IT Services

Tighten up your customer focus

In sports, successful athletes narrow their focus during crunch time. They may concentrate on footwork, technique or increase their margin for error. Technology providers must do the same thing during tough economic times. You must focus on your customer and nothing but your customer, whether the customer is a consumer, another business, or internal departments needing technology and support.

Pimp my data center: Rackwise DCM

Rackwise Data Center Manager (DCM), from Visual Network Design, arrived a little late to our HIG 319 build-out. Generally, a datacenter project would have made use of the Rackwise product from the very start of the planning process. But better late than never -- the DCM software arrived in the nick of time to help us with our sudden weight limitation issue.

Pimp my data center: OSI Security Devices

APC's NetBotz surveillance system can spot any hooligans invading our precious HIG 319 sanctum, but it can't keep them out. That's where OSI Security Devices' Omnilock 2000 comes in. This high-security physical access system met two key requirements for our specific situation.

Pimp my data center: Lantronix

It may have come in the smallest box, but Lantronix's SecureLinx Spider KVM had an impact on our project that was far greater than its physical size would suggest. The Spider is a "zero U" KVM, meaning it takes the form of a USB or PS/2 KVM dongle on one end and a dual-port Cat 5e plug on the other. The whole ensemble is light enough to hang off the back of a server, saving you the rack space normally eaten by IP KVM switches and such.

Pimp my data center: Avocent

Avocent brought its industry-leading out-of-band management systems to our project, providing IP KVM for PC and Sun servers, service processor aggregation, serial terminal services, and the DSView management server. Because our new datacenter, HIG 319, functions like a multicompany colocation service, we ended up with a wide variety of equipment and at least three different flavors of service processors (Sun, Dell, HP) with three different management interfaces to juggle. Avocent's MergePoint 5224 appliance, a 24-port service processor aggregation system, gives the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology's IT group a single service processor management interface, while losing none of the functionality from individual dashboards.

Pimp my data center: American Power Conversion

American Power Conversion (APC) played the central role among the vendors in the HIG 319 datacenter project. The company donated a boatload (literally) of APC InfraStruxure gear and no small measure of professional services expertise, but considering the pro bono nature of the project was understandably forced to cut corners, especially regarding the free expertise. We'd recommend engaging APC's professional services arm for a real-life, budgeted build-out. You'll get the same excellent equipment, backed by a full-on, start-to-finish project consultancy that has a few decades of experience managing datacenter infrastructure projects.

Ultimus jump-starts BPM deployment

The success of a BPM (business process management) initiative hangs on a good plan. Spend too little time developing a snapshot of your company's inner workings, and the resulting system of misfiring rules and unhandled exceptions will find you mired in costly troubleshooting. But, sure enough, you can also lean too far in the other direction. Spend too much time charting workflow definitions, control points, and exception management, and the delays will start whittling away at your ROI.

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