When I think about the upcoming holidays I feel, honestly, a bit of stress. The holiday season, by its very nature, brings with it a more harried pace. The quest to find the perfect gift for each person on my list adds an extra bit of angst. And, you don’t have to spend much time with Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff (http://www.storyofstuff.com/) to wonder if there is a way to put a little green back in the holidays. What I’m talking about is getting back to basics and thinking outside of the Macy’s gift box.

NetApp’s video below is another great example of their creative and fun work environment. While I have never seen “8 Mile”, the concept was very fun, and not to mention accurate. The video provides a lot of good facts about Data Deduplication and sets the record straight on many issues or concerns that people may have.

Having problems with trying to do eDiscovery with NetBackup? Stop! Just Stop! For the love of NetBackup…. Stop! Find out more about the marriage between NetBackup and Enterprise Vault.

Veritas Storage Foundation has an optional utility called Simple Admin, that you can switch Veritas File system and Veritas Volume Manager. The Simple Admin utility simplifies storage management by providing a single interface to the administrator and by abstracting the administrator from many of the commands needed to create and manage volumes, disk groups, and file systems.

Autodesk University, Day Three was a big day for Autodesk's Subscription customers and I found myself joining many of them at Subscription Forum, hosted by Autodesk's Subscription Team.

This is Daniel Clark’s second entry in a blog series from on Autodesk University 2010. For Daniel’s first entry, visit: http://blogs.dlt.com/autodesk-university-2010-melting-pot-diversity-innovation/ After a mediocre breakfast of yogurt and stale muffins it was off to a full day of classes here at Autodesk University 2010. I won’t bore you with a play-by-play account of the day, but I do want to share some insights about the two most powerful classes that I attended. The first class was hosted by a government customer who recently made the decision to switch from their current GIS platform to Map 3D. The class was interesting because it was not an endorsement of Map 3D, but a glimpse into the decisions and testing that led the government agency to conclude that Map 3D was the correct choice for them. As with most new software adoption, some of the biggest concerns expressed about Map 3D, was the level of training it would take to ensure they got the most from their software investment. However, this concern was outweighed by the substantial cost savings they would receive by consolidating to one software package for mapping and only having to train each person on one program.

The second day of Autodesk University flew by and today’s sessions were as enlightening as they were yesterday. The field of digital design is extremely diverse and the partners that work with the different disciplines are as varied as the fields that Autodesk supports. On the AEC side, there are partners that do advanced survey and CAD integration. The manufacturing industry is also well represented with a variety of companies offering 3D printing and enhanced scan and manipulation tools. Autodesk’s media and entertainment partners are also out in force demo’ing the creation of live caricatures on iPads by an on-site graphic artist.

Autodesk University 2010 kicked off Tuesday morning with its Welcome Address. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass began with a challenge to all users. He wanted to get the message across to not just design, but design to make an “impact”. Bass proceeded to bring several users to the stage to show how their design work is already fulfilling the challenge of making an impact.

Autodesk University is already well under-way at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. And, I have to tell you, as a first-time visitor to Vegas, it took me quite some time to get past the overwhelming visuals that this city has to offer. That being said, I also found myself blown away by the sheer volume of people that are here for this event. Walking to the opening ceremony the escalators and hallways are literally packed with people from all over the world, all of whom are here for one reason - because they use, sell or are somehow associated with Autodesk software. Reading the name tags of people in class with me, I have seen people from Finland, Germany, Sweden, England, Japan and all over the United States.

Quest Software, DLT and NetApp recently sponsored a panel discussion in Washington to discuss data center consolidation and cloud computing. The panel participants were progressive well-respected IT leaders from different federal agencies that had all launched consolidation projects. The speakers reported that most projects would take several years and acknowledged that consolidations were really evolutionary transformations to achieve long term objectives. The ultimate goal for each agency is to have no more than 5 major production sites with total capacity to serve both the current and future needs. Even after consolidating and increasing utilization rates, the plans predicted there would be excess IT capacity – theoretically this capacity could be “reallocated” to other entities.