Tag Archives: storage administrators

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Cloud Computing Promises New Opportunities For IT Personnel

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Where do you find the real value in the data center?

As technologists, we get our thrills from the latest application release, add-on, or widget. It’s the nature of the beast. But, it’s not the new features or advanced capabilities that deliver the real value to the data center; it’s the IT personnel who wield the tools. A data center is only as good as its staff.

As discussed in a previous post about filling the IT skills gap, as technology evolves, so do the skill sets needed to harness the promise of cloud computing. Fortunately, for those people whose pay check depends on it, the trend leans strongly toward retraining rather than replacing existing staff on the new concepts and technologies that make up the cloud. But, it is not only the hard skill needs that have changed; soft skill requirements have changed too. New personas have been emerging around cloud and tenant administration. Additionally, it should come as no surprise that the business analyst function has seen a rebirth given the interest in Big Data analytics for business intelligence.

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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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Filling The IT Skills Gap

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Do you have the right IT skills for the job?

In a previous post about understanding the changing roles in the data center, I discussed the need for a new mindset among data center personnel and some of the new roles emerging for IT professionals  like cloud architects and data center architects. But, even for the most progressive employees and managers, there’s the challenge of keeping current with new innovations and developing the skills to make the most out of the new technologies.

In recent weeks, there has been some newly published information about the IT skills gap and about cloud computing creating new jobs. Fortunately, some of the new education programs available to IT personnel now address the training needs of the physical and virtual data center as well as the new world of cloud computing—and the promise of Big Data analytics. Continue reading →

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Understanding Changing Roles in the Data Center

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Who moved my cheese? In other words, what happened to my job!?

Were you ever just getting comfortable in a job when it changed? Well, look out…it’s happening again.

New IT service models are driving new technologies that span islands of isolation. Storage, network, data base, and application administrators can no longer concern themselves with their own topologies, they must collaborate.

For the most adept and visionary, this phenomena will open up new career opportunities for leaders who can see the big picture and define the future—the cloud architects, data center architects, and virtualization administrators or whatever label you want to assign to the new breed.

For those adverse to change, the need to take a new approach to their jobs will not only be disruptive to their daily routines but also potentially career-limiting or even career-ending depending on attitudes.

It’s a new twist to an old story that gets told time and time again. Continue reading →