Recent Articles
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ADCs at the Center of the Cloud Computing Universe
Most solution providers are familiar with the role application delivery controllers (ADCs), also known as load balancers, play within the data center. As the ADC analyzes application traffic it flows that traffic to the appropriate server. As important a function as that is within the data center, the rise of cloud computing is starting to…
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SMB Storage Gets a Whole Lot Smarter
The trouble with storage is that it’s difficult to manage, so very few organizations do it well. It’s kind of like the digital equivalent of cutting the hedges; many IT staffs don’t do it particularly well because they’re secretly hoping that somebody else will just show up and do it for them. Unfortunately, most small-to-medium…
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Time for Solution Providers to Help Reinvent Enterprise IT
Most solution providers today still think in terms of classes of products. But it’s become increasingly clear that many of those products are starting to converge. Customers are obviously starting to think more holistically about IT. Instead of having isolated conversations about servers, storage and network, the arrival of next-generation systems such as the Cisco…
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Reinventing Cloud Storage with a Little Help from the Channel
There’s obviously a lot of interest in cloud storage these days, but actual usage of cloud storage has not been as popular as most solution providers in the channel might like. The reason for this is that most customers are not very disciplined about backup and recovery as a process, In addition, many customers can’t…
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Unified Storage Drives New Enterprise Opportunities
There’s a tendency to think of the enterprise as one massive entity. In reality, an enterprise is much like the average city, which is usually made up a series of neighborhoods that share access to common services. Similarly, most enterprise IT organizations are an amalgamation of divisional systems that ideally should depend on a common…
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MSPs Need to Focus More on Providing Strategic Value
For many managed service providers (MSPs) the difference between winning and losing new business often comes down to whether they can convince customers that they can provide a higher level of service than the internal IT department. The challenge, of course, has been actually proving that on a regular basis. With the release of version…