Citrix Synergy 2010-Registration is Live!

Come to Citrix Summit and Synergy 2010 in San Francisco, May 10-14. Thousands of customers and peers are coming together for one powerful week with an agenda designed to give new market insights, technical skills and opportunities to expand your business.

Virtualization Forum 2010

Virtualization and Cloud Computing are considered by analysts two of the top priorities for IT Professionals in 2010. VMware® Virtualization Forum is a free, interactive event where you will learn about virtualizing your business infrastructure from experts, industry analyst and companies like yours. Speakers from companies of all sizes will discuss virtualization solutions for the desktop, datacenter and cloud.

If you are new to virtualization or a VMware customer eager for more information about maximizing your current virtualization investment, this is a "must attend" event for you.

Entisys Solutions and Agile360 receive the 2009 Arrow ECS "Highest Year-over-Year Growth - West" award for sales of NetApp® enterprise storage solution

Learn more

Entisys Solutions and Agile360 Achieve Microsoft Virtualization Competency status; Earn "Winning on Value" award from Microsoft

Learn more

Netapp Data OnTap 7.3.3 goes GA

Netapp released Data OnTap 7.3.3 for general availability (GA) on 19 March 2010.  Netapp encourages customers to upgrade to this latest version as soon as operationally feasible as it contains bug fixes for previous 7.3 versions on Data OnTap.

Contact your Entisys Solutions account representative to obtain assistance with this upgrade.

Click here for more details

HP Lefthand virtualizes local storage 

Does your company require enterprise level virtual environment features like high availability but can’t afford the required shared storage environment?  Find out how the HP Lefthand P4000 Virtual SAN Software (VSA) enables the benefits of a physical SAN with the ability to transform captive server disk drives and build a virtual iSCSI SAN.

Click here for more details.

White Paper: Netapp and Citrix VDI Best Practices
The white paper described provides best practice architecture and implementation guidelines for Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions on Netapp storage solutions. 

Citrix Delivers the Citrix NetScaler VPX Virtual Appliance

As further proof to Citrix’s commitment to virtualization and optimization, the Citrix NetScaler VPX can lower your TCO for testing, development and deployment of small environments with NetScaler solutions. 

Click here to download the Citrix NetScaler VPX Express Edition for Free (MyCitrix.com account required).

Netapp Flexshare: Prioritizing disk access to meet your SLA

Flexshare has been a free feature included in the base Data OnTap software for a number of years although most customers either don’t take advantage of or don’t know it’s there.  It allows the prioritization of disk reads and writes at the volume level to ensure that critical workloads meet their intended SLAs. 
Click here to read more about Flexshare

 

HP, Citrix, VMware or NetApp Training Needs? We have you covered.

Contact your Entisys Solutions Account Executive concerning your training needs for HP, Citrix, VMware and NetApp solutions.

The ThinApp Windows 7 Migration Promotion

• Offers 75% off of ThinApp Client licenses (minimum 500 licenses) from 4/1/2010 – 9/15/2010.
• The objective of this promotion is to save customers time and money when they migrate their OS to Windows 7 and it provides VMware an opportunity to seed the market for desktop virtualization.

Contact your Entisys Solutions sales representative for more information.

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As new application servers come online and the amount of data you protect increases, you need to be confident that your data protection solution has the performance required to complete nightly backups and minimize downtime during restores—without costly storage upgrades. Learn how NetApp high-speed, high-efficiency solutions can dramatically improve the recovery times, reliability, and efficiency of your data protection operations.

Top Reasons Why NetApp is Your Best Defense in Data Protection White Paper

Do you know what the next generation of HP Proliant Servers can do your organization?

Next generation HP ProLiant Servers

• Dramatic efficiency improvements in compute and power cooling
• Comprehensive virtualization capabilities
• Best in class management tools

What is HP announcing?

• New HP ProLiant G6 servers with Intel Xeon Processor 5600 Series (Westmere)
• New HP ProLiant G7 servers and AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors (Magny-Cours) 

Why should customers care about these new offerings?

• Up to 97% reduction in power and cooling costs
• Best in the industry consolidation ratio
• 27x improvement in performance per watt
• ROI is as little as 2 months  

How is this different from competitors’ offering? 

Breadth of offering:

• HP offers a wider range of servers with the new Intel and AMD processors. (19 new models today)
• Delivering on the promise of HP Converged Infrastructure: HP drives innovation in the areas of power and cooling, virtualization, and management
• Thermal Logic technologies allow customers to reduce energy and cooling costs by as much as 97%.
• Comprehensive Management simplify management and cut expenses up to $48,000 for every 100 users
• HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 reduces network connection costs by up to 66% and offers 4x the number of connections per port.

More infohttp://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100329xb.html

Data archiving is a concept that extends storage into different classes of service to provide a foundation for business units to assign value to their data. 

Mimosa (recently acquired by Iron Mountain in Feburary of this year - Press Release) NearPoint captures the richness of Exchange data and fits perfectly with the NetApp Unified Storage Architecture for block storage and NAS storage, replication and snapshot efficiency, allocation and provisioning, and backup and data deduplication. While NetApp provides archive storage and continuous data protection with the SnapManager product family, Mimosa’s archiving solution delivers full mailbox capture, storage lifecycle management, retention, and e-discovery. 

With the increased emphasis on e-discovery preparedness, organizations are storing a growing amount of critical data for extended periods of time. By leveraging NetApp storage solutions, Mimosa is able to deliver greater innovation for archiving and discovery by creating a simpler, more efficient solution. 

Mimosa NearPoint has high-performance storage requirements for both the SQL database and the archive content index, which is used for searching the archive. Because of their access patterns, both the database and the index are best stored on high-performance Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI attached block storage. The NetApp platforms provide excellent support for NearPoint’s block-based storage requirements. In addition to the database and index storage, NearPoint uses NetApp storage for retaining the archived objects themselves on the same array or on a different NetApp storage device. 

The NetApp architecture supports a wide variety of storage configurations, including FC or SATA devices accessed through block or CIFS protocols. NetApp solutions are ideal to support all the storage requirements of NearPoint, giving administrators a full range of options for connecting the NearPoint application to a NetApp infrastructure.

Click here to see Netapp/Mimosa solutions videos.

Click here to read the whitepaper.

In recent years, the iSCSI protocol has increasingly proven to be a viable option for storage administrators looking for a low cost shared storage solution that offers the enterprise level features that fiber channel based SANs provide.  In order to implement an ISCSI solution each server must be configured with either a software or hardware initiator that allows the transfer of data between the server and the SAN. 　

So what are the differences between software and hardware initiators and when should one use each?  In most cases the software initiator satisfies the needs of the administrator and provides a much lower cost since the software initiators are typically free or built into the server operating system.　 

One of the disadvantages of the software initiator used to be that it incurred additional resource utilization from the host server since the IP to SCSI translation had to be performed by the host CPU for any data being transferred to and from the SAN.  Although this perception still exists, the reality is that today’s newer processors almost always have surplus processing power to handle iSCSI protocol translation.  Also, the use of jumbo frames further lessens the load on processors by reducing the number of frame processing requests that are sent to the CPU. 

Although a software-based iSCSI intiator may be a less expensive solution, there are some scenarios in which the use of hardware iSCSI initiators is necessary.  In those cases where a boot from SAN requirement exists, a hardware initiator is needed since the software initiator relies on the underlying operating system to be loaded to access data.  Hardware initiators perform the IP to SCSI translation on the card itself which has an onboard TCPIP offload engine incorporated. In a virtualized environment, the hypervisor layer is processing virtual machine requests and the additional load of processing IP to SCSI translations may be undesirable. In situations such as this where the goal is to provide maximum CPU resources for non-storage related functions, a hardware iSCSI initiator may be a preferred option.

In many cases, software initiators should satisfy the initiator requirement at a much lower cost, but as the age old IT saying goes, "It depends". The proper solution for any situation should be based on the specific requirements, so if there’s a doubt, contact your Entisys Solutions representative to schedule a technical discussion with our architects and engineers.

Contact Us

For more information, sales and/or technical support, please contact your Entisys Solutions sales representative at sales@entisys.com.