Virtual Tape Library – Enterprise Edition

Enterprise Data Centers manage large heterogenous environments often with hundreds of servers running various operating systems and applications, generating pegabytes of data. This makes backup and recovery operations complex and time consuming point where many organizations struggle to complete backup in the required time.

Since 2003, FalconStor Software has been helping organizations address this business challenge with what has become the number 1 virtual library (VTL) solution on the market proven by major OEM partners such as EMC, IBM, Sun, Spectra Logic and COPAN Systems. IT gurus are able to leverage their origonal investments in backup infrastructures and processes while improving their quality of their data protection.. HOLLA!!

Register via RedLegg’s live product demo on the bottom right hand side www.redlegg.com. And other information is also available here http://www.redlegg.com/files/virtual-tape-library.php. Hot yes I know.

Happy Thanksgiving/Black Friday etc!!!!

Wallet/Purse of the Future?

Leave your wallet/purse and keys at home.  In the not to distant future we could see our Cell Phones purchasing things from stores, opening doors, getting us on public transportation and more.  Some of these thigns have been tried in the US already but didn’t catch interest in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.  15% of people in Japan and South Korea already use their cell phones to make purchases and use public transportation. 

There are some security risks with this obviously but aren’t there always risks with anything, even carrying your wallet?  Some one could steal your phone and it would be identity theft heaven for a theif.  This could happen with your wallet too so does it really matter?  They could add something like a fingerprint reader to verify who is the owner of the phone to make it more secure as well as a password. 

A hotel in New Zealand has installed locks that are opened by your cell phone and in Asia people use their cell phones to purchase things from stores.  The technology they use for this is called near-field communication.  It’s a secure radio frequency that’s similar to the techonology used in the scanners and passes that let people go through the tollway without having to stop and pay cash. 

Consumers will have less to carry and less to worry about with this technology.  It could be the future of how people pay for things and get into their homes.  There is only 10% support in the US for this type of technology and no partners who will purchase the technology yet and put it into phones because there isn’t a lot of support for it here in America yet.  In a few years this technology might pick up, but for now if you want it your going to have to move to Asia.

The Online Cloud and Where Your Data Actually Goes

Where do all the pictures and files go that you save on Google, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc…  They don’t just float around the outside of your computer and they aren’t floating around in the sky.  They are stored in data centers.  These data centers are all over the world.  They are huge warehouses in most cases with server racks that are the size of refridgerators.  Most companies replicate the data several times on servers all over the world so that nothing happens to it. 

Your pictures and files aren’t stored in just one place but replicated in several different places all over the world and even several different places in the data center.  They do this so that if one data center goes down you won’t lose your data.  It’s what they do to protect your data.

Not many data centers will give you a tour though because of the security risks it poses.  Having people in the data center that don’t know about the complexity and cost of everything in the data center poses security and financial risks.  Some clod companies have armed guards, retina scans and other security measures in place to ensure protection of the data centers. 

This is the future of technology and even though people don’t trust cloud computing 100% yet, it is going to be the standard soon.  It saves energy, saves space on your own computers or systems and let’s you have access to it wherever you are.  Companies like Google and Amazon guarentee that your data will be available 99.9% of the time so it doesn’t make it 100% reliable but 99.9% is pretty good.

Cisco Bumps Up Bid for Tandberg to $3.41 Billion

This post continues the 10/21 post. 

Cisco has bumped its bid to buy Tandberg from $3 Billion to $3.41 Billion after initial offer was rejected by Tandberg’s Shareholders.  The offer will  be taken off the table on Dec. 1, 2009 if Tandberg doesn’t accept it and Cisco says it will look for other ways to expand its hand in the video conferencing market. 

40% of the shareholders have pre-accepted the new offer Cisco has made.  Video conferencing is a growing technology in businesses to cut down on travel expenses.  Also, if a company is trying to go GREEN then this technology helps them in that way as well.

94% of Healthcare Not Ready To Comply With Security Regulations

Recent surveys have shown that 94% of Healthcare organizations are not ready to comply with the government’s r3egualtions that will be enforced in February.  This comes from the HITECH Act, which extends the HIPAA security and privacy safeguards and will enforce more penalties, fees and audits.

Most hospitals know that there are deficiencies in their privacy and security areas for HIPAA.  The problem is they don’t have the budgets to get up to compliance with the HITECH Act right now. 

With 79% of the Healthcare community not having an independent assessment or audit program in place to determine how adequate things are in their system.  57% of the Healthcare community said they have known deficiencies concerning privacy or security or both.  Only 29% have said they haven’t had any deficiencies.

Most Healthcare organizations have had one or more breaches of security in which protected health information was stolen in the past two years.  90% had a breach of at least one protected health record.

No management support is the reason for 55% of the slow compliance goals. 

60% of organizations say they have only partially implemented a risk-based program for protecting the privacy of PHI (protected health information).

50% don’t have adequate staff training for privacy and security.

45% say they haven’t effectively developed a privacy policy that clearly summarizes appropriate use and sharing of PHI.

50% said they may need assistance from a third party to conduct a detailed risk assessment.

45% need outside support for staff training

42% will need assistance in implementing procedures for fielding complaints.

39% will rely on the help in developing the privacy program.

These numbers are alarming given that they need to be compliant in only a few months! 

Let RedLegg help get you get compliant with our Managed Services to help you save money and time!!!

RTLS Programs Could Save Healthcare Organizations Hundreds of Thousands of $$$!!!

A recent study shows that RTLS (Real-Time Location System)Programs could save Healthcare Organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars!!!  This technology tracks medical equipment like hospital beds and wheelchairs to crash carts and IV stands etc….  

The study showed that nurses spend at least an hour a day looking for equipment and this technology has cut down that time down to about 10 minutes a day.   This technology also can be used to properly bill insurance companies and patient showing what was used for the patient while they were there.   The data collected from this technology can be analyzed to help patient flow. This technology is saving HUGE $$$$ for Healthcare providers and also improving the care of patients because nurses have more time to be with the patients.  This technology will be in hospitals everywhere in the immediate future it looks like.

Aaron Returns Home From Afghanistan

He is the bald head guy in the interview with the tiger stripped jacket lady. The one without the kidos.

http://www.wics.com/newsroom/top_stories/videos/wics_vid_917.shtml

Welcome home Aaron! Yahoo!!!

RTLS Technology.. Oh my!

A study, conducted by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), analyzed the use of  RTLS  (real time location system)  at a Lumberton, N.C. hospital.

According to the results, soon to be published in the Journal of Clinical Engineering, the technology, used to track mobile medical equipment, saved the hospital nearly $750,000 in indirect costs, as well as reducing the time spent by staff in searching for medical equipment by 96 percent.

Other benefits were noticed, researchers said, in improved clinical outcomes – driven by increased operational efficiency – and improved staff morale.  Oh my happy employees that is important!!!

“The level of data generated by these systems has the potential to profoundly change the management of technology and the delivery of patient care,” said Barbara Christe, the lead researcher for the study team and associate professor and program director of Biomedical Engineering Technology at IUPUI.

RTLS systems like those developed by RadarFind, based in Morrisville, N.C., are being deployed in hospitals around the country to keep tabs on all kinds of medical equipment, from beds and wheelchairs to crash carts and IV stands. Such systems, employing radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, allow staff to quickly locate equipment in an emergency and cut down on wasteful uses or lost items.

According to SRMC officials involved in the study, nurses spent at least an hour a day searching for equipment before the RadarFind technology was introduced. Using the technology, the 120 nurses at the hospital were able to save the hospital roughly $750,000 in indirect costs – and use that extra hour to spend more time with their patients.

According to the study, nursing staff could do their jobs more efficiently because they could quickly find “hidden” equipment, improving both the caregiving process and nurses’ morale.

“As a former nurse I understand the frustration experienced by nursing staff when they must search for equipment,” said Joanne Anderson, president and chief executive officer of SRMC. “This technology supports our nurses and enables them to spend more time caring for patients, ensuring that our patients receive the utmost quality of care and benefiting hospital staff morale.”

In addition, the study found that clinical engineering staff reduced time spent searching for equipment from four hours a day to less than 10 minutes, while preventive maintenance for tagged equipment improved from a monthly rate of 90 percent to a consistent 100 percent. Also, the RadaFind technology – which uses a color-coded system to identify items available, in use and in need of cleaning – allowed the hospital to improve its infection control measures.

The study will be used to identify steps that hospital officials can take to increase the benefits of RTLS technology, including improving inventory processes, accuracy in billing patients and insurance companies for equipment used and storage policies for vital medical equipment. In addition, data collected by the technology can be analyzed for patient flow improvements.

“The transformational results attainable by implementing our suite of automated tracking solutions for hospitals are influencing process changes throughout the facility, as evidenced by this study,” said Michael Nelson, president of RadarFind, which was recently acquired by TeleTracking Technologies, Inc., a provider of patient flow automation solutions. “The combination of technologies from RadarFind and TeleTracking offers hospitals the most comprehensive answer to the need for tracking and accountability, and reducing unnecessary costs while improving efficiencies and overall patient care.”

For more information about RTLS or any other heathcare technology check out http://www.redlegg.com/files/healthcare.php ASAP!!!

Why are Virtualization Services Necessary?!??

Well I guess they really are not.. Nothing is necessary Nelly.. but here is the scoop on why they are a good idea.

First of all a virtual “service” is an application that executes a specific function at one of the layers of abstraction within your infrastructure.  So thinking of your infrastructure as three core components – server, network and storage.  At and in between each layer will live a virtual interface- and within those interfaces, services will be presented to the surrounding layers.

So for storage virtualization, the point is to be able to treat an underlying storage infrastructure via a common view-making the physical nature of that infrastructure to the higher layers and so much more from the user.  The point of storage virtualization is to be able to migrate the management and data management issues created by direct physical requirements.  You want the server layer to not need to know or care where its data physically resides, only where it is requests are being satisfied according to policy.

Data migrations are a perfect example of a service in a virtual world.  Before virtualization when IT Admins migrate data  and the associated users/applications between storage devices it requires meticulous planning downtime and a lot of prayer.  It something goes wrong, and it usually does, the cost can be huge.  If we create a virtual layer of storage and needed to migrate 5TB of data from one array (which is coming off lease for example) to another and were able to do it online, non disruptively that of course would be ideal.

So what are some good services to execute? Well it depends on your world… I’ll add some crazy options on here later. Stay tuned.

 

HP Buying 3Com to Push Competition w/ Cisco

HP is buying 3Com for $2.7 Billion!!!  This looks like it’s a counter move from HP to compete more with Cisco’s Networking business.  Cisco has recently started a new line of servers which will now compete against HP’s server line and Cisco also partnered up with EMC for storage solutions (in a previous blog from last week) and EMC competes against HP Storage.  Cisco looks to be making moves to gain market share in the Datacenter and HP looks like they aren’t backing down! 

With this move HP is broadening its capabilities for networking solutions past their ProCurve line.  They will start producing a new line of Ethernet Switch and Router Solutions.  HP also gets to take advantage of 3Com’s H3C Enterprise Networking Portfolio and it’s TippingPoint Portfolio of Network Security Products.

These moves will essentially make a 3-way competition for the Datacenter market between HP, Cisco and Brocade (who just acquired Foundry Networks last year).

3Com has the broadest portfolio out of any vendors except for Cisco but they are underappreciated because of the way they pulled out of the enterprise market a decade ago and left a bad taste in the mouths of networking professionals.  HP can change that because of the distribution capabilities they have and their brand recognition. 

All in all an exciting move in the IT world that will give Cisco some competition!!! 

Let us know if you would like to talk about this more or anything else. – Jack