Monday was the opening of really, three different EMC events.  EMC World is an annual event held for the EMC user community, Global Partner Summit the annual update for the worldwide partner community of EMC, and the SE conference for the EMC and partner presales technical community. An estimated 15,000 are in Las Vegas this [...]

EMC World is upon us. EMC World begins Monday in Las Vegas.  As partner shows go, this is one of the big ones.  EMC World is actually comprised of three integrated events: Global Partner Summit on Monday is focused on partners like Datalink. Global Technical Summit for EMC and partner SEs VMworld for partners and [...]

A mentor of mine in the consulting business once told me that consultants have a “Golden Searchlight,” which could be shined on issues that had been either inadvertently overlooked or carefully hidden. But, once the Searchlight revealed an issue, it had to be dealt with, no matter how painful or embarrassing, so the advice was [...]

Monitoring is more important than ever in this era of virtualization and cloud. Good performance data is critical to getting the most leverage from your servers while maintaining stability, and it’s getting harder than ever to work without performance data. As you build out your private cloud, you’ll find monitoring critical to measuring and reporting [...]

Private cloud initiatives are moving up the CIO’s priority list, but very few seem to get to production in a timely manner. Here is a list of some of the headwinds these projects encounter: Internal Resistance – While your business users are eager for the self-service and faster provisioning that a private cloud would offer, [...]

Recently, Datalink attended the HIMSS 2013 annual conference and exhibition where the focus of this year’s event was on the convergence of three key elements: technology, health IT reform, and delivery of care.  As an exhibitor and participant, we had a chance to interact with some of the largest healthcare systems in the country and [...]

Article Summary: You may be the CIO or IT manager for a fairly complex IT environment. You also may already have begun moving your data center to a private cloud paradigm that offers greater efficiency and agility to meet your company’s needs. While there are still a few challenges to work through, most days seem [...]

A data center relocation (DCR) project can seem a daunting effort to any organization staring it in the face. The need for DCR may be the result of a merger/acquisition, expiration of data center lease, renewal of a provider’s contract, or the fact that you’ve run out of space, power or cooling. Whatever the root [...]

I have talked to many clients recently who have experienced the challenge of trying to replace a rare skill set within their organization. Unexpectedly watching that skill set and knowledge walk out the door puts a strain on operations, and usually puts high business impact efforts on hold.  Those same clients are feeling the same [...]

You have heard us talk about the energy around the virtual data center and how orchestration is an important component in the drive toward IT as a service (ITaaS) or cloud.  In fact, we built our “proving what’s doable in the cloud” campaign and Datalink on Demand Labs Cloud using those solution stacks.  One of [...]