Brace Rennels

IT Strategy Server backup and recovery isn’t rocket surgery, but you would be surprised by the number of IT organizations that can’t get it right. Here are five of the most common mistakes that I have seen. 1. “Don’t worry, it’s Backed Up” Famous last words! Is it really? Prov... (more)

High availability for full server protection has never been more important. As virtualization and blade technologies continue to rapidly be adopted, IT infrastructures are becoming smaller and more efficient. Doing more with less has been a centralized theme for IT managers this p... (more)

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 syst... (more)

There are several challenges when attempting a data center move or even just consolidation. Availability is the number one priority. All the systems during the move need to be available so production operations are not interrupted. Depending on the technology you use some solutio... (more)

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 ... (more)

With print advertising declining due to the use of the internet as the primary source of information today, what is the disaster recovery plan of our nation’s newspaper industry? More and more newspapers are facing the challenge of declining advertising revenue and are looking fo... (more)

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 gener... (more)

Workload migrations and portability don’t have to be limited to moving active workloads. Workload flexibility is a key function of workload optimization solutions that allow rapid provisioning of new workloads. iSCSI and workstation consolidation have been the latest trend to pro... (more)

Server, storage and site migrations have always been the elephant in the room. IT managers know that it is necessary to reduce costs and improve workload management but cringe over the potential impact to production. In the past, migrations have usually required significant plann... (more)

The need for moving, provisioning and migrating workloads in real-time for server and storage consolidation is necessary to help IT organizations deploy more efficient and flexible technology, as well as consolidate other site locations for centralized facility management. Many o... (more)

So, you have just lost your most business critical application or worse yet the entire data center. What do you do? Unfortunately I have experienced these exact situations more than I would like but here are ten tips to get you through and more importantly what not to do. 10 Tips... (more)

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 hel... (more)

The last few weeks Microsoft has been revving its engine and flexing its muscle all before VMworld approaches the starting line. What does it all mean for the future of the virtualization market? It all started a few weeks ago on February 4 when a Cnet article announced how EMC a... (more)

There will be several great presentations at VMworld Europe this year but learning how to get the most our of your virtual infrastructure will certainly be at the top of the list. Wednesday February 25th, in the redaction 1 room at 11:00am will be one such presentation.  Bob Roud... (more)

Businesses in the southeastern United States have been hit hard with hurricanes in the last few years, and 2008 was no exception. As a project manager and CBCP for over 1600 disaster recovery deployments I can share real examples of how entire data centers were failed over to the... (more)

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... (more)

Next to ensuring the safety, health and well being of your employees, the next most important Business Continuity task is resuming business-critical operations. Keeping servers highly available is what likely keeps most data center managers up at night. There is a higher probabil... (more)