Bedell Communications

SANpulse Technologies Inc. recently hosted a VIP Executive Briefing and Roundtable in Boston, Mass., to discuss storage industry trends with analysts, service providers, and practitioners. I talked with SANpulse CEO Peter Mehta about these trends and their end result. Here’s what Mehta and his colleagues have found:

• Data center consolidation continues to be a priority for many organizations as the result of acquisitions or the lack of power and space.
• Organizations are embracing virtualization at the server layer, but it’s just not happening at the storage layer. In fact, server virtualization is one of the top IT spending drivers for 2010, according to Bill Laliberte, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, who presented the findings of a recent ESG survey at the Roundtable.
• Enterprises like the concept of thin provisioning, says Mehta, but they aren’t using it for production applications. “Nobody wants to take the risk of running out of storage with production apps,” he says.
• Those companies that are using thin provisioning for production apps tend to have a charge back mechanism, but even that can create a point of contention because it must be decided if departments or other entities will be charged for what they actually use or what they’re allocated.
• Over allocation continues to be a problem. Even with the best storage technologies deployed, many enterprises still report storage utilization rates between 20 and 25% of their available storage resources, says Mehta.

According to Mehta, these trends point to the need for greater visibility into the IT and storage infrastructure. 

“Strategic IT design is now front and center,” he said. “A global view of the total IT environment, including virtualized platforms, storage and more, can help with resolving IT ownership and responsibilities, allowing enterprises to maximize the value of what they already own rather than relying on new capital projects to improve IT efficiency.”

– Crystal Bedell, Freelance Technical Copywriter & Content Strategist

I met with Security-as-a-Service vendor Zscaler last week to go over the highlights of its State of the Web — Q1 2010 Research Report. Among the key findings, Zscaler found that when it comes to browser security, consumers are better protected than enterprises.

Turns out more consumers are upgrading Internet Explorer than enterprises. According to Zscaler, nine-year-old IE6 still comprises more than 27% of enterprise Web traffic, while between 8-14% of consumers are using IE6. This is alarming when one considers the number of vulnerabilities the browser suffers from.

“Enterprises have the tools and technologies to push out a centralized upgrade,” says Mike Geide, Senior Security Researcher for Zscaler. “They just aren’t making it a priority.”

That’s not a surprise when you consider how busy IT staffs are these days. Unless an organization directly suffers as a result of an IE6 vulnerability, upgrading the Web browser is probably at the bottom of their to-do list.

Security technology marketers can help move that task to the top of the list by reminding network and security admins of the importance — and relative ease — of upgrading IE6 in a blog post or a short article published on your Web site. Even better: Keep the article vendor-neutral and submit it to the tech media. If your technologists are too busy to write the article, consider hiring a freelancer to ghostwrite it for you. – Crystal Bedell