HP ProLiant Blades hit the mark

The first Blade Server Magic Quadrant report from Gartner, released October 6, 2009, places HP in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers.

To learn more, view the Magic Quadrant report.

NetApp and Microsoft Announce 3 Year Pact Spanning Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Storage Management

NetApp and Microsoft Corp. announced a new three-year agreement. Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility.

HP Blade Servers lowers costs of Network Cabling and Administration with HP Virtual Connect

Pass-thrus are simple but require too many cumbersome cables and create complexity. Blade switches reduce the number of cables but add more for LAN and SAN administrators to manage. In both cases, multiple people are needed to perform very simple server tasks. Only HP offers a third choice—HP Virtual Connect.

Contact Paul.Sunok@agile360.com for more information.

Netapp Data ONTAP Fundamentals Training in Los Angeles Feb. 8-10

Course Description: Data ONTAP® 7.3 Fundamentals is an instructor-led course designed for those who provide support and administration on NetApp® storage systems running the Data ONTAP operation system. Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL®) file system, volumes, aggregates, qtrees, and quotas will be covered with Hands-on labs. 

Contact you Agile360 Sales Rep orsales@agile360.com for class information.

Citrix Synergy 2010: Early Bird 
Registration Ends February 2nd

Citrix Synergy 2010 takes place May 12-14, 2010 in San Francisco, CA. Early bird registration ends February, 2nd. Early Bird registration can save you up to $400 so sign up soon.

 
Citrix, VMware or NetApp Training Needs? We have you covered.

Contact your Agile360 Account Executive concerning your training needs for Citrix, VMware and NetApp solutions.

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The right hardware can make or break the success of a virtualization solution. You know Agile360 for their rock solid infrastructure architecture and implementation, but did you know we can provide the total solution including Servers (Blades or Rackmount) and Storage?

Getting virtualized systems to perform as promised can be a consulting challenge and costly. A critical element to the success of a virtualization solution is working with a hardware vendor who has broad and deep experience in the unique pitfalls and problems with virtualization.

Engaging Agile360 can help you ensure the best of breed choices, intelligent and efficient technologies, ease of use, quality and reliability for mission critical virtualization environments.

Call your Agile360 representative or e-mail sales@agile360.com for more information. 

Implementing V-Series Open Storage Controllers in EMC and HP mid-tier SAN environments reduces your storage capacity requirements and facilitates a quick payback of your V-Series investment. NetApp is so confident in their storage efficiency capabilities that they promise, under the terms of the ZIP (Zero Investment Program) promotion, that if you use NetApp V-Series to augment your EMC and HP SAN environments and don't see savings, they'll let you keep the equipment at no charge.

Agile360, a NetApp Virtualization Partner, has partnered with NetApp to help EMC and HP customers achieve greater efficiency on SAN storage systems that they have already deployed by recovering capacity that is inefficiently used and by reducing the ongoing rate of storage consumption. Increase Storage Utilization Now.

• Reduce ongoing spend for disks. Leverage De-Duplication on primary storage.
• Your storage costs will be lower—NetApp puts it in writing!
• NetApp will loan equipment so you can prove it to yourself.
• If not, then you keep the NetApp loaned equipment at no charge.*
  
  * See Terms and Conditions of the ZIP promotion for detailed information

Program details and online application form can be found herehttp://www.netapp.com/zip

Not every virtualization project is the same. They vary by size, choice of hypervisor or level of criticality. HP blade systems can help create a virtualized solution that can be tailored to meet your needs today and allow flexibility for the future.　 Together with HP’s Insight Dynamics management software and Virtual Connect technologies, HP Blade servers provide the ultimate on-demand capabilities that enhance any virtual server environment. 
Agile360 has recognized this and can help you create a virtual infrastructure that fit your needs.

Call your Agile360 representative or e-mail sales@agile360.com to discuss your specific needs and to get a better understanding on what HP Blade servers can do for you.

In today’s IT environment it’s normally a given that shared storage is a critical element of any virtual server environment. After all, even the entry level standard edition of VMWare’s latest version of ESX, vSphere, requires shared storage to enable higher level functionality like high availability. The next question now becomes, "which storage protocol should we use?" Fiber Channel (FC), iSCSI or NFS? 

Anyone who goes down this path immediately encounters numerous comparisons of these three protocols throughout the blogosphere, most of which focus on performance (throughput and CPU utilization). Generally speaking, fiber channel is currently the best performing and iSCSI and NFS are fairly similar assuming 1 GB Ethernet for the later two. However, the increased adoption of 10GB Ethernet ups the ante in the storage protocol performance war and will no doubt incite another round of benchmark tests and heavily opinionated blogs. The key factors that determine these performance results tend to be workload request size, disk read/write ratios and disk access type (randon or sequential). This is all great information, but what about functionality? 

For example, if an administrator has a requirement to create a vmdk that is larger than 2 TB what are his/her choices? Or if they must be able to shrink the datastores within their virtual environment, which protocol allows this flexibility? It quickly becomes apparent that the key consideration in thestorage protocol decision is functionality, not performance. The tables listed in section 2.4 of the Netapp Technical report TR-3749 provide functionality comparisons for VMware vSphere running on Netapp FC, iSCSI and NFS.