Jerry Melnick

Thanks again to those who joined us for last week’s webinar, "Windows Server 2008 High Availability: Technology Comparison." The on-demand recording of last week's webinar is now available to watch at your convenience (here). We had a lot of good questions from our attendees during the Q&A portion of the webinar, which are summarized below. Q: How do you determine when to use an HA solution vs. a DR solution? When it comes to availability vs. recovery, the most important question to ask is what are your recovery time objectives (RTO)? What is the amount of time your application can afford to be down? If the applications have strict requirements, then you want an availability solution. Disaster recovery is data replication often times with a failover capability, not availability. For critical applications, this may not be sufficient. Q: If I have an HA solution in pla... (more)

Citrix XenServer Makes the Grade with the Burton Group

The Burton Group recently completed a certification review of Citrix XenServer 5.5 with Citrix Essential 5.5 Platinum Edition. After reviewing XenServer against extensive production-ready criteria (27 required features, 42 preferred features and 24 optional features—these guys are thorough!) the Burton Group team found that XenServer is enterprise-production ready. Chris Wolf, virtualization expert and Senior Analyst at the Burton Group, said on his blog that “XenServer has demonstrated itself as a virtualization platform worthy of the demands of large scale enterprise environme... (more)

AMEX Gift Card Winners from the July 30th Webinar

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our webinar yesterday with Microsoft, Direct from Microsoft – The Top 10 Reason You Should Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 Now: Here are the AMEX Gift Card winners who were randomly selected from the attendee list: $50 AMEX Gift Card Winners: Jeff Wotring, PEBTF Scott Dukart, Lehman Brothers Raminder Chhatwal, Syswizards Gerard Wubben, Raxco Software Anthony Fabisiak, Fellowes Inc. $250 AMEX Gift Card Winner: Jon Maynard, Quality Distribution ... (more)

Understanding XenServer HA

Following the XenServer HA announcement, we’ve been approached with questions like “How exactly does XenServer HA work?” and “How does XenServer HA and everRun VM work together.” Rather than respond ourselves we thought it would be best to point to a few fellow bloggers who have already answered these questions. First, here’s a good post written by Anil Madhavapeddy at Citrix discussing how the overall architecture of XenServer HA works. Second, Scott Lowe has put together a great summary of why Citrix and Marathon worked together to develop XenServer HA. If you want more detai... (more)

Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009

A couple of weeks ago Gartner released their “Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009.” Each technology is defined as, “one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.” The technologies listed have been available for quite some time – many of which were present on last year’s list – but one that continues to move up in rank is virtualization. Considering the state of the economy, we anticipate this to be an area that will continue to flourish over the next 12-24 months as virtualization technology becomes feasible for businesses of all siz... (more)