer and analyzing the traffic—before it gets to your computer.
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Today’s business processes place high demands on IT infrastructure, and the answer often is integration of software and hardware resources. Now you can integrate by separating: divide logical processing and storage resources from the physical hardware on which they run, and help make virtualization a powerful tool for improving your data center’s flexibility, reliability, and use—while reducing cost of management.
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Virtual data centers must enable increased physical server use and central management of virtual machine infrastructure. A clustered file system, with a virtual machine manager (VMM), can add critical new management and migration capability to current virtual servers. Before installing and configuring VMM, find out the hardware and software required for migration and integration, and helpful “how-to” pointers.
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Today, more and more companies are purchasing goods from overseas. But once those goods are on the water, many companies find it difficult to keep track of where they are at any given time. Ineffective container management leads to extra costs, but with Sage ERP X3’s import tracking functionality, business functions are tied together in a single database—enabling real-time access to information and improving productivity.
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CTS Cement Corporation, a manufacturer of professional-grade construction cement, operates out of 15 facilities across the US. As the company grew, it needed to address the inefficiencies of its accounts payable invoice processing, which was being keyed manually into two different systems. With this lack of connectivity between systems, CTS turned to AnyDocINVOICE solution and now indexes nearly 2,500 invoices per month.
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In a 2006 SAP survey, 93 percent of respondents experienced data management issues during their most recent projects. The problem: many organizations believe that they are using master data, when in fact what they are relying on is data that is dispersed throughout the enterprise. Discover the importance of master data and how the ideal master data management (MDM) solution can help your business get it under control.
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In order to meet the increasing need to extend services around the world, companies must be able to consolidate data centers and business applications while adhering to compliance rules and security regulations. While SAP addresses these business needs through its enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, the question of how to test these global enterprise SOA deployments still needs to be answered.
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Virtual private networks (VPNs) are optimized to perform specific functions within the remote access architecture. But deploying the often complex mix of approaches for managed and unmanaged devices can affect your security. Blue Coat RA provides a new approach that bridges the gap between traditional and endpoint security technologies—helping businesses meet remote access requirements in a simple, cost effective manner.
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Today, more business than ever is done in branch offices or at remote sites, but very few IT resources are actually hosted there. To reduce costs, businesses often consolidate applications—but consolidation can lead to poor performance. With the right solution, however, acceleration techniques—like bandwidth management and protocol optimization—can be properly dispersed to remote applications, helping increase performance.
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A clear customer focus is an essential part of improving business effectiveness and efficiency. But how can businesses achieve global customer visibility in today's competitive market? With the implementation of a master data management (MDM) solution, businesses can gain multidimensional, real-time visibility of their customers, resulting in improved competitiveness, higher profit margins, and reduced business risk.
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Explosive data growth, shrinking backup windows, and unreliable restores are just a few of the issues you have to manage on a daily basis—especially if you’re using a legacy tape backup application system. But you can still use your legacy system by extending its life and enhancing its reliability with a hardware-based disk compression solution. Find out how, and considerably reduce your backup and recovery times.
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Chances are, if you’re backing up your data, you’re using backup tape as your solution. But advances in data management technologies are making disk-to-disk (D2D) backup a vital component of any sane data protection strategy. In fact, D2D backup provides answers to the challenges threatening traditional tape backup strategies. Find out how to evaluate the different advanced data protection solutions available on the market today.
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Storage system administrators are constantly battling with growing volumes of data. But can you create more space-efficient storage? You can. With a data virtualization solution like NetApp Snapshot, administrators can create point-in-time copies of data volumes—consuming only a fraction of the space normally required. Find out how using data virtualization tools can help reduce your ongoing data storage management costs.
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For AG & Co., embracing new technology was the only way to go if it wanted to continue increasing its revenues. Although it had purchased a new computer system back in 1986, the old software products it was using were non-integrated, making it difficult to keep track of engagements and billing. Billable time meant revenue, so AG & Co. opted to implement BillQuick, and has since reduced its overhead and increased profits.
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The first step in any enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation involves bringing together the team that will plan and implement the project—your ERP task force. But who should be a part of this task force and why? Selecting the right people is imperative and can play a major role in determining the success or failure of your ERP effort. Find out about what you should beware of when assembling your team.
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When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) communications, two of the basic requirements for regulatory compliance are having a reliable network and a high quality dial tone. So why would you want to settle for anything less? To ensure that both are obtained, many companies are entrusting their data—and their compliance responsibilities—to the Inovis Multienterprise Expert Services Hub (MESH) platform. Find out why.
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E-mail archiving systems are no longer simply tools that focus on regulatory compliance, but instead are multifaceted systems that can help companies satisfy legal discovery requirements, improve messaging-related storage management, and assist in disaster recovery efforts. While there are several solutions available, a hosted solution can offer a number of important benefits you should consider.
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Does your business have a records management policy that addresses e-mail? Well if it doesn’t, now’s the time to consider adopting one. To meet Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) requirements, businesses must create and enforce a clear corporate messaging policy. With Fortiva’s on-demand archiving solution, your legal team can easily develop e-mail policies—making compliance with legal discovery demands much easier.
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With the recent amendments made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), businesses must take a closer look at how they manage their electronic data. Recent studies have shown that many companies are not prepared for how these changes will affect their business. To improve their governance procedures to meet these new requirements, businesses must invest in technology that can adequately preserve electronic data.
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It’s no secret that there is a bevy of deployment options available with most customer relationship management (CRM) solutions today—ranging from customized to out-of-the-box. But with choice comes complexity. In order for CRM buyers to choose wisely, they must find a deployment approach that best matches their needs while delivering superior performance, application integration, and functionality. Find out how.
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Radio communications are subject to unpredictable behavior due to environmental dependencies and various types of interference. But with the proper operating parameters and an agile antenna system, many of these impairments can be mitigated. Using smart antenna technology like Wi-Fi, with its adaptive real-time system, you can greatly improve the transport of demanding applications in challenging wireless environments.
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It is widely acknowledged that unauthorized changes made to an IT infrastructure cause up to 80 percent of a system’s unavailability. So what key ingredient is needed to reduce that percentage? By adding change control to an existing or planned change management infrastructure, businesses can improve IT service availability, lower compliance costs, and accelerate their IT infrastructure library (ITIL) implementations.
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There are key systems in every infrastructure where unapproved change can pose significant business risk. These guidelines show you how to properly categorize these systems in order to identify those that have risk characteristics. By learning how to identify critical change control failure points in your infrastructure, you reduce the threat of costly downtime, potential security breaches, and compliance weaknesses.
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Identity theft and credit card fraud affect all businesses—and the problem is only getting worse. In order to combat these threats, credit card companies have joined forces to introduce the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). For financial institutions, complying with PCI DSS by using real-time monitoring and selective enforcement software can help to relieve the burden of unauthorized changes.
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Corporate governance encompasses the processes and systems by which organizations operate—and it affects every business. To effectively participate in governance processes, businesses should consider closed-loop service oriented architecture (SOA). Although stand-alone applications for governance, management, and security exist, find out why they do not enable the demand and value management that closed-loop SOA offers.
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Corporate IT organizations are struggling to satisfy the demands of a constantly evolving business environment. Lowering costs and responding to changing markets are a few of the challenges they face. Another is understanding how to leverage mission-critical applications as they develop new composite applications. Find out how deploying a service-oriented legacy architecture (SOLA) can help—and save you time and money.
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Corporate IT departments and independent software vendors (ISV) alike are faced with a number of similar business challenges. One such challenge is the problem of how to derive additional value from their existing Windows and UNIX software applications and create advantage with Web-enabled solutions. Discover the pros and cons of Web-based and Web-enabled applications—and learn about the solutions that lead the pack.
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Linux operating systems are taking the world by storm, and have seen double-digit growth rates for seven consecutive quarters. With its promise of higher performance and better stability and security, Linux has become the alternative to traditional Windows-based servers. By deploying Linux in key strategic areas and taking advantage of application publishing solutions, you can lower your costs and speed time-to-market.
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Nearly half of all US companies have serious data quality issues. The problem is that most are not thinking about their business data as being valuable. But in reality data has become—in some cases—just as valuable as inventory. The solution to most organizational data challenges today is to combine a strong data quality program with a master data management (MDM) program, helping businesses leverage data as an asset.
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The security provisions of the US Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) are complex and process-intensive, and non-compliant financial institutions and their officers have suffered penalties as a result. With QualysGuard’s vulnerability management and policy compliance solution—including on-demand auditing capabilities—financial institutions can easily meet the key security guidelines that are detailed in the GLBA.
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Despite the defensive efforts of firewalls, intrusion detection, antivirus solutions, and the like, criminals, careless employees, and contractors have exposed more than 158 million digital records of consumers personally identifiable information since 2005. With this critical need for stronger network security, Qualys has developed an on-demand solution that effectively manages these vulnerabilities.
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While most information vulnerabilities stem from external intrusion and theft of data, there remains a greater potential for information to be lost, stolen, or accidentally erased by internal sources—the employees. Don’t let this be the case with your business! Information vulnerability management (IVM) is a corporate issue—one that needs addressing. To learn how you can reduce your exposure, download this white paper.
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One of the largest expenses for distributors and wholesalers is stock. Many have difficulty finding the perfect balance between ensuring products are available when they’re needed and not holding too much inventory. So, how is it possible to increase profitability while lowering inventory costs? By exploiting an inventory optimization system, businesses increase automation and collaboration—allowing greater profitability.
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What can user-driven applications like Morello and Microsoft’s Office SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 do to help your web content management strategy? By combining the two, users can develop web applications and collaborative workspaces themselves rather than acquiring IT development input. In doing so, they unlock the silos of working practices and content stores, and add significant value to the web content management strategy.
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For many years, S&C Electric, a global provider of electric power system equipment, used internally built tracking and Subversion data to manage source code and documents and to track viruses. But as it grew, its needs became more complex, and more maintenance time was required. A managed source control solution now manages and protects S&C Electric’s intellectual property, and saves the company a lot in man-hours.
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Software company Terra Technology’s development team often worked remotely, without a centralized development system. Managing documents manually was quickly becoming an unproductive use of the team s time—and increased its chances of making errors. Since using ProjectLocker’s document management system, Terra Technology has saved valuable time and money, and can now focus on its core competency—supply chain software.
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When crafting an e-mail marketing campaign, a few guidelines should be followed in order to maximize its effectiveness. Believe it or not, e-mail marketing is not only an art, but a science as well. Carefully balancing the needs of the audience, properly communicating your inspiring message, and using the right technology to manage the interaction are some of the key ingredients needed to make it a success.
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Information chaos is one of the primary sources of inefficiency and waste for knowledge workers. So how do you improve efficiency and make more informed decisions? There’s a new direction in content management policy that can help: semantics-based search tools that go beyond just the “find” function, to search, categorize, analyze, and extract meaningful information from unstructured data and texts.
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For many years, the various departments at Walker Foods worked independently of one another, which seriously impeded the flow of data throughout the enterprise. It was clear that an integrated system was in order, and after a few initial upgrades, the company decided on AppFinity’s WebCustomer overall online solution. Since its implementation, Walker Foods has increased order accuracy and significantly reduced expenses.
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Is it possible to easily migrate from legacy tape devices to encrypting tape drives and still keep costs to a minimum? The answer is yes. With a comprehensive key management storage security system, a manageable and affordable migration process is achievable with a simple 3-step process. This process includes many benefits, such as a complete feature set that enhances system auditability and minimizes operational costs.
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What can a managed Subversion solution do to help .NET businesses solve their integration problems? Subversion meets the challenge of software development by allowing teams to use branching and tagging methods that help them work better with their QA organizations. It also saves .NET businesses a lot of money over setting up and maintaining a development infrastructure in house, which keeps the cost of ownership manageable.
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Software development best practices can save you money and make your team more productive. When software development teams don’t invest in a solid development platform, it makes their work harder and often ends up costing them more money over time. A hosted platform, however, provides a level of convenience and savings that makes it the obvious choice for today’s IT development, management, and consulting organizations.
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What does Visibility’s .NET enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution have that others don’t? .NET technology. And because it contains no legacy code, it provides a system that’s accessible using a web-browser and has a user interface equal in functionality to a client-server application. In fact, any client PC with Internet Explorer 5.5 or later can operate it—without compromising the quality of the user experience.
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In their efforts to accelerate time to market and improve business process efficiency, many marketing organizations adopt customer relationship management (CRM). But CRM often falls short in exploiting the exponential growth of content associated with product and brand marketing. By using a digital asset management (DAM) solution, however, you can increase productivity and achieve a favorable return on investment (ROI).
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In today’s business world, heightened privacy concerns and tightened regulations such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act have forced organizations to improve their workflow and archival and records management processes. That's why many results-oriented organizations are now using workflow software—bringing together people, processes, and documents to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and meet compliance requirements.
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If you’re dealing with increasing demands on your server storage by adding servers one at a time, the number of servers is growing hand in hand with management complexity, while stretching your IT budget. Make sure your data assets are covered—find out how server and storage consolidation storage systems can simplify storage management, increase flexibility, and advance data protection and disaster recovery.
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IT is often characterized as distinct groups pursuing individual agendas and launching disconnected initiatives to increase operational efficiencies. To overcome this, organizations need a set of capabilities that can help improve coordination between IT and the rest of the business while facilitating effective service management. Adopting foundational technologies and a best-practice benchmark is a good place to start.
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Most businesses today depend on their own IT departments to satisfy corporate governance objectives and meet increasing customer demand. Unfortunately, many have failed to clearly demonstrate to themselves—and to their customers—that they are truly managing their business. Only when the IT department understands what the business wants can it benchmark itself and build continual improvement plans that can meet these demands.
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Organizations of all sizes face similar challenges when managing storage—not enough capacity or protection. Help has arrived with Internet small computer system interface storage area networks (iSCSI SANs)—and they're steadily gaining momentum. With iSCSI SANs, businesses can effectively manage their storage needs, while lowering costs and increasing security. Find out why many industry leaders are choosing iSCSI today.
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Enterprise search is rapidly emerging as a key component to electronic discovery, and is proving to be the very technology that organizations need to comply with US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). But not all enterprise search software is the same, and conducting a review of the various technologies available can be a daunting task. Find out what you’ll need to look for to ensure regulatory compliance.
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Today’s extensive use of data collection tools coupled with the easy access to communication networks has woven more devices and systems into the fabric of our daily lives. As the scale of integration and complexity grows, so does the need for the appropriate paradigm to address it. In order to scale, system software architecture must be organized around a common-shared information model that can span multiple systems.
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Every day, sensitive business information finds its way into the wrong hands—through external breaches or internal theft. Such data is highly regulated, and any risks of exposure can result in stiff penalties and legal liabilities. Many of these security risks lie in the test/dev environments, and as such require a solution that protects data application clones from unauthorized access without jeopardizing its integrity.
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The growth of application data has placed an enormous burden on IT organizations to maintain acceptable application performance and availability. The weight of managing and navigating through vast amounts of inactive data has caused outages and raised budgets, among other problems. Active archiving software, however, addresses complex data management issues and delivers lasting benefits to organizations and its users.
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Data breach is a very real problem in business today. Every day, organizations store massive amounts of data inside database tables—data ranging from credit card transactions to product inventories. This valuable information is what runs the business. In order to protect this data and stay on top of compliance, an enterprise data management solution that respects information privacy regulations should be considered.
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Fax hardware plays a crucial role in the sending and receiving of business documents. With high-volume use over time, instabilities in performance can occur. Therefore, how well fax boards and fax software applications perform together becomes an important consideration. With IQ Express intelligent fax board series, fax servers send and receive corporate documents electronically—reducing costs and improving productivity.
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Three strikes—your out; that’s what lockout management does. But employees often forget the many passwords needed to access information. What ensues is a flood of calls to the help desk that, over time, can become a huge administrative burden. Adopting a strong password policy is critical. By implementing a lockout management strategy via automated management solutions, businesses enhance security and improve workflow.
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Are virtual appliances really more advantageous than physical appliances? For businesses looking to decrease server complexity, increase load balance, and optimize scalability and mobility, the answer is yes. Virtualization has brought distributed computing to a new level and provides many key benefits. This white paper looks at four of those benefits and uncovers why more organizations need to consider making a change.
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When it comes to data, it’s all about location. Although more than 80 percent of enterprise data has a geographic dimension—such as stores, customers, and competitors—it’s rarely used in traditional business intelligence (BI) analysis. In order to react faster to market changes and to improve competitive advantage and operation efficiency, businesses should consider adding location intelligence tools to their BI platform.
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To boot or pre-boot, that is the question. There’s no doubt that operating systems (OSs) are complicated given the sheer amount of code that must be flawlessly interfaced and the potential vulnerabilities that can ensue. While full disk encryption (FDE) is one step closer to a more secure OS, encryption without strong authentication isn’t enough. For security-conscious users, pre-boot authentication is the only way to go.
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On top of the many challenges faced by IT managers today comes yet another challenge: ensuring efficient and secure user access to SAP. Because of the unencrypted communication between users’ workstations and the backend servers, the SAP environment—and the confidential data it stores—become vulnerable. With a secure single sign-on solution to SAP, however, you can significantly improve the security of this environment.
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Today’s business environment is more mobile than ever. With more employees traveling—using laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and home computers to conduct business—vulnerabilities increase. Companies are now protecting their digital assets with full disk encryption (FDE). Recent advances in FDE allow businesses to protect data stored on users’ mobile devices, without jeopardizing intellectual property.
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Traditionally, 1U and blade servers have not been attached to high-end fibre channel storage due to the cost of adding those servers to the storage area network (SANs). However, by leveraging the HP StorageWorks EVA iSCSI Connectivity Option, you can solve this problem.
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The storage industry provides an abundance of white papers discussing the ever-changing data management and retention regulations, the need for business continuity, and disaster recovery. The core of these data services is the ability to copy, move, and replicate data—locally and far away. Unfortunately, SANs only reach about 10 km. IT managers need to share, protect, and move data much farther than that. Find out how.
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The enterprise environment continues to evolve and change. Regardless of technology breakthroughs and system designs, storage area networks (SANs) continue to provide IT with severe administrative challenges. But by implementing a cost-effective and robust core-to-core solution, system administrators can reduce the management burdens and provide greater access to network resources.
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Industries involved in outsourcing and collaboration know that accurate data translation is fundamental to a project’s successful completion. Valuable engineering and manufacturing product data must be exchanged quickly and efficiently while protecting corporate assets—but with older technology, this is not always possible. Learn more about a number of integration solutions that can help you reengineer your supply chain.
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Ideally, your service area network (SAN) permits an uninterrupted flow of data all the time. Unfortunately, with changes to the SAN fabric—when a server comes online, or when storage ports are added—the attendant tape backups might cause a serious lapse in the flow of data. However, an interoperable solution can keep registered state change notifications (RSCNs) from making your SAN go haywire.
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As products become more complex and customer expectations continue to rise, service and support become increasingly difficult. So how can service and support managers transcend these problems and use each customer interaction to build customer loyalty and drive service leveraged revenue? By empowering customers with Web 2.0 technology and enabling users to manage their own experiences. Find out how.
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With the growing global epidemic of data theft, tougher regulations are being enforced by government bodies worldwide. As such, organizations need to work harder at proactive security. With the right technology, identifying network vulnerabilities and measuring overall security exposure becomes manageable. By using these eight steps as your guide, you can put an end to network security vulnerabilities once and for all.
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Storage area network (SAN) administrators are under constant pressure to reduce costs, particularly in the area of storage systems. iSCSI technology offers an alternative to fibre channel for implementing SANs enabled by Ethernet at a significantly lower total cost of ownership. We contrast the options for connecting a system to an iSCSI SAN, and describe why a full iSCSI offload host bus adapter (HBA) is the best method.
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The network attached storage (NAS) model, based on network file systems (NFSs), creates a number of issues for high-performance computing clusters (HPCC) systems. NFS is oriented toward access, not performance—which means that it does not scale as needed for growing HPCC systems. It also adds another layer of latency between the storage and the computing systems. In this white paper, we outline a new model for storage.
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Knowledge management (KM) can mean different things to an organization depending upon the nature of the initiative. KM is not a technology or set of methodologies, but a practice or discipline that involves people, processes, and technology. If implemented correctly, a KM initiative can improve the productivity and efficiency of an entire organization. With these ten basic principles, your organization can learn how.
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Today’s support organizations often face the challenge of providing efficient and effective customer service. Without the right tools, it can become an uphill battle. To gain true scale and effectiveness in service and support, many organizations are now turning to knowledge management initiatives like knowledge-centered support (KCS)—a business process that directly addresses the root causes of support inefficiencies.
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Organizations need lower ownership costs for hardware. But that’s not all. They also need a protected infrastructure investment, and applications that perform the way they need them to, when they need them. To meet these demands, enterprise storage area network (SAN) users must deploy a scalable host bus adapter architecture that addresses cost, performance, backward compatibility, and—most importantly—future scalability.
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A critical element of storage area network performance is the selection and deployment of a host bus adapter (HBA) with the right architecture. But high-performance database solutions also need to be complemented by high-performance and scalable input/output connectivity. Choosing the wrong components can result in management complexity—and severely limit an organization’s overall business agility.
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Supplemental product or technical data is typically delivered separately from the information contained within portable document format (PDF) files. This can make it difficult for users to locate the additional content for download. With the CopyFILE plug-in application, however, companies can integrate supplemental product information by using links within a PDF file—thus allowing content to be easily distributed.
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Interconnect performance has become a key factor in application and system performance, and this will increasingly be the case as applications become more complex. Indeed, latency and bandwidth are not the only factors defining interconnect performance. Discover the truth behind common interconnect performance misconceptions, and gain a better understanding of how your interconnect solution will perform.
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Want even more connectivity options for your storage area network (SAN)? Need to boot your blade server up to iSCSI-based storage systems? Itching to offload iSCSI traffic from the host processor and allow your server to support boot from SAN configurations? This paper outlines how dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) can be adapted in several ways to automate and ease the configuration of your servers.
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Registry cleanup is inarguably an integral component of PC maintenance. However, many PC users may be wasting time and effort cleaning their registries more often than necessary, depending on the age of their computers, as well as how often software and other utilities are installed. In order to save time and get the most out of your PC, there are a number of myths about registry cleanup you ought to dispel.
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Bridging the gap between an application’s problem domain and its code can be difficult, even for the best software engineers. Bridging these two diverse worlds—each with its own language—requires a finished application that creates an intersection between the two. By building a domain-specific modeling (DSM) language and generator using MetaEdit+, engineers close the gap and pave the way to better productivity.
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Reducing inventory and satisfying customer demand are high priorities in manufacturing and distribution. Being able to fill orders on time and satisfy every customer is an integral part of order commitment—and a very attainable goal. Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) can help your company become responsive and accurate—and that’s what counts in today’s “demand and supply” environment.
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Is it beneficial to use multiple types of virtualization software together? The answer: yes. Combining complementary virtualization technologies provides a stronger, more robust solution that reduces costs, maximizes return on investment (ROI), and minimizes the number of servers to manage. By consolidating these technologies, organizations can get the most out of the application, hardware, and operating system (OS).
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As the digital era evolves, media content companies are faced with a number of new challenges. One such challenge is that they can no longer specialize in one communication format. The advertising market is now a dynamic and complex forum making it difficult to manage multiple channel revenues. A standard, integrated solution, however, can facilitate the management of advertising revenues while increasing customer satisfaction.
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There was a time when picking out a book meant going to a library and signing one out. Today, readers expect content to be available through a variety of distribution channels—in both print and digital formats. To be successful, publishers must be able to observe the intellectual property rights of authors for each format and channel of distribution they offer. With a digital publishing management solution, it’s possible.
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Just when you thought you had all your security measures figured out, along comes the portable storage device to make you question them all over again. With the popularity of portable consumer products—and their ever-increasing storage space—comes a greater risk of losing sensitive corporate data. To secure corporate data, companies must not only focus on perimeter security, but on internal security weaknesses as well.
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In 2004, there were 1.3 billion credit cards in circulation in the US. With fraud incidents on the rise, credit card companies are at constant risk of losing sensitive cardholder data. At the same time, strict payment card industry (PCI) requirements are forcing companies to put better systems in place to ensure clients are adequately protected. By implementing the right software tools, achieving compliance is possible.
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As a supplier to Wal-Mart, appliance manufacturer Haier America was required to implement a radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging system. To satisfy this requirement and to keep costs to a minimum, Haier needed a solution that would seamlessly integrate with its current enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. That’s why it turned to a custom-designed modification package. But was it enough for Wal-Mart?
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For most companies, e-mail is an integral part of the business workflow and a primary channel for communication. For these reasons, e-mails can be considered legal business documents and should be retained for a predefined period to satisfy government regulations. With an e-mail archiving system, message contents and attachments are stored in a read-only format, ensuring they are archived in their original state.
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Research shows that between 65 and 95 percent of all e-mail is considered spam. On an individual level, spam is an annoyance more than anything else, but on a company-wide basis, spam causes significant problems—and the cost to manage it is sizeable. Spammers are always one step ahead of antispam vendors, so to combat this persistent problem, companies need a single-source product that can eliminate spam for good.
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Storage area networks (SANs) are complex structures that contain an infinite number of configuration possibilities—making the process of configuring the devices to be installed into the SAN a lengthy one. To simplify the process, QLogic’s configuration wizard provides users with some basic tools to guide them through common SAN tasks, enabling them to easily build stable and secure SAN fabrics for their storage solutions.
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The first step to a successful storage area network (SAN) implementation is preplanning. Architecting a SAN not only helps solve issues of storage consolidation, it facilitates day-to-day data center support and maintenance. A SAN investment should save support dollars, not require additional support resources. With a sound implementation strategy, costly upgrades—and many headaches—can be avoided.
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Research shows that the occurrence of multivendor Internet protocol telephony (IPT) environments is on the rise. As such, an increasing number of companies are faced with the challenges of using multiple tools to manage these environments. With a single, specialized IPT management solution, companies gain a unified view across the entire voice infrastructure—which can significantly impact total cost of ownership (TCO).
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Chapter 2 of this 4-part e-book explores the Internet protocol telephony (IPT) life cycle, and discusses how understanding the key phases of this packet-based system can increase implementation success. By harnessing your knowledge about this system's natural rhythms, you will begin to establish key concepts that you can put into action—facilitating the management of the system and reaping its long-term benefits.
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Spam considerably lowers user productivity, as it delivers unwanted, irrelevant, or anonymous e-mail messages. The best way to manage the incidence of spam is to measure it. The Spam Index—a tool for measuring improvement in spam control systems and for comparing spam control performance with competitors—is a method used by businesses worldwide to achieve lower spam levels and improve business performance.
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E-mail is a powerful business tool that most enterprises can’t live without. Unfortunately, along with its capability of accelerating commerce, productivity, and social interactions, there are some drawbacks—such as spam! Companies that rely on e-mail to do business simply can’t afford the negative affects of spam. However, new technology is emerging that helps stop spam and allows users to get on with business.
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In this new era of corporate governance, risk avoidance, and responsibility, organizations are more than ever held accountable if their data is not properly protected. As such, many are finding new ways to address security risks, by developing multiple layers of defense to reduce points of weakness. Deploying data encryption technology is a good place to start—but the key is making the right choice.
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Heightened awareness of vulnerabilities in sensitive stored data has resulted in the increased application of encryption technology. To secure data at rest, a well-defined process for handling the keys used to encrypt data—as well as the keys used to safeguard the data encryption keys—is essential. With the proper key management controls in place, companies can ensure that data is effectively secured and recoverable.
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It s hard to go anywhere these days and not see ads for mobile wireless carriers. But the technology is so confusing and the choices so overwhelming, it can be impossible to know which solution to choose. Before making the wrong choice, it’s best to have a basic understanding of mobile wireless communication—how it is currently being used in the industry, and how it can benefit your organization in the future.
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For manufacturers, improving internal processes and supply chain responsiveness can help maintain profitability. That is why many are tuning into radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. With RFID, the benefits are immediate throughout the supply chain, and organizations that take the time to understand its capabilities and limitations can increase their inventory visibility while streamlining their operations.
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Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has retailers talking. The reason: RFID helps reduce labor and improves the ability to gather data. Retailers can use this data to make positive changes to business processes, which can be tremendously advantageous for them. With careful planning, an RFID system can provide immediate benefits, as well as long-term competitive and total cost of ownership advantages.
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Imagine this scenario: an infected laptop within your company has accessed the network and is spreading malicious code to thousands of other devices. This incident could cripple any business, but with network access control (NAC) products, companies can rest a little easier. NAC’s ability to measure, enforce, and report on an array of security issues has gained it attention amongst security conscious organizations.
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As proprietary network hardware appliances become obsolete, unified network platforms (UNPs) are slowly gaining momentum. UNPs are the new paradigm for networking and security—operating on a single system that can be implemented on off-the-shelf hardware. With a UNP, organizations can design, build, manage, and maintain secure networks, without the limitations and expense of vendor proprietary hardware and software.
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Malicious hacking and illegal access are just a few of the reasons companies lose precious corporate data every year. As the number of network security breaches increase, companies must find ways to protect data beyond the perimeter of their businesses. But how do they build a data-defensible architecture that will protect data on an ever-evolving network? The answer: by first developing an in-depth defense strategy.
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The supply of multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services and service providers has grown exponentially with the demand for Internet protocol (IP) and Ethernet services. But while MPLS enhances packet processing speed and network performance, it lacks in security. As government and industry compliance regulations increase, organizations must invest in tools that can ensure security without affecting network performance.
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In any organization, people remain one of the largest sources of value when it comes to business processes. But providing them with tools that can be easily accessed and used has its challenges. As we move into the era of service-oriented architecture (SOA), portal and collaboration software now delivers the essential people-focused capabilities businesses need, while adding significant value to the organization.
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Today, companies are looking to improve work processes, comply with legislation, and increase productivity—and they’re implementing electronic document management systems (EDMS) to help them effectively manage their information. By deploying EDMS—which are capable of capturing, storing, and retrieving records, files, and folders—these companies are achieving unprecedented levels of control, efficiency, and automation.
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What is compact, lightweight, ergonomic, and power-friendly? A microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based scan engine—an innovative scanning technology that provides outstanding reliability and performance. When it comes to supply chain laser scanning, the advantages MEMS scanners have over traditional lasers are unparalleled. While MEMS is not a new technology, it does provide a new option for bar code scanning.
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One of the first and seemingly simple questions that companies ask when making IT investments is “how much does it cost?” Many often find themselves wondering why—even after a successful implementation—their costs keep going up. When evaluating a mobile workforce automation project, companies should take the time to conduct a thorough total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis to detect hidden costs—and avoid nasty surprises.
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Scanning technology has changed dramatically over the years with new, more powerful, and reliable imaging scan engines now surpassing the laser scan engines of yesterday. Although both laser and imaging technologies continue to improve, there’s a debate on which technology is superior. When researching data capture equipment, you may be asking yourself, “How do I choose the best scanner for my application?” Here’s how.
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In the $1.8 billion market of document management services, only 10 percent is billed by dealers. So how can they increase their share of the managed print services trend? The dealer’s path to advantage lies in its service and supply organization. To make this transition, the dealer needs a tool that gathers knowledge of the client’s fleet and identifies where printing dollars can be saved.
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Carefully tracking components and assemblies throughout the manufacturing process can prevent costly production and sequencing errors, but executing these procedures can be difficult. While bar codes provide accurate, efficient product identification, they are not viable in many common industrial processes. Specialized RFID tags, however, are optimized for use on or around metal, and are an effective and viable alternative.
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Any organization that deploys multiple same-application servers with regularity could benefit from virtual appliances. Virtualization solutions eliminate the need to copy an operating system (OS) and application into each virtual environment, by creating a single, centrally installed master copy instead. It saves time on installation and enables greater levels of efficiency, manageability, flexibility, and resource use.
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Cox Communications, a leading cable provider, needed to find a way to centralize the IT requirements of its customer support team. With over a hundred users, its challenge was to move from single desktop applications to a centralized server which would offer many concurrent instances of the application—and minimize the cost. By deploying a virtualization solution, Cox realized a return on investment (ROI) of 300 percent.
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An important question facing IT professionals today is how best to harness computing power to further improve automated business processes. This is especially critical in business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. While service-oriented architecture (SOA) delivers the benefits of IT integration to business, it needs a programming language—such as Lisp—that can optimize its capabilities and scale in size and complexity.
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The computational complexity of problems faced by programmers today is growing exponentially. With accelerated changes brought on by the Internet, companies need to explore new methods of enabling their programmers to focus on these complex problems. When dealing with complex data, an object caching database system can alleviate the task of programming special code for persistent data while writing applications.
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One person’s freedom to pirate is another person’s loss of royalty revenue. Every day, millions of Internet users are downloading copyrighted materials—music, movies, TV shows, and more. Although this is illegal under most countries’ copyright laws, it doesn’t stop them. What’s worse is they don’t even see themselves as criminals. Piracy isn’t going away, and content owners and governments need to regain control.
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Understanding how a system really works is the first step toward using, improving, automating, or explaining it to others. The basic concept of a system is that it is driven by cause and effect—but there is so much more to understanding its full complexity. The best place to start is by learning how causal loop diagrams (CLDs) are used to model dynamic systems by identifying variables and causal effects.
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Point of sale (POS) software was designed to speed up sales checkout processes. However, it has evolved to include many more features, and is now more commonly referred to as retail management systems (RMS). The benefits of implementing RMS are clear—they can help increase profits, improve marketing strategies, automate manual processes, manage inventory, and—most importantly—make the customer experience more memorable.
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As a business employing IT, you may have encountered situations where the software application you purchased didn’t come with a help file. With no time to write complete documentation yourself and no budget to hire a professional technical writer to do it for you, what do you do? By applying the basic principles of cost-effective documentation, your business can develop impressive documentation quickly—for a minimal cost.
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Thanks to pressures in the telecom equipment manufacturing industry, application-ready platforms (ARPs) in Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) are increasingly indispensable. ARPs must provide standards-based platforms to support diverse sets of applications. The ATCA ARP provides such a platform, but in light of the ATCA specifications that define the basis for the platform, ARP implementations still present some interesting challenges.
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Just behind fire and the wheel in a list of the world’s greatest inventions comes information lifecycle management (ILM). Without a doubt, ILM will revolutionize every facet of the computing landscape. And along the way, it will probably generate more hype than all the high-tech buzzwords of the past five years combined. But does it solve a real problem?
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Novell has made it clear to its NetWare customers that they must begin planning for transition. However, there is no guarantee that its customers will stay the Novell course. Few observers would disagree that many of those transitioning from NetWare will be moving to Microsoft. But operating system platform changes are no picnic—even in the most standard of environments.
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Companies today are managing ever-increasing amounts of data. Traditional solutions have involved increasing server space by adding more hard drives. Strategically, however, this is like building storage rooms in your house, with no thought as to what will be stored where. That’s why you need an intelligent approach to data management, which doesn’t involve “building more rooms” in your systems.
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A new trend is emerging in the world of storage management, and it’s called information lifecycle management (ILM). Just what it is, however, varies significantly from vendor to vendor. Generally, ILM is a strategy for policy-based information management. Its mandate: to provide centralized management of all information assets, aligning storage resources with the value of the data residing in them.
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Information technology (IT) executives are beginning to seriously re-evaluate their highly hyped, service-oriented architectures (SOA) strategies—and consequently, their IT outsourcing, hosting, and enterprise system management strategies. However, creating long-term strategies is complicated by the wide range of available service delivery models. That’s why it’s vital to uncover the important concepts—and decision points—relating to these different delivery models.
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Making sure that your applications run properly over private and public wide area networks (WANs) is particularly challenging for applications that are sensitive to network conditions. The only way to have confidence that a given application will operate with acceptable performance once it is deployed is to test it under expected (and maybe unexpected) production network conditions—prior to deployment.
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