For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

TechRadar™ For Infrastructure And Operations Professionals: Infrastructure Virtualization, Q4 2009

I/O Virtualization Enters Its Growth Phase

by Galen Schreck, November 16, 2009

Every major category of IT infrastructure has been endowed with some virtualization capability. Although virtualization can make your IT environment more cost-effective and agile, the underlying technologies have matured at different rates. Furthermore, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

How Efficient Is Your Storage Environment?

The KPIs That Matter Most In Enterprise Storage and How To Measure Them

by Andrew Reichman, October 22, 2009

Building an effective storage environment is a balancing act between performance, reliability, and efficiency. For years, improving storage efficiency took a back seat to the other goals. Now, with infrastructure budgets being cut and data growth continuing . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

TechRadar™ For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals: Cloud Computing, Q3 2009

As Much Diversity Of Maturity Across Categories As Confusion Among Them

by James Staten, October 2, 2009

The No. 1 challenge in cloud computing today is determining what it really is. What categories of services exist within the definition and business model, and how ready are these options for enterprise consumption? Forrester defines cloud computing as . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

UK Firms Continue To Look To Green IT For Cost Reduction And Business Benefits

Findings From The UK Green IT 2009 Conference, May 2009

by Onica King, Doug Washburn, October 2, 2009

Findings from Forrester's second joint survey collaboration with Tech:Touchstone Events, organizer of the Green IT 2009 Conference in London, uncovered that after a year of economic turmoil, financial drivers and efficiency gains are still the core motivation . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

EMC Rethinks High-End Storage With V-MAX

Potential Customers Should Look For Efficiency And Favorable Economics

by Andrew Reichman, July 16, 2009

You've probably had the EMC Symmetrix family as a fixture in your data center for high-performance and high-availability storage for years, or at least you've given it strong purchase consideration. But in the past few years, EMC fell behind the technology . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Use Deduplication To Store More With Less

Dedupe Your Backups Today, But Plan For Other Environments

by Stephanie Balaouras, July 10, 2009

While the cost of disk has declined significantly over the past five years, you still can't call it cheap at thousands of dollars per terabyte (TB). IT professionals struggle to keep up with 30% to 40% annual data growth while simultaneously creating . . .

For Consumer Product Strategy Professionals

The Convenience Quotient Of Consumer Storage And Backup

by Nathan Safran, July 6, 2009

The consumer backup and storage space has become increasingly crowded — and sophisticated — over the past 24 months. From burning a DVD to using a full-blown home server, there are a wide variety of options today, with varying features and degrees of . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Role Overview: Virtual Infrastructure Architect

by Galen Schreck, Rachel A. Dines, June 25, 2009

As the adoption of virtualization across servers, storage, and networks continues to climb and organizations push to larger implementations of virtual infrastructure, a new question arises: Who is going to manage your virtual infrastructure? Sure, you . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Virtual Infrastructure Architect - Job Profile And Description  (32 KB XLS)

by Galen Schreck, Rachel A. Dines, June 23, 2009

Position overview: The virtual infrastructure (VI) architect is responsible for managing all of the virtualized infrastructure across technology domains (this usually does not include the virtual desktop).

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

TechRadar™ For I&O Professionals: Green IT 1.0 Technologies, Q2 2009

Helping IT Ops Professionals Understand And Prioritize Green IT Hardware, Software, And Service Investments

by Doug Washburn, June 12, 2009

Green IT is on the rise. Even in the face of a weak economy, twice as many organizations expect to accelerate their green IT plans as expect to slow them down. Why is this? Green IT initiatives are financially motivated, exposing opportunities for cost . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Align Green Storage With Overall Efficiency

Power Savings Benefits Are Limited, But Improved Efficiency Makes Good Sense

by Andrew Reichman, April 17, 2009

Storage vendors worldwide have jumped on the "green" bandwagon in their marketing campaigns, but it's hard to determine which technologies move beyond hype and rhetoric to have a real positive impact. In a gloomy economy, initiatives that sound good but . . .

For Sourcing & Vendor Management Professionals

IT Infrastructure Market And Services Data  (222 KB PPT)

by Paul Roehrig, Ph.D., April 13, 2009

IT Infrastructure Market And Services Data.

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Inquiry Spotlight: Infrastructure & Operations Organizational Structures, Q1 2009

by Doug Washburn, Rachel A. Dines, March 11, 2009

Infrastructure and operations (I&O) departments are currently in a state of flux. Beyond increasing centralization, I&O departments are reorganizing to become service-oriented or are at least considering such a change. Why? When surveyed, IT executives . . .

For CIOs

What Are The Hot Roles In IT?

by Marc Cecere, August 14, 2008

Near-term demand for hot roles in IT will be driven by the need for local and cross-discipline knowledge, changes in technology, greater emphasis on managing risk and the enterprise, and a limited supply of key roles. For example, business architects . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Five Key Storage Strategies For A Down Economy

Tips To Make The Most Of A Tight Budget In The Face Of Ongoing Data Growth

by Andrew Reichman, July 16, 2008

It's clear that the economy is on a downward trajectory, and regardless of the duration or severity, there's no doubt that belt-tightening in IT spending will be the norm for the next year. At the same time, most IT budgets were already stagnant or slow-growing . . .

The State Of Asia Pacific Enterprise Technology Adoption: 2008

by Jonathan Browne, May 20, 2008

How are businesses in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region adopting technologies in the software, hardware, networks, and services categories, and what do they plan to do with IT budgets in the next 12 months? This document gives highlights of data collected . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Consolidate Storage Vendors To Reduce Complexity

More Companies Prefer To Buy Storage From A Single Vendor

by Andrew Reichman, April 23, 2008

According to a Forrester survey, storage equipment and management software represents 10% of the IT hardware budget, and spending is expected to increase by 4% in 2008. Given the significance of this spending and the tenor of the economy these days, it's . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Market Overview: File-Based Storage

NAS Offerings And Other Approaches To Address An Avalanche Of Files

by Andrew Reichman, April 14, 2008

Firms must store more and more file data as users generate more office documents and create more rich digital content such as photos, audio files, and video files, and as applications do more with these and other forms of file-based content. With increasing . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Forrester TechRadar™: Infrastructure Virtualization, Q2 2008

Client And Server Virtualization Progress, But Storage Virtualization Reboots

by Galen Schreck, April 4, 2008

Every major category of IT infrastructure has been endowed with some virtualization capability. Although virtualization can make your IT environment more cost-effective and agile, the underlying technologies have matured at different rates. Furthermore, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

SRM Needs Services To Succeed

IBM Shows It Gets This By Acquiring Storage Service Provider NovusCG

by Andrew Reichman, January 22, 2008

The storage resource management (SRM) market has been stagnant for years, despite significant needs on the part of storage end users. A big part of this low adoption rate is the combination of complex tools on the market and limited bandwidth for implementation . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Topic Overview: IT Management Software

by Natalie Lambert, November 13, 2007

Today's organizations are trying to keep up with the continuous pace of technology change and growing business requirements. The importance of management technologies to monitor and manage the wide array of hardware and software systems deployed in the . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

The Virtualization Imperative

Why Virtualization Is The Key To IT Flexibility

by Galen Schreck, November 8, 2007

Virtualization has wide-ranging effects throughout your IT infrastructure. Even though virtualization has been making technology easier to use, it has become even trendier in the past few years. Why the sudden attention? Recent innovations in server or . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Trim The Fat In Storage With Thin Provisioning

Thin Provisioning Offers Green Storage Through Improved Utilization

by Andrew Reichman, July 23, 2007

Companies face an uphill battle when it comes to managing storage capacity effectively: Utilization is low (often around 40%), they have inadequate forecasting capabilities, and there is poor communication between the storage organization and application . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

Server/Storage Attach Sells For Systems Vendors

North American Enterprises Are More Likely To Buy Systems Vendors' Storage

by Frank E. Gillett, May 21, 2007

Are North American enterprise customers more likely to buy storage from their server vendors than from other sources? We surveyed enterprise IT hardware buyers and learned that they purchase a wide variety of combinations of server and storage gear, with . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

North American Enterprise Storage Buyers Prefer EMC And Systems Vendors

Storage Providers Are Divided Into Generalists And Specialists

by Frank E. Gillett, May 21, 2007

Forrester annually asks IT infrastructure buyers about their storage providers. We learned that half of enterprises in North America are customers of EMC and nearly as many also buy from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. To get beyond the simple statistics . . .