Over the last few years, virtualisation has been successful at helping companies reduce the number of physical servers in data centers, leading to savings in space and power consumption. However, there is one area where consolidation has been elusive: network monitoring, analysis and security infrastructure.
Telstra (ASX:TLS) is set to build a new 2000-square metre data centre in Melbourne as part of its $800 million, five-year Cloud services agenda announced this week.
A Sydney-based IT services provider has built a public Cloud with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualisation hypervisor instead of one of the better-known commercial or open source products making it one of the first of its kind in Australia.
With a storage environment ripe for replacement and nearing the end of its lease, the CIO of Aussie earth moving giant, Komatsu, took the opportunity to step back and review the organisation’s IT infrastructure.
The University of the Sunshine Coast has moved to streamline its software licensing, reducing thousands of unwanted certifications for its software applications.
The growing popularity of Cloud services has not hindered the local server industry, with enterprise investment in servers forecast to continue over the next five years, according to IDC.
While telephony is, of course, a core component of any business communications system, one of the biggest drivers for UC adoption to date has been the promise of high resolution video communications. With high definition video playing an increasingly important role in corporate UC projects, the issue of network capacity takes centre stage.
Last year Microsoft and Telstra agreed to work together on developing a UCaaS offering based on Microsoft OCS and supported by the carrier’s vast fixed and mobile broadband networks. Neither company would reveal exactly how many subscribers they have signed up, except to say that they have doubled the number of UCaaS services sold between June and December last year. Microsoft will soon announce an upgraded version of the service which supports Lync 2010.
One of the biggest barriers to UC in the enterprise he feels is the existence of expensive legacy equipment.
Research has shown consistently that the major bugbear of IT managers about unified communications (UC) is perceived cost.
Neither cloud computing nor virtual servers were intended as agents that would change traditional IT organizations, says Rachel Dines, a researcher at Forrester Research (FORR) who specializes in IT infrastructure and management. But IT organization and management issues are turning out to be nearly as important as the technology itself to making large-scale virtual-server migrations effective.
Macquarie Telecom’s move into self-managed Cloud computing services has paid off, with Ninefold reporting hundreds of customers signing up to the service in the first four months.
Australian transaction processing company, Mercurion, has signalled plans to trial a car monitoring system in a Sydney metropolitan carpark based on Telstra's 'Silver Lining' Cloud.
Local chief information officers and IT managers would be wise to take a closer look at their service-level agreements with Cloud providers following the Amazon EC2 service outage in eastern United States over the weekend.
Organisations are looking to make the most of opportunities associated with the national broadband network (NBN), with Gartner Executive Program’s annual CIO agenda survey showing that networking, voice and data communications are a higher technology priority in Australia and New Zealand than globally.