Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder of unknown cause that affects nearly 5 million individuals. While the average age at onset is 60 and the disorder affects one in 100 people over the age of 60, people have been diagnosed as young as 18. DLT Solutions knows firsthand the impact Parkinson’s disease can have on an individual and his or her loved ones. That’s why the DLT Foundation is proud to support the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF). The DLT Foundation focuses on making strategic investments to meet the most critical needs in our communities.

Today we’re excited to announce a new edition of Google Apps. Designed with guidance from customers like the federal government, the City of Los Angeles and the City of Orlando, Google Apps for Government includes the same great Google applications that people know and love, with specific measures to address the policy and security needs of the public sector.

I hope that you enjoyed our series on ERP Trends in technology for 2010 and beyond. We’ve, hopefully, given you something to think about and to consider as you plan your IT strategy going forward. One of the more interesting things that we’ve deduced from observing these trends is the increase in services & support. At first glance you would think that this would be counter-intuitive given the advances in software. That is, with the newest versions of software being mostly self-managed—e.g. OEM, Cloud Computing – you would think that the need for specialized labor would decrease but in fact it has increased. Why is that?

First, some background. In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Inaccessible technology interferes with an individual's ability to obtain and use information quickly and easily. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. 794d), agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.

In the ongoing saga of Federal adoption of clouds one of the sticky wickets has been the requirement by law that all Federal information systems comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, commonly referred to as FISMA. In a very small nutshell FISMA requires that information systems comply with security guidelines that are the responsibility of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) and that these systems are monitored for vulnerabilities.

Now that you've stood up your bright shiny new virtualization pod, all of your OS management issues are behind you, right? Not so fast. Virtualization does nothing for you in patch and configuration management, and can actually exacerbate the problem. Many workflows surrounding virtualization lean toward image based techniques, which can be more of a problem than traditional bare-metal techniques. Let’s look at the problems of image management and how you need a systems management solution in a virtual environment as much, if not more, than you do now.

The only thing hotter and steamier than the weather in D.C. right now is the conversation about cloud. And, it's both tiring and confusing. There are more flavors of cloud than of coffee at Starbucks - private, community, public - not to mention IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Venti, double-caramel macchiato, skim-milk latte @ 190°...

Oracle Clusterware 10g will always handle node fencing (aka eviction) by rebooting one or more nodes. Oracle didn’t have its own cluster manager software for most platforms on 9i. So, if your customer was on a platform where Oracle didn’t have a cluster manager of its own (it only had a Linux and Windows), then building the RAC cluster would have required some 3rd party software. Some of the 3rd party cluster managers used different schemes to fence nodes from the cluster. Many of them used I/O fencing which is less disruptive in that it didn’t require a node reboot, but required more proprietary interfaces to be used to access and manage storage.

To put it simply, our goal as NetBackup administrators and engineers is to keep tapes spinning. What do I mean by that? Well, if your tapes are constantly spinning during your backup window, you will be taking full advantage of your underlying hardware and be backing up to tape as fast as possible. Sounds simple, right? Trust me, we all get the “Tim the Tool Man Taylor” fever, and want to purchase a beast of a backup device that will solve all of our backup problems. Of course, you must go through much red tape to purchase this “Tim the Tool Man Taylor” device, and more than likely it will be rejected because of “budget” or “It rained on Tuesday”. Whatever the reason for not purchasing, we still are left with backing up the same amount of data! What do we do? We make sure that we keep our tape drives we currently have spinning as much as possible. How do we do that? Well, let me introduce you to my friends Multiplexing and Multiple Data Streams (aka Multistreaming).

So you ask, “does it require a separate install procedure to enable deduplication with Symantec NBU7?” Uhh NO! With NBU 7, deduplication is built right in, there is nothing to install. If you want to turn on dedupe, all you to do is click a box in the GUI, and ensure that the media server is adequately configured for the additional dedupe workload.