Metalogix, a provider of content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange, File and Cloud platforms, has announced the industry’s first dynamic email management suite to transparently migrate, store, secure and protect email and file content for on premises and hybrid cloud environments. The new solutions, Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition 6.0 and Metalogix Email Migrator 1.0, operate in tandem to enable enterprises to achieve a dynamically scalable email and file archive which reduces complexity, mitigates risk and improves user productivity with the flexibility and control that enables them to adapt to changing enterprise needs.

«Today’s enterprise is under constant pressure to preserve, protect and produce business content to suit ever-changing international regulatory requirements,» said Christine Taylor, analyst at Taneja Group. «Archive repositories easily reach into petabyte scales and are constantly growing. This pace will not slow down. Companies need an adaptive email management solution that optimizes and simplifies massively growing volumes of data. This includes managing compliance and data retention, storage and migration, data protection, and discovery; turning huge email archives from black holes into valuable businesses assets.»

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Inside the world’s companies and government departments, IT organizations have traditionally focused on delivering to internal customers. This has created an environment where IT is expected to align the services it delivers with age-old business processes that have evolved over years of operation, and is focused on efficiency. Delivering innovation and new ideas has become fraught with unnecessary complexity and internal politics, and strategically IT remains a back-office function.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, things have changed. IT is now front of house, delivering to consumers via online and mobile apps, whose expectations are higher. IT is part of the customer relationship and, as a result, it is expected to deliver its service promise and for problems not to occur. Social media has meant that when there are problems, they occur publicly. In the time it can take to raise a trouble ticket on a service management system, a consumer problem can surge on Twitter and reach thousands, damaging an organization’s reputation. At the same time, organizations now have access to more information about their customers and services than ever before, which provides huge potential for transforming their services.

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Growth is good, but sometimes it may not feel that way when the business you love has outgrown your ability to manage it. When Post-It notes can’t support your customers, it’s time to change. When you’re apprehensive about winning that big, new account because you don’t have the capacity to manage it, it’s time to change. Change came to Old Mill Kettle Corn, a company that manufactures healthy corn-based snacks, when McKee Foods Corporation a national snack food manufacturer approached it with a distribution offer that the company couldn’t refuse.
Old Mill Kettle Corn had never used an ERP platform or a formal food safety management system (FSMS) but with the imminent expansion and new market opportunities, management realized it was no longer feasible to use paper spreadsheets and manual processes to manage product quality, inventory, supply chain communications and other processing operations aspects.

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There is so much happening in the Cloud Computing world and everyone seems to want a piece of the cloud. Though more and more users are positive about deploying a cloud solution for their business, they are still unclear as to how much they would need to shell out for it. Many organizations are still reluctant and feel they won’t get the expected returns.
But this is not true and Cloud Computing does deliver organizations measurable benefits. Businesses that have deployed Cloud solutions have been talking about how it has helped them save their IT costs and be profitable in such tough times as well. They have achieved good returns from their investments in the Cloud and also have saved a lot.
If any organization or individual needs to ascertain how much it will cost to implement a Cloud solution they can easily do so. The cost of moving to the cloud can be estimated in two forms: i) Cost of migrating and ii) the ongoing costs.

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The Internet is a dangerous place. There’s a new story on Ars Technica about a corporate or government hack almost everyday. So for those interested in how an enterprise-grade secure cloud backup solution handles data encryption, here is some background on a few of the security protocols used to protect customer data here at Zetta:

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) / Transport Layer Security (TLS)
SSL is an Internet security protocol developed by Netscape in the late ’90s that is incorporated in browsers and web servers. The protocol uses the RSA public-key/private-key encryption system and digital certificates to establish a secure connection between the client and server over which data can be transmitted.

SSL has recently evolved into the TLS protocol, but both protocols are still in use. When you see a website that starts with https instead of http, it requires an SSL/TLS connection. Both protocols are IETF standards. While the SSL Working Group is no longer active, the TLS Working Group is, and has issued a number of documents on the protocol since the start of the year. SSL/TSL differs from a complementary IETF protocol Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) in that S-HTTP is designed for sending single messages, while SSL/TSL creates a secure connection over which any amount of data can be sent.

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There’s been lots of buzz on the enterprise hypervisor front over the past month … In August, Microsoft announced the RTM version of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, the latest major releases of the Windows Server and System Center families. In addition, at VMworld this year, VMware announced the latest edition of their vSphere hypervisor platform: VMware vSphere 5.5. In this article, I’ll provide a summarized comparison of the virtualization and Private Cloud feature sets provided by each of these latest releases using the currently available public information from both Microsoft and VMware as of this article’s publication date …

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The bad thing about price differentiation is that it is also the most easily countered. What happens if Cisco announces dramatically lower price-per-port when they spin Insieme in? They don’t even have to beat Arista; they just have to be close enough that the price part of the equation is roughly a draw. If Cisco does this, the most newsworthy element of Arista’s big product launch is largely neutered. That is not to say that Cisco will match on TCO but rather that their go-to-market strategy will effectively counter what Arista had previously launched.

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Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

The recently released Teradata 14.10 platform adds several features that one-up and surpass some of its newer analytic platform rivals. Highlights include dynamic tiering of hot data into memory, increased support for in-database analytics, better connectivity to Hadoop, and new optimizations for R implementation that fully exploit parallel processing.

Some of the enhancements, such as in-memory tiering, in-database analytic functions, and tighter Hadoop integration, are not necessarily unique to Teradata, but the implementations are. As for R scale-up, Teradata is uniquely applying MapReduce-like enhancements to enable R to better utilize the platform’s massively parallel architecture.

In sum, the enhancements are essential for maintaining Teradata’s premium positioning for scalability and performance for workloads that still require the service levels and data protections offered by the SQL environment.

Taking advantage of memory

This is an ongoing theme for all data platforms, both …

By Lee Fisher, Vice President, Abiquo

Most households have many services to keeping things ticking. No two households are the same; they have different priorities, values and structures, and different services suit different households. Water, gas and electricity all come from separate service providers, so if the electricity goes down in a house, it is not left in the cold.

Like a household, organisations are unique and something that works for one organisation, may not work for its competitors.

Choices, choices, choices

Like household utility services, cloud services are designed to bring agility, simplicity, efficiency and self-service capabilities to a business.

Organisations have freedom of choice in terms of selecting infrastructure and services; but in order to make the right choice it is vital organisations have an understanding of what the business requires and the capabilities of existing infrastructure.

Despite the complexity of business requirements and the variety of choices …