- Multi-factor authentication. Your server should authenticate every user for their username, password and the company-specific domain customers are logging into.

- Protection against cross-site request forgery and cross-site scripting. Your server should scramble passwords, so that if a hacker opens your password database, the passwords would be indecipherable.

- Next generation firewalls that focus on Layer 7.

- Good encryption. Web browser and desktop access should be encrypted over SSL to protect from sniffers. Data at rest should also be encrypted.

- Segregation of customer data by accompanying every request with tamper-proof user identity credentials, even for offline sessions.

- Proactive security measures. The system should detect and log unsuccessful login attempts for monitoring by the administrator. The cloud provider should be proactive about monitoring network activity, retaining all log files and analyzing them in real-time.

• ASG finished the year just shy of 70% year-over-year  growth—a new record
• In addition, ASG overachieved every quarter in Fiscal Year 2011—also a record
• ASG became HDS’s #1 Commercial Partner
• In 2011, ASG continued to maintain more technical certifications than any other partner

We have over half of our sales team actively engaged with HDS solutions for our clients, which is a testament to their innovative data storage solutions. We’re looking forward to an active 2012 and growing this relationship even further!

So the question then becomes, how do you manage growing business and data storage requirements amidst the complexity of multi-vendor, multi-platform infrastructures with limited staff or expertise? Well, you might try the IT Operations Analyzer software from Hitachi Data Systems.  For comprehensive performance and availability monitoring across heterogeneous servers, network devices and storage systems, the IT Operations Analyzer provides fully featured monitoring tools, specifically developed for medium businesses (up to 750 servers, switch or storage devices).

Here are six benefits of the IT Operations Analyzer:

1. Ensures system uptime; if network breakdown occurs due to device failure, the IT Operations Analyzer can reduce the mean time to diagnose by up to 90 percent
2. Keeps pace with IT environment growth without sacrificing performance or simplicity
3. Delivers a complete view of the IT infrastructure in a single console
4. Accelerates IT efficiency with faster and easier problem identification
5. Reduces costs associated with unscheduled downtime and boosts customer service levels
6. Allows the IT generalist to deploy and manage easily, without specialized expertise

These benefits deliver a number of cost-related savings that result from streamlined IT operations, improved custom service, and improved efficiency. To see additional features and benefits, you can check out Hitachi’s IT Operations Analyzer page on their site. There’s a 30 day free trial available so you can test drive it yourself.

If you’ve tried this solution, drop a comment below. We’d love to hear your thoughts and what benefits you realized.

IT departments facing the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) reality are learning quickly that they can’t test every type of mobile device to determine if it’s up to par in terms of their organizations’ performance and security standards.

And unfortunately, virtualization technology, in this case VDI, doesn’t always translate well into mobile environments. The applications are generally not optimized for touch interfaces, so the user experience can be less than ideal. Also, not all mobile devices support the same VDI clients, so administrators have to manage multiple client-based access apps on the endpoints.

A critical component of a BYOD—or any mobile device reference architecture—is Mobile Device Management (MDM). MDM offers a view of devices on the network in terms of attributes, capabilities, and constraints. MDM allows IT departments to monitor how the devices that employees “bring” to work actually function in the enterprise environment.

With MDM solutions, administrators can address the diverse set of endpoints simply by sending emails, text messages, or URLs to users. These users can click the URLs and automatically get their devices configured for access; they don’t need to worry about downloading the right applications, entering the right settings, or encountering any setup issues.

However, some applications just don’t work well in a smartphone/VDI-only type environment—like office productivity suites, for example. In these cases, administrators must use MDM to push out and configure specific mobile applications functioning in the users’ environments. This process uses the same push methods described above and requires no user interaction. In fact, it’s sometimes called the ‘zero touch’ method because users don’t need to know anything about their environments— they simply click on the links their administrator sends them, and then type their usernames and passwords to get their devices configured.

Ultimately, IT departments are using VDI to handle application security and user context, while using MDM to manage device provisioning and user settings. It will be interesting to observe and help shape this balance as BYOD and mobile productivity continue to ramp up.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Fortunately, our technology partner, Hitachi Data Systems, works with us to provide cloud computing services for managing unstructured data that can help address this exponential increase in content. Hitachi’s solution enables organizations to move legacy or lower-value file data to cloud-based storage located within their organization’s firewall and only pay for the storage that they consume, when they consume it. We’ve seen it first-hand how this solution can help manage the explosive growth of data and lower data storage costs.

Here are 7 things to consider when looking for a cloud-based data storage solution:

1. Storage Sprawl – Too much to store also means too much to back up and manage. Neither cloud service providers nor enterprises with remote or branch offices can afford to be weighed down with a glut of storage, backup, content control and multifaceted application demands. Make sure your provider understands this and has the wherewithal to manage it appropriately.

2. Unstructured Data – Data types such as rich media, PAC images, legal documents, presentations and web pages are among the countless content types that impact the data center’s ability to maintain control over this unstructured data.

3. Scalability – For distributed IT environments, one of the challenges with scalability is being able to manage the complexities of various storage settings without sacrificing cost efficiency, data agility, performance or security. Organizations are grappling with the need to manage active archives, backup reduction, cloud deployments and other mission-critical facilities. And all this requires flexible scalability.

4. Archiving and Compliance – Today’s enterprise needs to archive critical data without sacrificing availability or rapid retrieval of data, and ensure file integrity and access along with authentication and retention enforcement.

5. Tape-based Backup and Data Durability – Cloud and remote operations demand capabilities beyond what tape backup can provide, including dynamic levels of data protection, constant integrity checking, RAID, data placement, search functionality and fast access.

6. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – Data at distributed IT environments requires but does not always get the same levels of data protection and recovery as data residing on core infrastructure. Challenges with a distributed work model can hinder business continuity and disaster recovery.

7. Data Reduction – Data de-duplication and compression are 2 reduction methods that control data size by eliminating unnecessary copies and shrinking the amount of storage used for a given piece of content, respectively.

There’s a lot to consider when contemplating a cloud-based data storage solution, and companies should start thinking about them. At the current rate of data growth, the risk of drowning is real—but so are the rewards of action. In fact, we’ve seen this cloud computing service lower backup costs by up to 65 percent and tier-one storage by 30 percent, all while using current applications and processes.

How are you taking advantage of cloud computing solutions for managing data storage? We’d love to hear, so drop a comment below. You can also check out some resources we put together to help companies select the right solution.

The UCS Manager provides embedded, unified management of a data centers software and hardware components. It can control any number of chassis and can help manage the resources for thousands of virtual machines, making this a data center management workhorse. What does this mean for a data center? Here are four benefits:

1. Increased agility – with support for data center automation, it can improve agility and scalability without the inherent risk. It has service templates and profiles built in for improved policy management.
2. Increased efficiency – accelerate deployment and provisioning while managing your applications with greater ease. This will undoubtedly help reduce management and admin costs, which are traditionally the largest budget busters in most organizations.
3. Increased flexibility – manage your workloads on physical as well as virtual servers, helping to promote server consolidation and performance regardless of the operating environment.
4. Increased visibility and control – with an open XML API, you can more easily integrate UCS Manager with other IT systems currently in place.

One of the best reasons to explore the UCS Manager is that it’s a great way to move your data center to a private cloud computing solution without risk. It’s an integral part of NetApp’s FlexPod data center solution, which we’ve blogged about a couple of times:

Move your Data Center to the Cloud without Unnecessary Risk

6 Benefits of VMware vSphere Built on Netapp’s FlexPod Infrastructure Solution

We’d love to hear how you’re integrating new technologies into your data center, so drop a comment below. Are you exploring cloud computing solutions? If so, a private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid?

Here are some highlights from NetApp’s announcement:

>> Offering price and scale that’s sized for business application workloads with 500 to 1000 users, the entry-level FlexPod solution allows customers to invest only in the infrastructure they require and allow for simple and rapid scaling to meet growing demands as their business needs change.

>> Customers gain investment protection with the new entry-level FlexPod solution, which easily scales to larger enterprises by simply adding incremental capacity as their needs grow for larger application workloads.

>> The entry-level FlexPod for the first time combines the NetApp® entry-level FAS2240 and the Cisco UCS™ C-Series Cisco Nexus 5000® Switches, Cisco® Nexus 2232 Fabric Extender, and Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects.

>> Similar to other FlexPod pre-validated solutions, this entry level FlexPod provides greater flexibility and customer choice, supporting multiple hypervisors and business applications to help accelerate deployment of private clouds.

>> Since Cisco and NetApp first announced FlexPod in November 2010, it has grown to become an extremely popular converged infrastructure platform. FlexPod is available worldwide through more than 500 FlexPod partners and more than 850 customers use FlexPod for their data center infrastructure – representing more than 400% growth in customer adoption in less than a year.

We’re impressed with what we’ve seen from FlexPod thus far and have blogged about it several times. Our most recent blog on FlexPod – 6 Benefits of VMware vSphere Built on NetApp’s FlexPod Infrastructure Solution – highlights some of the things we feel make FlexPod a fantastic cloud computing solution.

> 3x increased administrator productivity with HP Smart Update

> 6x performance increase for demanding workloads

> Delivers 70% more compute per watt

> 66% faster problem resolution with industry’s first comprehensive, cloud-based management and support portal

Two other intriguing technologies built into the Gen8 could also be of great interest to data centers:

> Smart Socket – which HP claims will eliminate bent pins, the leading cause of motherboard failures
> Smart Drive – which is the addition of a “Do Not Remove” LED which should help reduce (if not eliminate) data loss as a result of removing the wrong drive

Mark Potter, SVP and GM for industry standard servers and software, has recently said:

In the cloud computing era, the current problems faced by data center administrators only get worse. Over the next 60 seconds, for example, more than 200-million searches will be conducted on the Internet, and in two years’ time, the amount of data we’re currently storing will quadruple. These are the kinds of issues that are driving the sale of more than 7,000 new servers a day – and this just doesn’t scale anymore.

With this new architecture we can deliver a five-month ROI to customers. And here we are not even considering the next generation of processors which, we believe, are just around the corner. So this ROI timeframe will get dramatically better as we move forward.

HP seems to be leading the way here in introducing technology designed to address the surge of virtualization and cloud computing solutions. Data creation – and the subsequent need to store and manage that data – is growing at an alarming speed. It’ll be interesting to see additional data center technology introductions in the months ahead to see how they address ‘Big Data.’

Any predictions?

At ASG, we believe that network convergence, thanks in part to high-density 10Gb Ethernet, will become the next data center standard, thanks in part to a number of benefits:

1.  Cost savings – Much like with virtual servers that share resources, network convergence with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) eliminates the need for much of the cabling and the complexity inherent in disparate networks. Cards and cables for connecting storage to server to IP are consolidated thanks in part to converged network adapters and multi-protocol switches. This can add up to a lot of savings, with some estimates between 50 and 60 percent, and possibly more if you factor in future equipment upgrades.

2.  Efficiency improvements – With less equipment and cabling to connect and maintain, managing the network becomes less time intensive and provisioning becomes simplified. FCoE also creates a lossless Ethernet environment which allows for higher-quality storage traffic across the infrastructure itself.

3.  Faster performance – Without the NIC and SAN connections, FCoE allows you to take advantage of 10Gb Ethernet, providing you with the data pipe needed to realize speedier performance. You’re also on the Ethernet roadmap, which will allow future Ethernet connections at 40Gb and 100Gb.

There are – like any new technology implementation – inherent challenges that need consideration. Storage is often the life-blood of an organization, so changes to its management and structure need to be taken seriously and performed by experts. Be sure to hire an integrator that utilizes and partners with best-in-class technology providers.

Despite challenges, network convergence will likely shortly become as second nature to data centers as virtualization is today.

How about your organization or data center? Have you considered network convergence and if so why?