Brace Rennels

Desktop management is a constant challenge for most IT or call center managers. A new update, service pack or totally new version of operating system can cause headaches for even the most experienced IT professional. The challenges with provisioning new versions of operating systems for desktops haven’t changed over the years: Do update and what is the incentive? Why should I? When do I update? How do I update hundreds of workstations across multiple locations? How can I update without affective end user productivity? With the recent release of Windows 7, many IT professionals are once again asking themselves these questions. Fortunately, there is a solution that you won’t loose any sleep over. Double-Take Flex technology has become a cost effective solution for provisio... (more)

Double-Take Software Compliments Business Continuity Testing for Hyper-V

Business continuity exercises have always been complicated and hard to exercise. There is significant planning involved to test the availability and recovery of the IT workloads and usually requires extensive downtime and effort from IT managers. Virtualization technology has helped IT managers with this process but that is primarily only for local high availability testing at the primar... (more)

Backing Up Virtual Machines

Virtualization technology is continuing to be adopted for consolidating data center infrastructure and providing a more flexible platform for moving, provisioning and backing up workloads. This has put an emphasis on backup and recovery; because a single virtual host can contain several virtual machines and is even more important to not only protect the individual virtual machines but th... (more)

How to Address IT Needs in Today's Economy Through Virtualization

The current economic crisis is affecting how organizations look at their IT. Existing systems are being stretched to increase their value, while investment in new systems is under greater scrutiny than ever before. For the channel, customers are demanding more from their spending. While this is putting some "nice-to-have" projects in jeopardy, money is still available in IT budgets for i... (more)

A Pandemic Exercise - Telecommuting & Will the Infrastructure Support It?

I attended a pandemic exercise at Northeastern University last year that was really enlightening and timely considering the latest information about the “swine flu”. Although far from a pandemic at this time, the CDC is taking preventative measures by communicating with the general public what they can do to avoid becoming ill. Here are a few tips that can help spread the transmission. ... (more)