I am often asked why should a client work with a valued partner vs going "direct" - good question. The short answer is that the Partner has a vested interest in the customer for literally decades. Direct (insert large HW or SW company here) is only motivated by results that quarter - and then they are done. Pricing, Service and Support are always going to be more favorable when working with a Partner........yep - that's right - Always. So even with the partner advantage on price, service and support, do you want to work with people that invest in your company for years and years, or a direct relationship driving revenue for the quarter, and then "new faces"? A Partner approaches customers with the intention of working with that customer for decades - and as such, provides the customer wit...

IBM online back-up solution, called Managed Back-up cloud.  Could be your answer to your offsite data back-up requirements.  Incredibly low price for a quality solution.  Your feedback is welcome.  Do you use an online back-up solution now?  Need one?  Leave a comment on the relevance of this technology to your business. Managed Back-up Cloud Video

DB2 is proven to reduce costs and improve performance over Oracle.   Check out the Break Free with IBM DB2 video.

Perhaps it was the lineup of speakers, the passion for storage, or maybe the opportunity to play golf and get out of the office before the big Memorial Day Weekend. Either way, the day was packed with customers, speakers, and seasoned architects to continue the ongoing discussion of SAN vs NAS. David Browning, thinkASG’s CEO, kicked off the event with introductions, review of the days agenda, and the instructions on how to use the Plain and Peanut M&M’s to cast the vote for SAN or NAS. During the morning session the participants were encouraged to drop an M&M for every time something tipped the scale of either technology. The goal was to determine which break out session would best meet the participants to storage requirements. I think I saw more M&M’s eaten than dropp...

When advising my clients as to why they should upgrade to P7, the following aways applies as immediate benefits to the customer: 1. P7 delivers better performance and depending if you're replacing P5 or P6 you see between 3:1 and 4:1 increase 2. P7 will allow you to do more with less processors therefore cutting your software lics cost. In some cases, the savings of software lics will pay for the hardware 3. P7 uses less energy consumption and takes up less space 4. P7 will lower your maintenance cost. In some cases the cost of maintenance on older boxes can pay for new hardware and ROI is less then 3 years. I hope this helps.

thinkASG, IBM and Bramasol/SAP joined forces and gathered their valued clients and prospects for a fun evening of hockey at the Staples Center. After all, everybody enjoys the inter-county rivalry of the Anaheim Ducks vs the Los Angeles Kings! We met at the VIP entrance to be escorted by the Kings Ice Girls and straight to the arena floor.  The, straight out to Center Ice for a perspective few but the athletes get to enjoy - where we took a picture of our winning team!  We marched back inside to find the Ducks playing a little soccer/volleyball as warm-up in the hallways of the Staples Center...it was all our crew could do not to stop for a George Parros autograph!  Our group broke into  two groups representing those interested in IBM/Intel EX5 offerings and those interested in S...

More and more customers that we talk to are considering cloud computing  and asking for our assistance with the design and infrastructure build out.   VMware vSphere 4 is the first and only OS Cloud Computing platform. VMware is working aggressively to encourage the world to embrace cloud computing by building critical infrastructure resources into ESX (the base technology of vSphere).   vSphere 4 enhances the infrastructure capabilities of VI3 to enable  customers to implement internal clouds with security, high availability, and fault tolerance.  Customers are building internal clouds with plans to enhance their environments with vSphere for expanding their infrastructure to incorporate utility based computing - allowing internal and external clouds to securely federate b...

"Protect accidental or intential release of backup/recovery tape data with data encryption used in IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager." ...The newspaper headline read, “U.S. National Corporation Freely Releases Customer Information on the Internet.”  The article begins, “U.S. National Corporation earlier today provided public access to confidential customer information including names, addresses, social security numbers, and credit card numbers.  The customer information was apparently routed internally to personnel not authorized for viewing.  In accordance with ‘full disclosure reporting,’ USNC has posted the information in a file on their website and made it available for download and viewing.” Further down in article, the CEO is quoted as saying, “…when we discov...

What is it?  You probably have heard all the advertising and banting around of the term, but what value is it to you?  Why should you care?  Well, for one, cloud computing is not an "epiphany".  It is something the industry has been trying to deliver in a cost effective way for years. It is this - delivering everything you need as an end user (infrastructure, platform and software) as a web service.  That is  it in a nutshell. But here's the tricky part - how to know what you need when you need it?  There is  the wide open field that companies are racing to fill. The "cloud" in this case, is the Internet as we know it.  The users are you and me, and we are delivered the services we need over the "cloud" on a per use fee basis, or a subscription.  We aren't required to inv...

thinkASG's Green IT - Earthday 2009 Event was a great success.  The Presentations by thinkASG on the merits of IBM's x3650 M2, which utilize the Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) Series Processors, along with Cisco's presentation on Unified Fabric, demonstrated to our attendees the ability to run cutting edge technology solutions while simultaneously making great strides towards achieving Green objectives in their datacenter.  Key areas of the presentation revolved around the Dynamic Infrastructure : Cost Reduction: • Containing Operational Costs • Reducing Complexity • Unparalleled Productivity Gains via Virtualization and Optimization Service Improvement: • Providing High Availability across the Infrastructure • Exceeding End User Expectations (both Internal Business U...