Network Architecture

Most white papers and webinars available on the Internet about choosing enterprise middleware focus the selection process around criteria such as licensing costs, technical coverage of long lists of specified functionalities, and vendor viability. While these criteria may have been suitable in the past, the experience of many enterprise architects leading J2EE projects over the past few years suggest that they are not enough. What’s missing? People costs.

Business and IT executives should not have to choose between their desire to innovate for future growth and the desire to avoid disrupting current operations. Enterprise innovation that embraces and extends existing infrastructure and applications is possible through modern software architectures such as web services and SOA – as long as those investments perform competitively when measured against alternative platforms and they are able to be modernized to participate in these architectures.

Staples’ information systems play a critical role in delivering on their brand promise 'that was easy.' As part of a recent strategic imperative, Staples recently embarked on a major modernization of its systems architecture and supporting processes. The goal was to ensure IT’s systems could scale with the company’s continued global expansion without sacrificing the quality of the brand experience. One critical target for modernization was Staples’ enterprise job scheduling processes and systems. After researching the top software providers in this space, Staples selected Tidal Software to support its efforts to centralize and streamline automated batch processing.

With 50+ percent of all business processes leveraging batch operations, it is essential to keep your batch production running smoothly in order to keep your business running smoothly. Whether you are consolidating datacenter operations, moving apps to more cost-effective platforms, or transitioning from customized to packaged applications, learn how you can simplify and lower the cost of batch management with a single interface to all batch processes across platforms and applications and more.

This case study highlights how one of the world's leading manufacturing companies employed a Mission Critical architecture to protect their most important systems. Learn how this customer achieved 99.99% availability of their systems for 4 straight years. As a result of adopting a high availability strategy, this HP customer saved 97 million Euros, by avoiding lost downtime.

This white paper looks at HP's approach to Data Center Transformation and how it can help enterprise data centers reduce costs, manage risks, and support business growth. Learn about the 4 key factors which should influence your data center transformation strategy. See first hand how HP embarked on a three-year transformation program for its own data centers. This ambitious program involved rationalizing 85 data centers into just six global ones- with tangible and measurable benefits.

While many enterprise architecture (EA) programs may be less than effective or threatened by extinction, the EA discipline is still an important set of skills and processes that improve IT decision-making and CIO effectiveness. Yet, after decades of architecting systems, the advent of several EA frameworks, and the many definitions available for the term EA, we still strive to understand what EA is, what it does, and what it looks like when it is successful.

Microsoft, together with Unisys Corporation, completed benchmark testing of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 running on the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database software. Benchmark results demonstrate that Microsoft Dynamics CRM can scale to meet the needs of an enterprise-level, mission-critical workload of 24,000 concurrent users while maintaining performance at sub-second response times.

Microsoft has made significant enhancements to the architecture of Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0 to improve network performance. Test results demonstrate network bandwidth utilization improvements of up to 94%. Improvements were evaluated in the number of round trips, bytes sent, and bytes received. Because the bandwidth utilization associated with a page can change after the first time the page is loaded, both initial (cold) and subsequent (warm) page loads were tested.

Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level virtualization tools are free or low-cost, and there are many benefits to virtualization (including saving money).

This document provides an overview of data center consolidation methodologies, the general impact of each method, and how Stratavia’s Data Palette helps data center consolidation initiatives.

BlueArc’s Titan Architecture creates a revolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale throughput, IOPS and capacity well beyond conventional software-based file servers. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to 4 petabytes of usable, tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements and provide a competitive advantage for business processes by consolidating applications while ensuring optimal performance.

Increasing power demands and space limitations in the data center have begun to transition server virtualization technologies from luxuries to necessities. Server virtualization provides a path toward server consolidation that results in significant power and space savings, while also offering high availability and system portability. Today, vendors are building hardware and software platforms that can deliver virtualization solutions at near-native performance.

Today’s enterprise faces a convergence of data protection challenges. Addressing them means extending online data retention, enabling deduplication, and simplifying operations. This report outlines how ContentAware VTL and deduplication solutions from SEPATON uniquely address these challenges.

Cooling for IT wiring closets is rarely planned and typically only implemented after failures or overheating occur. Historically, no clear standard exists for specifying sufficient cooling to achieve predictable behavior within wiring closets. An appropriate specification for cooling IT wiring closets should assure compatibility with anticipated loads, provide unambiguous instruction for design and installation of cooling equipment, prevent oversizing, maximize electrical efficiency, and be flexible enough to work in various shapes and types of closets. This paper describes the science and practical application of an improved method for the specification of cooling for wiring closets.

Craig Mathias, Principal of the Farpoint Group, explores the advent of cooperative control, an innovative new class of wireless infrastructure from Aerohive Networks. Aerohive’s cooperative control architecture gives you all of the benefits of autonomous access points and controller-based infrastructures, without the high OPEX or CAPEX associated with either approach. Cooperative control architecture represents an innovative approach to wireless LAN systems, one that incorporates a number of interesting features and corresponding benefits.

All companies are different, but the value of their network to their business varies little. In fact, as a business grows, its network grows not only in size and complexity, but also in significance and value. Very quickly, the network not only supports the company, it is the company. This is obvious for e-businesses and other entities that are highly dependent on their website for driving revenues.

Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to automatically manage the resources of the physical server to efficiently support multiple operating systems, each supporting different applications. This IDC Technology Assessment presents IDC's view of how virtualization technologies are impacting and will continue to impact operating environments and the operating environment market near- and long-term.

This paper introduces and describes the principal concepts and techniques involved with DNS best practices.

Virtualization and workload management are essential technologies for maximizing scalability, availability and value on high-end computing systems, and Itanium(r) 2-based servers offer many options. One is SWsoft Virtuozzo, a proven, software-based virtualization solution for consolidating Linux and Windows applications. 

Virtual appliances have recently been gaining notoriety with IT organizations. These pre-packaged ready to deploy instances of an applicationcreated in a virtual machine or environment can provide significant management savings. While they can be a powerful IT tool, not all virtual appliances are created equally.

VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and quickly delivers signification ROI. This paper describes commonly used TCO models and looks at several case studies that apply TCO models to virtualization projects. Learn more.

The Nemertes Research PilotHouse Awards provide insight on the performance of technology vendors, according to feedback from IT decision makers who use their products or services.

Before simply delaying new hardware purchases, organizations need to assess the impact on both capital budgets and operational budgets.

HP CloudSystem Matrix enables organizations to realign traditional technology silos into virtual pools sharable by different applications and flexible enough to change as business needs evolve.