Virtualization services to state agencies

Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) has awarded Infinite Group a three-year contract to deliver virtualization services to state agencies. Under terms of the agreement, various Mississippi state agencies can engage Infinite Group to virtualize servers and migrate applications into ITS’ virtual data center environments, housed in the State Data Center facilities. Infinite Group will manage and implement server consolidations that will migrate physical servers to virtual machines, using VMware vSphere technology – reducing the number of physical servers, with resulting benefits in both physical footprint and energy savings.

Florida law firm replaces Novell Groupwise

One of Florida’s leading law firms, Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, P.A. (Stearns Weaver), has replaced its Novell Groupwise installation with Azaleos remotely managed e-mail services for Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise Server. The Azaleos service, which leverages patented technology to maintain e-mail data and infrastructure on the customer premise, provides dial-tone levels of e-mail availability for the firm’s more than 300 users. Stearns Weaver is a full service law firm with over 120 attorneys serving clients throughout Florida and nationwide. (Eugene Cabreja, IT Director for Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson.)

Power management software saves

As part of the City of Honolulu’s Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s Sustainability plan, the city’s deployment of Verdiem’s Surveyor PC power management software. Since deployment and power policy enforcement across 1,700 of the city’s 4500 PCs beginning in July 2008, Verdiem’s Surveyor has saved the City of Honolulu $30 per PC per year, reducing PC energy costs by more than 30 percent. As a result, the city has also achieved a payback from its purchase within 8 months of use and is accruing an ongoing positive return on investment. “At thirty cents per kilowatt hour, the City of Honolulu pays the highest energy rates in the country, so we deployed power management solutions as a key component of our Green-IT initiative and it’s already paying dividends,” said Gordon Bruce, Director/Chief Information Officer of IT for the City of Honolulu.

“The City of Seattle has set an ambitious agenda to address climate change and the results we are achieving with Verdiem in reducing the City’s PC energy consumption demonstrate, in a very tangible way, how we can collectively save on energy costs and protect our planet,” said Seattle’s Mayor Nickels.

Self-healing PCs at USPS

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has awarded a contract to Persystent Technologies to deploy Persystent Suite, which restores corrupted, changed, or missing operating system and application files in less than 30 seconds, will be used to image, protect and enforce desktop policies on approximately 150,000 PC workstations for the USPS nationwide. Persystent Suite ensures that PCs are always work-ready by identifying and resolving system problems every time the computer is started. With more than 32,000 post offices nationwide, USPS faces the challenge of managing thousands of remote PC workstations. In the past, USPS staff relied on remote IT help desk assistance for the majority of computer issues, which could take hours to resolve. With Persystent Suite, individual employees will be able to resolve computer issues caused by malware, system misconfiguration and viruses by simply rebooting the machine – essentially giving them a self-healing PC. As a result, USPS expects to reduce PC downtime and the time and expense associated with re-imaging a failed PC. 

Security and compliance process support

Connectria Corporation, a managed hosting and data center services provider has adopted Tripwire Enterprise by Tripwire. Tripwire Enterprise allows Connectria to support security and compliance processes across all its world-class data center locations. The net result for the company is increased system availability and customer satisfaction. Two of Connectria's strong differentiators are its high degree of security and cost-efficiency. With partners such as Cisco, Dell, Lotus and VMware, it is important to establish proactive solutions that continue to mitigate risk. Tripwire Enterprise provides automated detection, enhanced file integrity monitoring, compliance assessments and remediation processes for any change or configuration that seems suspect or at risk for non-compliance. (Rich Waidmann, President and CEO, Connectria)

Anticipate IT investment

According to the latest CDW IT Monitor, an increasing number of IT decision makers from small and medium-size business sectors anticipate investment in the next six months. The latest survey suggests, 29 percent of small business IT decision makers expect budget increases in the next six months, an increase of seven percentage points from February. Additionally, 18 percent of medium-size business IT decision makers anticipate hiring in the next six months, an increase of six percentage points since February. For the first time in eight months, this reading remained flat with the previous IT Monitor, indicating that sentiment may have stabilized. The CDW IT Monitor is based on an online survey of at least 1,000 IT decision makers from businesses of all sizes and all sectors of government. www.cdwitmonitor.com.

Meanwhile... more than 25 percent of companies are increasing their investments in information technology (IT) this year, according to the Value of IT Investments survey of more than 500 IT professionals in the US. Conducted by ISACA, a nonprofit association serving 86,000 IT governance, audit and security professionals in 160 countries, the survey also found that only 16 percent of companies are making across-the-board cuts in IT spending and 14 percent are freezing at current levels.

Federal Government to spend $135 million on technology

Tech Data is holding its annual TechEDG Government and Education Conference at which resellers, vendors, industry experts and Tech Data’s government and education services team will discuss trends and share strategies for capitalizing on an estimated $135 billion in technology spending in the government and education markets for 2009.

High performance computing

Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS) has selected Voltaire Grid Director InfiniBand switches and 10 Gigabit Ethernet gateways for a high performance computing system based on products from Sun Microsystems. CU-CCMS is a new world-class computational center dedicated to the automotive and transportation industries located at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR). Computational simulations that previously required many weeks of processor time should be completed within hours, saving time and costs. In one study with an automotive supplier, CU-CCMS researchers reduced turnaround time for new product simulation by over 80 percent. In another case, prototype development that would have required 12 weeks was replaced with a simulation that requires less than 3 weeks — a 75 percent reduction in the time required from concept to results. (James H. Leylek, Ph.D, CU-CCMS executive director.)

One-to-Watch: Replify virtualized products accelerate applications over wide area and mobile connections without the need for costly hardware. http://www.replify.com