The term "managed hosting" describes the provision of a ready to use IT stack including hardware and infrastructure software for the deployment of applications. Providers house the infrastructure in central data centres accessed by customers over the internet. In the past this has usually been on the basis of hardware servers dedicated to individual customers, however the increasing use of virtualisation has allowed managed hosting providers to reduce costs by sharing infrastructure between customers, creating the earliest versions of what the industry now refers to as compute clouds. Computing platforms provisioned and managed by specialists provide higher service levels, greater ease of secure access and more manageable costs than many organisations are able to achieve internally. ...
15/06/2009 | Quocirca_-_Managed_Hosting_in_Europe_-_June_2009.pdf | VIEW
I recently heard a worrying statistic : It is predicted that by 2012, the amount of data being stored will double every 11 hours. I have to say that I view this with a healthy dose of scepticism, but whichever way you look at it, there's still going to be a lot of data around. ...
15/05/2009 | IM - datasort.pdf | VIEW
The 'green' hype seems so last year. Today's poor market conditions have refocused business minds on survival, rather than ensuring organisations have a solid environmental plan. Despite this, Quocirca expects to see a lot more green messaging in the coming months. ...
30/03/2009 | Green IT isn't dead yet....pdf | VIEW
How do you take the complexity out of systems management, to make it easy enough for small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) to use? ...
06/02/2009 | Simplifying systems management for SMEs.pdf | VIEW
Thin client computing has been around for many years - predating the PC, if you include standard green screen terminals. However, the real push with thin client devices was during the late 1990s, when the likes of NCD, Wyse and IGEL pushed their devices as being the antidote to the high price, low stability and variable management costs of the standard PC. ...
02/09/2008 | Thin client computing smartens up.pdf | VIEW
Software Asset Management (SAM) has often been seen as a necessary evil, used to ensure that software licences are used within contractual limits, so avoiding the possibility of fines should a company be found to have a copy of an application running somewhere without a valid licence. ...
01/08/2008 | SAM - Friend or Foe.pdf | VIEW
On the face of it, datacentre consolidation and rationalisation may not sound like a prime hunting ground for new business. After all, the whole reason for carrying out the process is to discover under-used hardware assets and either squeeze more out of them, or get rid of them entirely. ...
31/07/2008 | Opportunities to minimise.pdf | VIEW
Although the cost of storage devices has plummeted over the last few years, the cost of managing stored data continues to grow. Unfortunately, an organization's predilection for creating new data does not abate, and many see data volumes doubling every year to 18 months. ...
30/07/2008 | Master Data Management and deduplication.pdf | VIEW
Recent Quocirca research shows that few data centre managers know how much power their data centres are using - which makes it difficult for them to come up with a well-constructed plan to optimise power consumption and enhance their "green" credentials. Even those who have access to the power bill do not seem to have any granular breakdown of how that power is being used. With data centres representing the greatest energy spend for most large organisations, such a lack of visibility should not be allowed to continue. ...
20/07/2008 | Measuring the Data Centre's Green Power.pdf | VIEW
Over the past month or so, I've attended two Microsoft events. At the MMS event, discussion focused on an approach to virtualisation that showed a greater appreciation of the problems than I would have expected from Microsoft at this stage of its embryonic Hyper-V play. ...
30/06/2008 | A game of two halves.pdf | VIEW
