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Our leaders have time and time again emphasized a core aspect of the EMC Federation strategy and functioning model: “(we) offer best-of-breed, integrated, technology while preserving customers’ ability to choose…” In this blog, I reflect upon how this strategy applies … Continue reading The post EMC Customers Can Choose Any Cloud appeared first on Reflections. |
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In my last blog The Evolution of Enablement, I discussed the role of marketing enablement as a hand-in-glove function to sales and technical enablement. Today I want to explore what marketing enablement means to the channel and why is it so important in the partner:vendor relationship.
Let’s say you’re a sales manager. You want to know that you have the facts and information you need to represent your company and its products accurately and effectively to close a deal. Having the most up-to-date information is critical to your success, but this can be increasingly difficult as the continuous barrage of newsletters, press releases, launch material, competitive intelligence chatter and sheer volume of email make it challenging to keep up. Add to that, the shift in mobile and cloud technologies that have ushered in the movement to the 3rd platform, the rise to social media in business, and the shift to the new buyer’s journey as we know it; all of this can leave even the most seasoned sales pro feeling overwhelmed.
Now let’s say you’re not just any sales manager -- you’re a sales manager for a channel partner representing someone else’s brand; even more disconnected from the vendor company you’re representing while also dealing with your own company’s barrage of information. Now multiply it by the number of vendors with which you work closely with. Then what?
Many companies have begun to recognize this issue and have started implementing new programs and teams to help with the flow of information. The relationship between a vendor and its channel partners can be a delicate one. While channel partners are not vendor employees, they are an extension of the vendor’s marketing and sales force and, in most cases, a serious source of revenue. So ensuring partners have information in a timely manner and that they feel part of a vendor’s trusted circle of business partners is paramount.
In a recent blog, What is Marketing Enablement?, the author defines marketing enablement as ‘when the sales team does things to HELP MARKETING to further drive alignment between the two functions.’ And while I agree with this to some degree, I feel it’s limiting marketing enablement to an internal function driven by sales activity to ‘enable’ the marketing team.
In a channel model, marketing enablement is an external function that requires finesse and a deep understanding of a day-in-the-life of a partner. Channel partners must be treated as an extension of your workforce, not just for sales, but as representatives of your company, its brand, messaging, voice, products and solutions, and ultimately the customer experience. Enabling them means providing guidelines, assets, training and funds so they know how to and are able to build awareness, increase demand, and generate leads for you thru both outbound and inbound marketing initiatives.
So remember that feeling of being overwhelmed by the barrage of information? Your partners are feeling it too. When it comes to the channel, helping partners quickly sift through information, providing them easy access to tools and resources, and helping in their marketing planning efforts to ensure successful execution is crucial and must be built into any channel strategy. While a lot of partners have in-house marketing teams, some smaller partners do not. Often times the sales and account manager is doubling as the marketing lead. Ensuring they have and know where to find the tools, information and resources they need to be successful plays a pivotal role in your own company’s success as well. Why? Because your channel represents you and your brand. It’s not enough to just give your partners a canned presentation and the technical data sheets and let them fly and be free and hope they are successful.
In today’s business world, we need to take it a step further. We need to help partners in promotion, research, campaign creation and execution; all of the ‘leg work’ that helps the partner get the lead that turns into that sales meeting. It’s about their representation at the meeting. It’s about making sure partners understand marketing trends and have the right tools to execute against them. Even for the larger partners who do have a marketing team at their disposal, making sure they have the tools they need could really help accelerate their efforts and improve ROI of the funds your company has invested in doing business with them.
When you are working with the channel, marketing enablement isn’t just about internal sales and marketing alignment -- it’s everything a vendor must do to market to, through and with its partners, which will help them sell. It’s about training, access, and execution. Its everything a partner needs to not only align to your company, but to feel supported and feel like you have a vested interest in their success. |
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I’ll definitely be updating my MacBook Air as I’ve noticed that the battery does occasionally seem to drain a little quicker than I’d expect with the lid closed. There are two methods to perform this update either via the ‘Software Update Tool’, which can be found in the Mac App Store or by downloading the update from the Apple support article here. The post MacBook Air (Mid 2013) Battery Drain – Firmware Update appeared first on TechHead and was written by Simon Seagrave. |
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Mike Foley and the VMware vSphere security team have just released the latest update to the vSphere hardening guide which covers vSphere 5.5 Update 1 (U1). This is the latest update since the vSphere 5.5 version of the Hardening guide and contains all the usual great stuff pertaining to securing your vSphere environment, but also includes the following four new updates (along with minor amendments):
As always I recommend that you download, familiarise and apply, where necessary, the security recommendations and best practices outlined in this guide, this will help you sleep at night knowing that your vSphere environment is better secured. Download your copy of the vSphere 5.5 U1 Hardening Guide from VMware’s dedicated page here, where you can also download vSphere Hardening Guides for previous versions of vSphere. Happy securing! The post VMware vSphere 5.5 U1 Hardening Guide Available appeared first on TechHead and was written by Simon Seagrave. |
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Fancy running your own EMC Isilon, VNX, VNXe or ViPR installation in your own lab environment, to try out, trial and/or educate yourself with? If so, you’ve come to the right post! Here I provide the links to virtual instance simulators that are free to download, install, configure and use – plus there are no time restrictions on any of them! There is plenty of learning and fun to be had with trying out and running these EMC storage simulators in your own lab. I will be releasing a series of posts in the coming weeks (I will publish links from this post once completed) that will cover how to install and configure each of these simulators, though don’t let that stop you from jumping in straight away and trying them out. Download links for each of the storage simulators is at the bottom of each of the sections below. What Do EMC Storage Simulators Offer?First off, as mentioned above, these simulators are free to download and use! They allow you to spin up, configure, present and manage storage in your virtualized lab environment. Yes, that means you could, technically, run VMs off of them and use them (apart from the VNXe 3200 simulator – see below) as shared storage in your lab environment.
The only catch is that these downloadable instances of EMC’s Isilon, VNX and ViPR are purely intended to be used in a lab environment only (ie: non-production), and as such don’t come with any “official” EMC support – though check out the EMC Community Forums Network here as you can usually find decent community support on these non-production simulators on the forum. Just to manage expectations, don’t expect full eye-watering performance from these virtualized storage instances and simulators, as this isn’t their intended use. Though for use in a standard lab environment they are definitely capable and a whole bunch of fun to use and try out – with no time limits attached. _____________________________________________________________ |
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EMC has just announced the results of research into the attitudes of consumers around the world towards privacy, particularly in terms of the often conflicting requirements of online convenience and online privacy. The research results were formulated into the Privacy Index: a numerical ranking of countries in terms of the predominant attitudes of consumers in Continue Reading »
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So hands up who protects their personal data? It’s that age-old problem, very few of us consider data protection until it’s too late and we find we have lost data. So let’s consider your options: Don’t do it Do it manually Outsource the problem Let’s assume you do want to protect your data, Continue Reading »
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By John M. Custer, Director, Federal Missions and Programs, EMC The intelligence community (IC) runs on data – from information on cyber threats to details on emerging political unrest. National security is about connecting the dots to ensure the safety of millions of Americans, and the 17 agencies that make up the IC must be integrated in how they collect, store, and analyze this data. Putting fences around information greatly limits its potential, and the IC is making huge strides to break down silos and facilitate better information sharing. By making information easily-sharable, agencies can collaborate more quickly, speeding up the process of making informed decisions. Say, for instance, that one department is storing a video of an individual involved in a crime, while another has a fraudulent passport naming a wanted suspect. By putting together these pieces of the puzzle, analysts can much more easily identify that person and move forward with the investigation. The government recognizes this need for shared information and is tackling the challenge on the IT front via the Enhanced Solutions for the Information Technology Enterprise (E-SITE) initiative. The goal is to upgrade system architectures, project management processes and software development to reach new levels of information-sharing and collaboration. But the E-SITE contract points to a larger shift that’s currently taking place across the IC. Broader and more integrated technology approaches are being pursued under the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE) strategy, which started in 2012 and aims to improve integration, information sharing, and information safeguarding. An overarching IT architecture is emerging that no one could have imagined 10 years ago, and holds incredible promise in terms of both mission effectiveness and cost savings. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers recently said that the intelligence community has made huge strides in this area and that agencies are working much more closely together. He also noted that this integration will continue to be a top priority for both himself and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This transformation has enormous potential for national security, as improved information-sharing means more pieces of the puzzle can connect to identify and thwart security threats. But looking more granularly, the ICITE strategy also allows for heterogeneous storage environments, and can fast-forward an agency’s path to the cloud by opening up the possibility of software-defined and virtualized storage. The Defense Intelligence Agency is already releasing an architecture based on this framework, and EMC looks forward to helping agencies transition to a more open, collaborative environment that promotes information sharing. Author information |
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This year, for the first time, the content of EMCworld is being made available online – not just to EMCworld attendees, but to everyone. From keynotes to sessions to panoramic tours, Virtual EMC World 2014 makes a wealth of insights and information available, including about the themes of trust, security and privacy, just by clicking “Watch Continue Reading »
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In the RESTBucks example, the authors present a useful state diagram that describes the actions a client can perform against the service. Where does such an application state diagram come from? Well, it’s derived from the requirements, of course. Since I like to specify requirements using examples, let’s see how we can derive an application state diagram from BDD-style requirements. Example: RESTBucks state diagramHere are the three scenarios for the Order a Drink story: Scenario: Order a drink Given the RESTBucks service When I create an order for a large, semi milk latte for takeaway Then the order is created When I pay the order using credit card xxx1234 Then I receive a receipt And the order is paid When I wait until the order is ready And I take the order Then the order is completed Scenario: Change an order Given the RESTBucks service When I create an order for a large, semi milk latte for takeaway Then the order is created And the size is large When I change the order to a small size Then the order is created And the size is small Scenario: Cancel an order Given the RESTBucks service When I create an order for a large, semi milk latte for takeaway Then the order is created When I cancel the order Then the order is canceled Let’s look at this in more detail, starting with the happy path scenario. Given the RESTBucks service When I create an order for a large, semi milk latte for takeaway The first line tells me there is a REST service, at some given billboard URL. The second line tells me I can use the Then the order is created This tells me the When I pay the order using credit card xxx1234 This tells me there is a Then I receive a receipt This tells me the response of the And the order is paid This tells me there is a link from the Receipt resource back to the Order resource. It also tells me the Order is now in When I wait until the order is ready This tells me that I can refresh the Order using And I take the order This tells me there is a Then the order is completed This tells me that the Order is now in Analyzing the other two scenarios in similar fashion gives us a state diagram that is very similar to the original in the RESTBucks example. Using BDD techniques for developing RESTful APIsUsing BDD scenarios it’s quite easy to discover the application state diagram. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the From the application state diagram it’s only a small step to the complete resource model. When the resource model is implemented, you can re-use the BDD scenarios to automatically verify that the implementation matches the requirements. So all in all, BDD techniques can help us a lot when developing RESTful APIs. Filed under: REST Tagged: application state, BDD, requirements, resource model, REST, RESTBucks, specification by example, state diagram        
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I've been writing a series of posts on EMC's Adaptivity technology. In my last post I discussed the concept of projecting applications onto different elements of the business value chain (BVC). For example, the diagram below highlights a variety of different applications (e.g. CRM, Financial Reporting, etc) and their underlying mapping to the BVC. The theory of best-fit application placement introduced in the last post is quite nicely described by Sheppard Narkier: While each workload is typically viewed as unique by their owners or creators, our experience has shown that the large class of enterprise workloads exhibit behavioral patterns that can be classified into a small number of consumption types (we have found less than 10). Characterizing these types of demand consumption is critical to consistently managing a complex environment that ensures optimal value in terms of cost, efficiency and the quality of the user experience. In other words, most applications can be placed on the best-fit (and therefore most cost efficient) infrastructure with a pattern-based understanding of the processing needs demanded by an application. The diagram below introduces the BVC Information Cycle. The beauty of the Information Cycle is that it overlays the five elements of the business value chain. If you project any application onto any of the five underlined areas (Marketing & Sales, Service, Internal Operations, Inbound Logistics, Outbound Logistics), that application by default becomes associated with a certain class of processing. Consider, for example, a market-facing application that communicates the brand of the company. The brand can't experience significant downtime. This application would be associated with the Marketing & Sales aspect of a business, and therefore associated with the Market Context Processing information cycle. Being associated with this type of processing means that the application likely adheres to a well-known pattern. Sheppard explains it as follows: Another consideration for platform design is high scalability and availability for mission critical applications, where planned downtime is rare. Applications that exhibit unpredictable spikes in demand are usually characterized as mission critical and are often market facing. These applications are the face of an organization and therefore unreliability profoundly affects the brand. Demand spikes must be handled seamlessly, requiring an operating environment that has an elastic resource pool technical capability. It is therefore a reasonable starting point to assume that any "Marketing & Sales" application should consume supply-side elastic IT resources. This may not be true for every Marketing & Sales application but it is a solid starting point. What are some of the well-known demand-side patterns that are associated with these information cycles? I will take a look at this question in an upcoming post. Steve Twitter: @SteveTodd EMC Fellow
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By Dr. Alon Grubshtein, Principal Data Scientist — EMC IT This is a great time to be a data scientist –a bit like rock stars with all the fans always trying to catch some private time with us. While there’s … Continue reading 
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The market and folks on blog sites are talking about Big Data, internet of things, and how these factors are redefining business and IT. Sometimes it can feel like an academic discussion or a discussion amongst futurists. While there is a significant amount of hype, let me tell you about a real world example of Big Data in action and how this example could be a precursor to widespread adoption of data lakes. I meet with customers regularly and I have been asked the same question from many of them, “How do I store, analyze and reason over large amounts of data?” One customer that asked me this question had a particularly thorny problem. They needed to analyze and reason over a vast amount of data to respond to increasing litigation requests and regulatory pressure. They had been trying for a few years to solve this daunting problem and none of the solutions could be delivered in a straightforward way.
This is only one of many big data use cases that I am seeing my customers ask about. In fact I believe the changing demands of business will make data lakes pervasive in the redefined IT environment. And that is a great thing! Data lakes hold the promise of enabling organizations to solve their most difficult and valuable problems. |
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There is a growing interest by institutions of higher education to take advantage of Big Data to improve student performance and raise teacher/professor effectiveness, while reducing administrative workload. Student performance data is increasingly being captured as part of software-based and online classroom exercises and testing. This data can be augmented with behavioral data captured from sources such as social media, student-professor meeting notes, blogs, student surveys, and so forth. There is also a wealth of public data on data.gov, as well as many open data initiatives at institutions of higher learning across the country. Higher educational institutions can benchmark their student, professor and curriculum performance against like universities, yielding yet new insight into potential for improvement. Higher Education AnalyticsHigher education institutions have numerous student engagement points that can benefit from Big Data—from initial profiling all the way through to alumni giving. (See Figure 1).  Figure 1: Student Engagement Lifecycle Let’s review a sample of Big Data-powered applications for higher education institution:
 Figure 2: Student Performance Effectiveness
 Figure 3: Student Cohorts Analysis
 Figure 4: Teacher Effectiveness Analysis
− Big Data In Traditional Retail – Part I Leveraging Higher Education Open Source DataOne of the beauties of doing analysis in the higher education space is the bevy of data that universities and state governments capture and share about university performance. Let’s use Texas as an example, as they provide not only the raw data, but also some rudimentary analytics to interested parties. Let’s start with Texas Public Education Information Resources, which provides a portal where one can select the types and amount of data you want to pull into your analysis.  Figure 5: TPIER Portal Here’s a sample report titled “Higher Education Graduation – Statewide by Degree Level, Gender and Ethnicity.” This report looks at number of graduates by degree, cut by key demographics (see Figure 6). Note: selecting the link actually runs Crystal Report (a Business Intelligence tool) to generate the full report that includes the graphic in Figure 6.  Figure 6: Sample TPIER Report The data from this report can be integrated with your data to create benchmarks against which you can compare your own performance and identify potential areas of operational and educational performance. Below is another example of publicly available data from the University of New Mexico Provost’s Analytics Dashboard. The analytics are part of the University of New Mexico’s UNM 2020 initiative. As an example, this report compares the 8-, 6- and 4-year graduation rates of a select group of universities.  Figure 7: University of New Mexico Provost Dashboard SummaryThere are a multitude of opportunities for universities and colleges to make use of Big Data to improve student and professor satisfaction and performance. And although there is competition among universities in recruiting students, all can benefit from sharing data, analytics, and best practices in areas such as student performance effectiveness, student retention, teacher retention, and more. In a world where education holds the greatest potential to drive quality-of-life improvements, there are countless opportunities for educational institutions to collaborate and raise the fortunes of students, teachers, and society as a whole. |
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In my recent blog posts, I’ve explored various components of enterprise IT transformation—from drivers, barriers, and process retooling to evolving personnel skill requirements, evaluating cloud service models, and allocating workloads. But one component that is often ignored can mean the difference between success or failure—executive governance. I’m finding that it’s one of the biggest internal stumbling blocks for companies that are about to embark on an IT transformation journey. I’ll give you an example. We have a customer who has committed to spending $100M for a massive transformation of its IT capabilities. But things haven’t been going well. And when I spoke to the CIO, it became clear to me that the organization’s “shared” vision was not a shared vision. It was a bunch of individual visions of what the end state should look like. There was no overarching executive governance model to bring IT and business constituencies together. There was no common framework that defined the end state, key stakeholders, executive sponsors, and procedures that would be followed on a recurring basis—weekly, biweekly, monthly—to ensure everything stayed on track.
What I see is that the customer’s organization doesn’t put the right level of oversight and executive governance into the program at the start. And then the vendor—us in this case—is afraid to raise its hand. As one CIO told me, “Your team should’ve screamed louder.” And, when you think about it, shouldn’t advocating for an executive governance model be part of any company’s go-to-market strategy? But often it isn’t. Because that means challenging the customer. It means saying, “Look, you may have an IT project management process in place that has checks and balances. But this is not a project. This is a program that spans multiple domains in business and IT. And that involves bringing together business and senior IT stakeholders whose paths rarely cross. It’s a completely different type of organizational governance structure than you’ve been using. It’s not project based.” And because, bottom line, it’s going to increase the price of the deal, many customers will balk. They will not be willing to allocate the extra funding until they don’t do it and experience the pain. And then they realize there is no shared vision; there is no executive-level agreement between senior IT leaders; and there is no meeting of the minds between IT and business. So, up front, you need to come to the table and say you won’t be successful unless you have an executive governance model in place. You need to be evangelists. Provide examples of what executive governance looks like, who key stakeholders would be, how to drive consensus, and how to put an executive steering committee in place. Here’s how to determine holistically the actual people that need to sit on it—both customer and vendor. Here’s how we’ll drive consensus and decision-making and keep the program on track. And here’s the additional expense to build this out, which is trivial compared to the overall cost of these programs—and what it will cost if you don’t do it. You may have a set of project managers handling all the individual work streams.But you need an overarching senior person who’s the program manager and who reports to a governance committee or executive board. And this is especially true when IT transformation includes building out cloud infrastructure, allocating workloads, and integrating application modernization or predictive analytics. Because then you’re starting to bring in the application teams, which means you’re starting to bring the business into the conversation. And this is probably completely new territory for them. We’ve seen time and again substantial investments made in transformative—and sometimes disruptive—technologies. More recently, companies have accepted that real transformation must also attack the cultural and behavioral aspects of the operation: the organizational structure and process layer. To do this takes time and investment in training and retooling people. But we are beginning to realize that without the proper governance model in place before investing in technology, training, and process redesign, transformation efforts are likely to fail. Executive governance… don’t try IT transformation without it. For more technology and business insight from EMC thought leaders, visit the EMCVoice page on Forbes.com. |
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I recently participated in a Predictive IT panel discussion at EMC World. Our panel was moderated by Bill Schmarzo (@schmarzo), part of EMC’s Big Data consulting practice. The other panelists were:
I thought this was a good mix of people with very different perspectives around this topic: Bill jumped right in, explaining to the audience that formulating questions is really the eye opening part of moving from BI to Data Science. He asked the panel their advice on what skills and training are needed and how to best approach a Data Science role. Matt was the first to answer, explaining that BI in an IT organization is all about capacity management. He said gathering all the data needed is a time-consuming, frustrating task and the data set only helps answer one question. He contrasted that with his experience with data scientists on a recent IT project. He said the data scientists worked with the operations people, opening their eyes to new ways to work with the data and pull additional value from it. His advice for preparing for a data scientist role: I completely agree with Matt’s point, especially since I’m going through a similar process right now. But I feel strongly that there’s a middle step between a BI person and a data scientist: a consultant. Once the consultant showed the path and proved the concept we could hire a data scientist…and bring in potential data scientists to be trained. Again, you bridge the gap between BI and data scientist with a consultant. Kirshnakumar “KK” Narayanan noted that although BIs are not data scientists, they have the basic capabilities to become one. KK said it’s important for BIs to get the training, especially in data visualization, to become data scientists because there is so much power and business insight driven by data science. He also identified a partnership critical to success: That led us to differentiating the roles on a data science team since I think that BI people too often thought of as data scientists.
But KK and I both agree that thinking an all-BI team is going to become data scientists is unrealistic and will lead to struggles. David Dietrich had some interesting insights into how to differentiate BIs from data scientists what kinds of qualities a data scientist should have. He also thinks getting BI people to change their thinking is to change the time horizon of how they think. David goes on to identify five main areas of data scientist capabilities.
He wrapped up by reinforcing one of my points: training was created for people aspiring to become data scientists but we also need to focus on training business leaders to have a data science understanding and perspective so they know the questions to ask to get their staff to try new things. Be sure to check out David’s blog from our panel discussion with 2 main suggestions for those looking to move toward Data Science. Just to summarize, many people in BI roles today can make the move to Data Science, as Data Science is a team sport. As I’ve said before, the Data Scientist is the hardest role to fill and requires additional training. |
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The technology industry has soared in the last three years, and InFocus has brought its enterprise IT audience along for the amazing ride each step of the way Since the blog’s launch back on July 1, 2011, readers have visited InFocus regularly to stay on top of the latest technology trends and major transformational advancements impacting their business and decision making every day. They come to delve into expert opinions from EMC Global Services bloggers on solutions, insight, and tips they need to stay one step ahead in the ever-changing world of IT. Over the last three years, InFocus has grown to become one of EMC’s premiere and most popular externally-facing blog because of you – our readers. We’ve hit a number of milestones at our 3-year anniversary mark, including over half-a-million page views, more than 900 posts and over 500 comments — not to mention an average 66% year-over-year growth rate. And the best is yet to come. As EMC and the Federation push innovation for enterprise customers every day, we can continue to look to InFocus as a reflection of that mission. We can continue to redefine and transform. In celebration of the blog’s third anniversary, let’s take a moment to look at the most read blog posts from each of the last three years: 2011 Top Blogs#1. Understanding the Role of Hadoop In Your BI Environment - Bill Schmarzo
#2. Security Risks of Mobility Computing - Richard Rees
#3. Five Mistakes of a Rookie Data Scientist - Frank Coleman
2012 Top Blogs#1: The Big Data Storymap – Bill Schmarzo
#2: Virtualization vs. Private Cloud – Choong Keng Leong
#3: Big Data and NoSQL: The Problem with Relational Databases – April Reeve
2013-2014 Top Blogs#1. Understanding Type I and Type II Errors – Bill Schmarzo
#2. What it takes to be a Great Consultant… The Top 10 List – Laddie Suk
#3. What is Active/Active, and How Can it Improve Business Continuity? – John Linse
The InFocus blog works because it’s a collaborative engine. We strive to continue to increase dialogue and give you, our readers, the type of content you require to help your businesses and IT environments run smoothly. We want to continue to redefine our company, re-energize our campaigns and rethink our approach to the world. Thank you for your continuous feedback and suggestions and please keep the comments rolling in! |
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Fancy running your own EMC Isilon, VNX, VNXe or ViPR installation in your own lab environment, to try out, trial and/or educate yourself with? If so, you’ve come to the right post! Here I provide the links to virtual instance simulators that are free to download, install, configure and use – plus there are no time restrictions on any of them! There is plenty of learning and fun to be had with trying out and running these EMC storage simulators in your own lab. I will be releasing a series of posts in the coming weeks (I will publish links from this post once completed) that will cover how to install and configure each of these simulators, though don’t let that stop you from jumping in straight away and trying them out. Download links for each of the storage simulators is at the bottom of each of the sections below. What Do EMC Storage Simulators Offer?First off, as mentioned above, these simulators are free to download and use! They allow you to spin up, configure, present and manage storage in your virtualized lab environment. Yes, that means you could, technically, run VMs off of them and use them (apart from the VNXe 3200 simulator – see below) as shared storage in your lab environment.
The only catch is that these downloadable instances of EMC’s Isilon, VNX and ViPR are purely intended to be used in a lab environment only (ie: non-production), and as such don’t come with any “official” EMC support – though check out the EMC Community Forums Network here as you can usually find decent community support on these non-production simulators on the forum. Just to manage expectations, don’t expect full eye-watering performance from these virtualized storage instances and simulators, as this isn’t their intended use. Though for use in a standard lab environment they are definitely capable and a whole bunch of fun to use and try out – with no time limits attached. _____________________________________________________________ |
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Business expectations for data protection have evolved more rapidly than IT can respond. Initially, CIOs sought to lower operational and capital cost and risk by covering the protection continuum (from availability to archive). Now, CIOs need protection to help accelerate … Continue reading The post Demanding More from Data Protection appeared first on Reflections. |
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Happy July 4th to my American brothers and sisters! Had a great Canada Day (July 1st) earlier this week… Saw some traffic and inbound customer requests around VVOLs earlier this week – and I wanted to open up info a...
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Here’s an important firmware update (SMC 2.0) for all of you MacBook Air (Mid 2013 model) users out there. Apple have just released an SMC firmware update (2.0) for all mid 2013 MacBook Air models which addresses an issue where your MacBook Air can use an excessive amount of battery when the lid of your Air is closed.
The VMware vSphere Hardening Guide is something you should always be familiar with and keep stashed away in your vArmory of useful things. This MS Excel based document/guide contains valuable information and a checklist of the settings and best practices that you should be applying to your vSphere infrastructure to ensure that it is secure against the risk of common exploits, etc.
![EMC VNX VSA Download[9]](http://techhead.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/EMC-VNX-VSA-Download9.jpg "EMC VNX VSA Download[9]")
Enter the 
This seems to be a missing ingredient for many large-scale programs. And I think our experience is reflective of a broader issue. If it’s so important, why is executive governance often ignored until there’s a problem? And an expensive problem because IT transformation is expensive.
Tempus Fugit – or “Time Flies” – and now is the time to look at disrupting mobile bot nets and mobile threat modeling rather than traditional computing threat modeling. Check out the Top 10 risks for mobile security here.
While Frank sits on the cutting edge of using Big Data, he appreciates and calls out his past mistakes in data analysis. Avoid these common blunders and learn how “from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!”
April, also known as @Datagrrl on Twitter, has 25 years’ experience as an enterprise architect and program manager. In fact, she was working in the industry before relational databases were commonly used. Here she talks about the Not Only SQL (NoSQL) movement and why relational databases are not the magic elixir to all problems.
Learn how your company can perform maintenance on applications without disrupting service for users with active/active applications. The game is changing drastically for backup and data protection, and it’s imperative to survey the landscape to understand your best options to move forward in today’s risk-filled and pararmount uptime world we live in.
