We tested a unit on a live network with actual production data with Firefox running on Windows XP in February 2010.

Price: starts at $110,500.
Backup products supported include Symantec’s Netbackup and Backup Exec, CA ARCserve, IBM/Tivoli Storage Manager, and EMC.

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Normally, the assimilation of one product category into another is cause for dismay in the channel. But as we go forward, Adam Famularo, CA , senior vice president and general manager for CA’s Recovery Management & Data Modeling business unit, points out that what we’re actually witnessing is the transformation of backup and recovery into an ongoing service that creates opportunities for recurring revenue streams for channel partners.

Famularo adds that this general movement towards backup and recovery in the cloud is also creating some even bigger opportunities for solution provider in the realm of data management. Customers no longer want to treat all data equally. They want to be able to prioritize the recovery process based on relative importance of the data. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to deliver information lifecycle management (ILM) services to the customers are that are enabled by data deduplication and replication services tied back to cloud computing services.

Famularo says channel partners should keep an eye out for how CA not only intends to tightly integrate backup and recovery with cloud computing services, but also how the entire portfolio of CA products will be unified around a data management strategy.

In the meantime, Famularo says he wants partners to know that CA is serious about backup and recovery because it’s now part of a larger corporate strategy that will ultimately create more opportunities for partners.

First off, password security should be priority in any network. Educating your users to secure and memorize their password (that means no yellow post its lying around with that info) should be the top concern for any sysadmin. Allowing a person to post their credentials in the footer of his email signature is horrifying, as one of the brainy scientist had done. Hmm, maybe that’s how the hacker got into your system in the first place? Just maybe so.

Second, if you write about deleting information that you’re afraid of being obtained through a freedom of information request, then don’t store that same information on an unsecure server. That’s just counterproductive now! You never know when a hacker will download all that info and, oh who knows, publish it for the world to see. It’s rare, but I hear it happens.

Finally, let your users know that everything they write, or say (voice mail) and do (teleconference, security videos) at work which is recorded is the property of the company, and may just find it’s way unto the front page of the NY Times. Do you really want that remark about your assistant advertised on the frontpage? Think twice about what you say and think thrice about what you document into written record.

What do you think about the fiasco of the Climatologist emails and the fallout that they are experiencing due to their bad security? ISC2 is going to have a field day in with this!

Besides Symantec and McAfee, we now see Lumension adding anti-virus software to its suite of systems management tools. Sophos has integrated data loss prevention (DLP) software with its anti-virus software. And Axcient is integrating encryption with its data backup and recovery services.

The reason that all the vendors are expanding the footprint of their clients is naturally to expand their reach in adjacent markets. But for solution providers in the channel, these expansion efforts will require a little extra consideration. As each vendor expands their footprint, they also expand their ability to lock customers and their solution providers into their architecture. This can be a good thing if the solution provider is tightly aligned with a particular vendor. But many solution providers might not want to align that closely with a given vendor for any number of reasons.

Of course, delivering a variety of services using the same client architecture should reduce systems overhead and lower systems management costs, so solution providers that don’t want to align with a particular vendor’s client architecture are going to have to make a compelling case to the customer. And as more services get added to a particular client delivery system, making that argument is going to get harder and harder.

By now, it’s become apparent that vendors are going to attempt to use universal clients to consolidate any number of distinct management services. The only real question is where will solution provider in the channel wind up with each successive wave of consolidation.

Data Security Tools: As the focus on security has shifted from the perimeter, solution providers are finding success with a wide range of security tools focused on securing data rather than access to the network.

Data Storage: No matter the state of the economy, demand for more storage space keeps growing. And until storage virtualization goes mainstream, there is still plenty of opportunity to sell storage arrays.

Business Intelligence: There are a lot of tools in this category, but the reason companies buy them is the same. After years of investing in packaged applications, customers are anxious to show value for those investments by presenting users with actionable information.

Smartphones: There’s not much money to be made on the sale of the smartphone itself. But a new generation of mobile applications is creating opportunity for the channel.

Cloud Computing: It’s still early days as far as the channel is concerned. But the convergence of cloud computing and managed services does create a lower cost model for delivering IT services.

802.11n Wireless Networks: Increased bandwidth, lower costs and fewer headaches are a combination that most customers can’t ignore no matter how bad the economy is.

Appliance Consolidation: All those devices at the edge of the network are now ripe for consolidation as customers have become concerned about the total cost of managing them all.

Virtualization Sprawl: In the back half of the year, customers have discovered that not only do they need virtual machine management tools, but that left to their own devices virtual machines will suck up all the memory they can find unless properly managed.

Application Acceleration: Short of a full network upgrade, the best thing for a slow network is a set of application acceleration appliances that offload high bandwidth or low latency applications.

Desktop Virtualization: Starting with a conversation about Windows 7 and aging hardware, solution providers are starting to discover that customers are rethinking their entire approach to managing the desktop.

Even in the worst of times, there is always opportunity in the channel if you just know where to look.

While solid state drives purport to be ultra reliable, that reliability comes at a cost, it seems that when a solid state drive fails, it fails completely, with little or no warning! Poof your data is gone, just like bad magic. In the days of spinning magnetic media, hard drives tended to give some warning before their demise, sectors would go bad, or other errors would popup as the drives started to approach the end of their service lives – that proved to be a great way to get ready to replace a drive and to increase the frequency of backups. With solid state hard drives, you really get no such warning and many users are lulled into a state of false protection, think their data is safe, simple because there are no moving parts to fail in a solid state hard drive.

There is a lesson to be learned here, just because a new technology is more reliable, there is no excuse common sense practices, such as backup. Because, solid state drives can fail unexpectedly, backup is no more important than ever! So do yourself and your customers a favor, make sure backups are performed frequently and important files are protect at all times, don’t leave the safety of data to electronics that can fail unexpectedly!

Avnet has partnered with Scale Computing to integrate a storage cluster offering directly with an IBM System X server to create a new appliance offering.

Besides the fact that Avnet did the engineering work, the offering is unique because the Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) technology from Scale competes directly with many of IBM’s own storage offerings at roughly one-third the cost.

In addition, the Scale storage technology allows the cluster to function as either a network attached storage (NAS) device or as a storage area network. And there is no single point of failure because the Scale storage system is based on a symmetrical architecture that makes all the nodes of the system aware of the management functions, as opposed to relying on a single master node.

Avnet is marketing the combined offerings to solution providers in the channel as the iSN1000 with pricing of a 3TB starter SAN configuration starting at $18,300.

I reached out to Limelight Networks later that day to ask what their offerings were on the HD and smart delivery circuit to which they said Limelight Deliver XD.

If both of these Content Delivery Networks (CDN for short) have adaptive delivery technologies, edge networks, fiber backbones, and support for multiple formats, then what makes them different? Let’s try to see what’s different by a quick comparison.

They both boast an edge network, which is just an easier way of saying “we have so many datacenters that we push the content to the closest server near the user, enabling a faster download.” “Closest” of course is a subjective term, and really refers to major metropolitan areas, as rural users don’t get the same response times as metropolitan users. Although it sounds easy to reroute content to the closest server, keep in mind this is per user, per account – where major accounts can have multiple sites that each can have 1 billion plus page views a month. That is a lot of re-routing which can quickly become a failure point if they have any weakness in their network. I’ll be the first to admit this is quite the feat, but they both do it. Maybe the next point will yield some differences.

The two networks both say they have an adaptive layering that can resample video based on type of equipment, baud rate, and other environmental situations as they occur. This sounds complicated because it is complicated. They are performing business intelligence on the fly to determine the best format at that moment. If you’re on a mobile or wireless connection, you’ll notice that you weave in and out of the “sweet spot” for connectivity. Now the CDN’s are saying that they have accounted for this and they’ll throttle down if your reception is poor, and throttle up if you get a better connection – all while re-sampling and without sacrificing quality. That’s awesome — but again they both have it, are they related?

They must be from the same lineage because again, Akamai and Limelight both support multiple formats of video like Silverlight, Flash, 3gp, and movie formats (i.e. MPEG or AVI). They both setup multiple areas for each type of file format, meaning you will have to keep track of 4 or 5 FTP logins, and they both have account control panels, that in my past experiences could have been tweaked to be more user friendly.

Analytics had always been an issue in CDN’s, at least for me, but now both are taking a page out of the same playbook, saying that they have full video analytics and reporting available in canned reports within their consoles.

Possibly the reporting is the difference between these two titans (besides price). I say possibly because I haven’t seen any examples of their new analytics yet, and don’t know if the reporting is simple access log information (like it used to be) or actual business intelligence as percentage viewed and audience involvement demographics.

If you had any experience with the NEW Akamai or Limelight let me know what they are in our comments area, especially if it pertains to their service and reporting!

As part of an effort to expand its footprint in the market, Sophos is using the same agent technology that it uses to manage its anti-virus software to deliver a new DLP offering.

From a solution providers perspective, the upside is the ability to deliver additional service to a customer while using the same Sophos delivery infrastructure. The potential downside is that some partners have been making money selling DLP software that Sophos now proposes to give away.

Sophos argues that its approach will prove to be more efficient than most existing DLP offerings that are dependent on network gateways to monitor e-mail messages. In contrast, Sophos software resides on each client, which Sophos argues is a more efficient approach than trying to monitor larger amounts of traffic flowing through a network gateway.

Of the 7 that Ki listed, 4 were Data Storage issues (cloud related of course), 2 were infrastructure and 1 was hardware supply chain based. This really has to make a manufacturer or service company wonder – who are my vendors and what safe guards do they have in place against catastrophes?

Speaking from my own experiences, I can say that I’ve hired vendors to handle many of my companies sensitive customer records like credit card processing, accounting, and marketing activities, with only reviewing their competitive bids, public information and, references from existing or past companies. Shockingly enough I’ve only gotten the real “dirt” on the vendor from past clients.

In one way or another we all outsource our business. Some things are forced upon us (like electricity), some are cost benefited (like your out-of-the-country development team), and others are out-right easier (like your Go-Daddy website kit for your corporate website – yes we know you have one!). Question is, did you actually read that service level agreement and/or terms of service or did you take it with a grain of salt? Odds are, they are protected but you aren’t.

Most likely your next outsourcing deal will be a Software as a Service company like PeopleSoft, so below I’ve listed 3 must reads that may help you reluctant managers in your next SaaS solution.