Category Archives: High-Availability

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Keeping The Lights On In An SAP Environment

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How do you keep your SAP costs under control in the modern data center?

As much as vendors like to think you spend all of your time planning architectural changes and your next purchase, the reality is more mundane. Mostly, data center personnel work around the clock to keep the lights on and business processes operational and fine-tuned to meet required service-level agreements (SLAs).

Keeping business processes operating at peak performance includes keeping mission-critical applications with their dependencies in good working order. Service-assurance for key applications such as SAP involves trained skilled staff, up-to-date database technologies, well-equipped test/dev environments, and effective data protection schemes. Maintaining service-levels thus costs money, which is not always plentiful.

Taking the right approach to data protection can not only ensure application availability but also keep personnel and licensing costs reasonable. Fortunately, for SAP environments, there is an approach that works well for physical and virtual environments today. So, in a brief departure from discussing the Software-Defined Data Center and clouds, this post focuses on keeping the data center lights on in SAP environments. Continue reading →

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Virtualizing Applications Benefit From EMC AppSync For Protection

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What if you could take an SLA-driven approach to protecting your virtualized applications?

Well, for starters, you would be able to provide the right level of protection to your applications. Remember, disaster recovery is still about recovery time and business continuity is about ongoing availability. But, one size doesn’t fit all – the needs can vary by application in today’s virtualized data centers.

Wrapping up our coverage of EMC World (the party has to end sometime), I’d like to go deeper into another of our software announcements for IT transformation, EMC AppSync: EMC’s newest product in the data protection management space.   If you missed the news, we essentially took the best parts of EMC Replication Manager and added in monitoring and alerting concepts from EMC Data Protection Advisor to offer a simple, self-service SLA-driven approach for protecting virtualized applications in EMC VNX deployments.  Continue reading →

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Transforming IT Application Protection Services with EMC AppSync

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What if you could provide application protection with your end-user services?

Cloud computing services conversations seem to focus on providing end-users with business processes and the compute, network, and storage resources necessary to support them. But, not as much attention seems to go into the operational business continuance functions like application protection.

Maybe, it’s because throughput, response time, and capacity utilization metrics are more top-of-mind than measuring unplanned downtime. However, if your business relies on information or transactional processing like all of them do, you need to ensure the integrity and availability of your applications.

Announced today at EMC World, EMC AppSync for EMC VNX simplifies and automates application protection, and provides diagnostics on the health of your automated application business continuance plan.  It aligns multiple replication technologies with your applications and their service-level agreement (SLA) to ensure ongoing business processes. Continue reading →

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3 Not So Obvious Reasons To Go To EMC World

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What about EMC World?

It’s EMC’s biggest event of the year. And, whether you attend in person or not, you’ll hear about new technologies and new products next week in Las Vegas, in the press, and on the Internet.

You’ll join more than 10,000 of your best industry friends in a four-day mind-blowing, brain-dump about the latest in Big Data, cloud, storage, and more. Then, and afterwards, you’ll also be able to view sessions on-demand, read media coverage, and see videos and out-takes on YouTube.

It wasn’t that long ago when EMC World and its predecessor was an event about data storage. Well, in many ways, the event still centers on the industry’s leading storage, but so much more has come up around the core storage for cloud deployments that this year’s gathering in Las Vegas, May 21-24, highlights how important and central software and services are to IT transformation. Continue reading →

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Faster Performance For Your VMware Environment

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What if you could get faster performance out of your VMware environment? You’d do it.

Stifling I/O bottlenecks, shrinking backup windows, and unplanned outages are commonplace concerns shared among data center architects rolling out their virtual data center and cloud.

Virtual machine (VM) growth tends to escalate as data centers get comfortable with virtualization technologies. But, growth often gets hampered by the lowest common denominator if not addressed as part of the implementation plan.

A few months back, I used the DeLorean with the flux capacitor from the old Back to the Future movies as an analogy to supercharging applications through data path optimization. Now, if you recall, in the second installment of this famed movie series, the fictional character Doc Brown went into the future to retrofit his DeLorean time machine with the power of flight. Similarly, upgrading your path management to optimize your virtual environment can make your data center seemingly levitate—and eliminate many of the concerns for virtual and cloud deployments.

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