Too many times I have seen customers fully thinking that they have their Disaster Recovery (DR) taken care of due to the fact that they have successfully been backing up their environment and have it on tape at the vaulting company. If you are one of these people raise your hand… I’ll pause for a second while you ponder your response wondering why I just made that statement. I’ll ask a few other questions now: Do you have a disaster recovery plan? Have you tested your disaster recovery plan? Have you tested a server recovery? Where are you going to perform DR? Who is going to be available to perform the DR? What level of expertise is going to be required to get things rolling again? What kind of hardware...
A Good Night’s Sleep with a solid Disaster Recovery plan
thinkASG’s eX5 Announcement Event Redefines eXcitement
Wow! That is the word that comes to mind from our announcement event. From Intel's newest saleable Nehalem EX processors to IBM's incorporation of these processors into fully redesigned and MASSIVELY scaleable SystemX servers. You want a Terabyte of memory for those virtual servers? No problem. You want a shared memory pool for two servers? No problem. Want to scale, start off with a 2S system and take it to 4S as your environment grows? No problem. These are just some of the new and exciting developments of IBM's Intel based SystemX servers. Call me and I'll find the right solution to solve your problems. So, if the new technologies from Intel and IBM weren't enough, we followed that up with an afternoon of racing at K1 Speed. 12 laps of practice, followed by...
Tivoli Table Topics Event – March 10, 2010
On a brisk and windy day in Southern California, several customers took the time to attend our Tivoli Table Topics (T3) event at the Irvine office. A quick poll of the participants showed that our agenda seemed to well match what customers wanted to hear. Topics included: TSM v6.1 News - Modernization and Upgrade Steps Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack Key Lifecycle Manager – Encryption Dedupe technologies General Support and maintenance issues Dave Howard, thinkASG’s Storage Architect, started the day with a good presentation on one of the latest Tivoli software offerings, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager. As IBM and other vendors have expended much R&D on FlashCopy, we find that fewer than 50% of customers take advantage of the technology. Customers cite difficulties with...
IBM’s eX5 – x86 redefined
A timeline of continued xSeries innovation, investment and differentiation: In 2001 IBM introduced their first generation in the Enterprise X-Architecture (EXA) systems. The x440 was the first scalable 16 Socket x 86 platform available in a form factor smaller than Unisys’ entire rack. Its small form factor was not its only draw, there was the fault-tolerant memory and the “pay-as-you-grow” option to expand past the initial investment (and capabilities) of a single system. In 2003 the x445 was announced as IBM’s successor to their first generation EXA system. The x445 allowed for increased performance and unparalleled expansion. Like the previous generation the systems was able to scale past a single node, with the new x445 being able to scale to up to 32 Intel Xeon processors...
Intel eX5 Announcement
Look out folks, another big announcement just took place. On the heels of POWER7 comes Intel's eX5. eX5 is the newest breakthrough in x86 innovation and brings with it the biggest launch in the history of System x. Yes, that's right, this is MORE history in the making! eX5 takes x86 systems to an entirely new level, enabling clients to tackle their toughest challenges. Mark McCardle, from Intel and Phil Drachman from IBM System x teamed up to bring the eX5 announcement to thinkASG's office on March 2, 2010, the same day that Intel made their announcement public. Mark briefed thinkASG's Human Drive Sales and Technical team on all the amazing technical capabilities that comes with the eX5 architecture. Thankfully, Intel's public announcement releases us from our NDA gag order and unl...
