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How Virtual Can Your Organization Get?

Posted by Chris Silva on July 31, 2009

Chrissilva

The answer, based on research recently completed by Doug Washburn and I, entirely. With the help of Christine Perkett, President and founder of PerkettPR — an organization of all virtual employees — we studied the IT infrastructure, productivity, and green benefits of PerkettPR's last ten years as an organization reliant on geographically scattered workers and reliable remote access to systems and information.

True to the topic's virtual focus, the entire idea began with a virtual exchange. I was initially intrigued by a Tweet that Christine submitted to her 12,000+ user following on Twitter, pondering the green effects and savings her company had garnered over the past ten years as a virtual organization.

Some of the findings in the document center on what seem, in Perkett's opinion, like common sense, but aren't always readily apparent to workers or to organizations:

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CA and its Mainframe 2.0 Program

Posted by Site Administrator on July 27, 2009

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Peter O'Neill

As part of my research around the IT management software market, I spent some days with CA the other week and met several of their customers as well. One of the topics we discussed was the mainframe. There is clearly resurgence in interest in using the mainframe in many enterprises. IBM’s System z mainframe family is mentioned often by our clients as a strong consolidation platform to capitalize on the trend to do more with less: the zSeries not only runs legacy apps, but it is capable of consolidation hundreds of commodity servers under Linux. However, enterprises are cautious about using their mainframes because of shortage of mainframe management resources: not software but people.

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HP Acquires Cluster File Storage Software Vendor IBRIX

Posted by Andrew Reichman on July 17, 2009

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Andrew Reichman
Today, HP announced that they will be acquiring the startup cluster file storage software firm IBRIX in a deal with few disclosed details. Congrats to HP for making another interesting acquisition in the clustered storage space, following their Feb. 2007 acquisition of Polyserve and their October 2008 acquisition of Lefthand. IBRIX makes software that allows users to cluster many nodes of storage (either industry standard servers or iSCSI/FC SAN arrays) for use in high performance global namespace file storage.  IBRIX’s customer base includes some 175 firms, generally in the high performance compute (HPC), video rendering/animation, and oil and gas exploration spaces.

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How Will Green IT Evolve? In Short, From 1.0 To 2.0

Posted by Doug Washburn on July 10, 2009

DougwashburnIn many of my recent conversations with CIOs and IT infrastructure and ops professionals, I’m noticing an increasing interest in understanding how green IT will evolve.

Why do IT leaders want this vision? In the short-term, IT leaders want to ensure they’re not missing out any easy opportunities for savings they haven’t thought of yet. And over the long-term, IT leaders developing their green IT strategies want to strive for a broad scope of projects that reduce the environmental impacts — and of course costs — within and outside of IT.

Forrester expects green IT to evolve from 1.0 (“green for IT") to 2.0 (“IT for green"). 1.0 is about reducing the environmental impacts of owning, operating and disposing of IT assets; 2.0 is about using technology to enable greener business practices. My recent “TechRadar™ For I&O Professionals: Green IT 1.0 Technologies, Q2 2009” discusses 1.0 technologies in depth (InfoWorld offers a great recap of the seven technologies that we believe are poised for the most success). And a framework with examples of green IT 2.0 in action can be found in my “The Rise Of The Green Enterprise: A Primer For IT Leadership's Involvement.”

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