The US Company Nimble Storage founded by and led by storage industry veterans, recognised this growing gap [...]]]> The growth of virtualization and server consolidation has compounded the need for storage to simultaneously deliver superior performance, increased capacity, and simplified data protection. Traditional storage architectures are unable to comprehensively meet these demands.

The US Company Nimble Storage founded by and led by storage industry veterans, recognised this growing gap in the marketplace and quickly became the fastest growing storage vendor in history. Their patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL™) is the first storage architecture designed from the ground up to seamlessly integrate SSDs with high-capacity disks, delivering affordable performance, integrated backup and disaster recovery, and pain-free operations. Nimble Storage solutions are built to eliminate the compromise among performance, capacity, ease of use, and price.

Performance and Capacity Efficiency: Nimble’s CASL architecture coalesces random writes into a single RAID stripe, improving write perfor­mance by 10x -100x compared to traditional systems. Hot data is served from flash which responds to workload changes within milliseconds instead of hours or days. Their variable block-based compression technology delivers capacity savings of 30%-75% with no impact on system performance. Combined with highly efficient snapshots, thin provisioning, and zero-copy clones, Nimble offers the industry’s best primary storage density, all in a 3U form factor.

Instant Backups and Restores: Nimble Storage eliminates the constraints of traditional backup solutions. Thousands of snapshots can be stored with minimal space consumption, eliminating backup windows, allowing for more frequent recovery points, and enabling quick and efficient replication over a WAN. Nimble integration simplifies application-consistent backups for Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware. Backups and restores can be completed in seconds, improving application-level recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives.

For more information on Nimble’s CS-Series converged storage array, technical highlights and specifications call our team on 020 7871 0800.

Enterprise cloud deployments are growing in popularity, but the wide area network (WAN) is often overlooked as more applications and data are moved into the cloud. Unlike hardware-based WAN optimisation, Virtual WAN optimisation makes it easy to optimise application and data access between enterprise data centres, the cloud, and branch offices.

Silver Peak’s VX appliances (Virtual WAN Optimisation Solution) are software versions of the company’s award winning NX physical appliances. It supports Silver Peak’s complete spectrum of real-time optimisation techniques, which optimise Wide Area Network performance by overcoming common bandwidth, latency and network quality challenges.

Silver Peak’s VX appliances leverage all the benefits of server virtualisation, including:

Ease of deployment / mobility

•  Instantly deploy Silver Peak’s WAN optimization technology anywhere in the world; easily re-locate appliances as needed

Reduced IT costs

• Consolidate different applications onto common hardware platforms

High availability

• Leverage existing high availability tools inherent in virtual solutions (e.g. VMware / VMotion)

Flexible platform options

• Deploy WAN optimisation on any hardware platform of choice, including industry standard x86 servers or other custom platforms.

This video shows how Silver Peak’s virtual WAN optimisation can quickly and easily be deployed to optimise Verizon’s Terremark cloud.

Silver Peak Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture and virtual WAN optimization enables and optimizes cloud deployments.

For more information on Silver Peak’s VX appliances speak to Response Data Communications Team

Response Data Communications Product Portfolio Suite Includes; Senetas ethernet encryption, Silver Peak data centre class WAN Optimisation, Isilon Systems scale-out storage, AeroHive enterprise Wifi, Arista Networks data centre switching, Network Instruments network protocol  analysis and trending tools, Paloalto Networks next-generation firewalls, ShoreTel’s unified communications, voice mobility and enterprise contact centre solutions.

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There are some perennial IT trends that crop up each year about this time, and in networking, IPv6 always seems to be in the mix.  Well, after many years, I think IPv6 is moving from a check-box item which “I’ll promise to do one day,” to being [...]]]> Courtesy of David Hughes, Silver Peak Systems Inc.

There are some perennial IT trends that crop up each year about this time, and in networking, IPv6 always seems to be in the mix.  Well, after many years, I think IPv6 is moving from a check-box item which “I’ll promise to do one day,” to being something where customers are now saying “you guys better be nearly finished because we want to start testing.”

2012 is going to be an interesting year from an IPv6 point-of-view. I think most enterprises are a long way from deploying IPv6, but a few are being forced down-the-path, in particular, in the “Web” vertical. If you look at the big Internet companies and service providers, it is those types of environments that require a lot of IP addresses, and perhaps even more in parts of the world outside the United States.  Those are the places where things are moving towards IPv6 more rapidly.

For the average medium-sized enterprise in the US, we are still a few years away from where IPv6 matters.  However, there is a cohort of companies in the US where it’s becoming important and something they need to move on now.  A few years ago, it was predicted that the Federal space would drive the adoption of IPv6.  And while they are still asking for it, I am not sure that is the first place we will see widespread deployments of IPv6.  It will start with the Web companies.

IPv6 support comes naturally with Silver Peak’s architecture.  Because we already utilize tunnels for optimization, our architecture is ideally suited to help customers migrate from IPv4 to IPv6.   Today, Silver Peak carries and optimizes IPv6 traffic that is being tunneled in IPv4, which is the majority of IPv6 traffic today.  Even though there are a number of different flavors of IPv4 and IPv6 inter-working, WAN optimization appliances can certainly play a critical role.  If you are looking at native IPv6 clients and you want to get them across the network between two islands of IPv6, Silver Peak will be able to carry IPv6 native packets across our IPv4 tunnels to the other side.

So as you plan for IPv6, keep WAN optimization in mind.  It may turn out to be a valuable part of the solution, rather than yet another networking device to IPv6 enable.

Why? Because we’re PASSIONATE about RAISING much needed MONEY to help THOUSANDS of suffering CHILDREN across the country, every penny helps prevent [...]]]> On 7th October team Response Data Communications are sleeping outside, yes outside with no shelter. Expecting the worse of our British weather it will certainly be cold and maybe wet and windy – eek!!

Why? Because we’re PASSIONATE about RAISING much needed MONEY to help THOUSANDS of suffering CHILDREN across the country, every penny helps prevent innocent youths from ending up with dismal lives on the streets.
By taking part in this notably crazy exercise Byte Night 2011, team RDC are hoping we can convince you all to please sponsors us! Please DIG DEEP and help us to raise £2,500 in the next 2 weeks!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!! PS. If you’re rich please don’t be shy

Byte Night - So what’s the plan? 

After a day in the office on Friday 7th October, team RDC are leaving work early to head to Cambridge for 6.30pm to join the other fundraisers in the Cambridge Byte Night 2011. On arrival we’ll need to look out for our ARM sister team – as it’s thanks to them we’re taking part is the awesome fundraiser. We’ve heard via the grapevine that it’ll be a long night but with a hugely positive buzz. We shall be fed warm food, to aid a peaceful night’s sleep but we all cant stop thinking that’s a bit of a luxury – unlike other not so lucky homeless youths. The most important fact is that this simple exercise will allow us to experience what it’s like to be homeless and the longing they must feel for a warm and cosy home. We hope to feel humbled by this unusual adventure and ask that you can please support us and the charity Action for Children in any way you can.

You can also sponsor us by texting via your mobile phone to: 70070 text: HELP 52 then the £amount. Thank You!

Gavin’s Story 

“Action for Children have done so much for me and thanks to Byte Night, they can keep helping me and 1000′s of young people like me.” Action for Children’s Youth Support Team has been working with Gavin for over a year. Without the Youth Support Team’s help, Gavin doesn’t know where he would be now. The team has helped him sort out his flat, made sure he can pay bills and most importantly they are always there if he needs to have a chat or some support. Gavin now has the opportunity to look to the future and has the chance to fulfil his life ambition to become a chef, his dream job.

The Youth Support Team in South Wales, works with local young people aged 16 – 21 who are setting up their first homes after leaving care, or because they can no longer live at home for whatever reason. They try to support young people to develop their independence, helping them with a wide range of issues such as budgeting, debt management and health as well as employment, training, education and even parenting skills. It is very common for the Youth Support Team to meet young people at a time of crisis for them, often when they’ve become homeless. So it is essential for them to be extremely flexible and sensitive to their individual needs while ensuring that they are finding the young people the best solutions to their problems.

About the charity – Action for Children

Action for Children meets the needs of the children and young people who most need support to achieve their full potential. Through our work and through speaking out, we seek to break the cycle of deprivation. We challenge injustice and empower children to overcome the obstacles in their lives that hold them back. We tailor our work to local circumstances, in partnership with children and young people, families, communities and local organisations. Charity Registration No. 1097940

About Just Giving

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the Action for Children charity and will make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – we’ll raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

The VX-Xpress is the industry’s first FREE fully functional, Virtual WAN Optimisation appliance for the masses. Leveraging Silver Peak’s award winning VXOA technology, the entry level VX appliance is an easy and simple to use solution for mid to large sized organisations wanting to experience the benefits of a virtual WANOp system without the costs.

Made available over the internet, business users can download Silver Peak’s free WANop application without even registering their corporate details. Silver Peak have recognised that more and more organisations are moving into cloud based architecture; applications running over the wide area, and are discovering the need for WAN optimisation. Using the same core structure as their paid solution it’s certainly not a watered down version and has all the benefits including; deduplication, network integrity and network acceleration. It’s simply been moved over to work on a hypervisor in a virtual environment, making it the perfect first step to discover the power of data centre class WAN optimization.

Silver Peak’s VX-Xpress Solutions:

-          Remote File Access

-          SharePoint Collaboration

-          VoIP and Video Quality

-          Disaster Recovery

Optimize File Transfers (CIFS) with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – It’s a challenge maintaining synchronized files across a distributed enterprise and it can be costly to deploy and manage file servers in remote and branch offices. Silver Peak’s VX-Xpress Remote File Access eliminates file sharing blues, from Microsoft (CIFS) and Apple (AFS) to Network File Systems (NFS) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). There are numerous advantages to centralizing enterprise file servers including faster data transfers, quicker access and the process is far more cost effective. Read More…

Optimize SharePoint with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – Does slow access to remote SharePoint files have you cursing Microsoft daily especially when dealing with large files? SharePoint Collaboration is a robust platform for information exchange, however real-time collaboration via SharePoint can also be painfully slow across a WAN – and a hazard to any non SharePoint users sharing the same network infrastructure. With the VX-Xpress, SharePoint benefits from the full range of Silver Peak’s WAN optimization techniques, so you can maximize your investment in SharePoint without overhauling your entire network infrastructure. It’s fast, free and effective, so what are you waiting for. Read More…

Optimize VoIP and Video Quality with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – Frustrated with dropped links on your videoconferences and video streaming? Does a mobile phone call sound better than VoIP over your corporate network? These and other real-time applications currently account for approximately 30% of enterprise WAN traffic, and are expected to grow significantly over the coming years. Too much latency, jitter and packet loss across the WAN causes conversations to be dropped, garbled, or pixilated. Silver Peak’s high quality WAN infrastructure makes conversations sound crystal clear and provides a strategic enabler for unified communications with the VX-Xpress. Read More…

Optimize Your Live Replication and avoid Disaster Nightmares with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – Are you one disaster away from losing all your company’s data? WAN optimization is an indispensible component of offsite disaster recovery projects. The VX-Xpress, not only reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for critical offsite data protection, but enables easy remote backup and offsite replication at an affordable price.  Give it a try – your storage team will thank you! Read More…

Register for Silver Peak’s VX-Xpress Community – The peer-driven community forum, moderated by Silver Peak product managers, eliminates costly maintenance fees. The VX-Xpress Community is a network to help IT managers configure and deploy their VX-Xpress virtual appliances. Register for the Forum now to swap stories, view documentation and videos or to speak to Response Data Communications; Silver Peak’s leading EMEA reseller.

Get started in 6 steps - Learn how to deploy a VX-Xpress, your path to WAN Optimisation.

Contact Center 7 can now be managed through an intuitive Web based management interface that makes the administration and management of the ECC brilliantly simple.

The new management interface is supported on Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers. Contact Center Director [...]]]> Web Based ShoreTel Contact Center Director

Contact Center 7 can now be managed through an intuitive Web based management interface that makes the administration and management of the ECC brilliantly simple.

The new management interface is supported on Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers. Contact Center Director makes it easy for administrators to search for records and keywords, copy configurations quickly. Advanced error checking and inline help further makes the administration simpler.

A “favorites” section allows each supervisor to bookmark their most frequently used configuration to show up in the top of the navigation panel making it even more easier to locate and configure.

Quick navigation links also enable supervisors to go back and forth between different configuration entities.

Helpful hints show up at every level of configuration giving indications of pre-requisites

Key areas such as shifts have detailed descriptions that enable administrators to visually see how the shift work better.

Extremely useful tips on errors and on screen validations guide the administrators through the process

Advanced searching and sorting makes configuration “brilliantly simple”

Finally keyboard shortcuts for those “younger generation admins used to  SMS like actions.”

Response Data Communications Product Portfolio Suite Includes; Senetas ethernet encryption, Silver Peak data centre class WAN Optimisation, Isilon Systems scale-out storage, AeroHive enterprise Wifi, Arista Networks data centre switching, Network Instruments network protocol  analysis and trending tools, Paloalto Networks next-generation firewalls, ShoreTel’s unified communications, voice mobility and enterprise contact centre solutions.

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This will be instrumental in helping customers “future-proof” the WAN for cloud and virtualisation architectures [...]]]> Here is a great video of Silver Peak vice president of product management Damon Ennis talking about the new NX-10K appliance, the industry’s first multi-Gigabit WAN optimisation appliance for next generation data centres and the industy’s highest-capacity WAN optimisation appliance.

This will be instrumental in helping customers “future-proof” the WAN for cloud and virtualisation architectures in the data centre.

Since joining Silver Peak from Network Computing, where I was the editor and a blogger, I’ve had the opportunity to see virtualisation and WAN optimisation from a new perspective. And what I’ve found is that virtualization isn’t just [...]]]> Courtesy of David Greenfield , Silver Peak Systems Inc

Since joining Silver Peak from Network Computing, where I was the editor and a blogger, I’ve had the opportunity to see virtualisation and WAN optimisation from a new perspective. And what I’ve found is that virtualization isn’t just making WAN optimisation more convenient or easier to deploy; it is offering two little-discussed benefits that will help you in optimizing your networks.

The top-level benefits of virtualisation are well known. Virtualisation takes care of many of the operational issues that organizations have had with installing devices in branch offices or remote data centers. There’s no shipping cost and the whole installation process is faster and smoother than with physical boxes. Virtual appliances can be installed into servers in a rack, of course, but they can just as easily be deployed in standalone servers, in a server blade within a Cisco router or on a blade server. And best of all, customers ride the Intel performance curve.

I think what’s been less understood, though, is what WAN optimisation means for vendors behind the scenes and how it will help network architects over the longer term. Carl Hubbard, Silver Peak’s vice president of engineering, mentioned as much to me recently. Carl is a hardware engineer by training, yet he was enthusing over the value that virtual appliances offered both customers and the vendor community.
“We completely change the purchase and delivery model of our IT appliances,” he said. “Instead of having to manage hundreds of boxes all over the world or tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment for trials, both of which can be costly, now customers can download a virtual appliance faster than FedEx with less capital expense on our part.”

What wasn’t said, but certainly implied, is that Silver Peak is in a position to pass along those savings in hardware, installation, shipping and more on to the customer. Strategically, WAN optimisation belongs anywhere there’s a WAN connection, and for most offices that means there is some network challenge that we at Silver Peak (and others) can address. These problems include correcting for packet loss (actually, that’s just Silver Peak), extracting more bandwidth from their lines and reducing latency in their applications.

Historically, the challenge has been that not all offices can afford to deploy WAN optimisation. Virtualisation changes all that.

Virtualisation also means that new applications become possible. Joe Boyle, our virtualisation product manager, made the comment that virtualisation enables WAN optimisers to help customers in new ways. When I asked him what he meant, he pointed out that some industries are especially careful with the technology investments made in their branch offices and, as such, could never have afforded a WAN optimiser.

He added that a frequent case in point is retail. With virtualised appliances, retailers can install a network optimiser in the servers already situated in the branch and open up the site to use new technologies to increase revenue. These applications might include new point-of-sale applications, kiosks, HR applications and more.

Today, though, physical appliances still have their place. Physical devices can be easier to deploy in offices that lack an environment already configured for virtualisation. Physical devices also have their place in environments that have the capacity to be configured for maximum reliability and performance.

All of this is great news for Silver Peak customers as they are no longer constrained by a vendor’s preconceived preference for virtualisation or their preference for physical applications. By offering both options, Silver Peak offers the approach that’s best suited for a particular business – be it physical appliances for some offices or virtual appliances, whose possibilities are endless.

The first line was an eye opener – 68% of [...]]]>

I recently came across an article in Contact Center World, entitled “Call Center Frustrations May Cause Consumers to Shop Elsewhere”. That may seem like a statement of the obvious but its one which is all to often often overlooked.

The first line was an eye opener – 68% of customers hang up if they have trouble hearing a call centre agent.  This includes a bad connection, poor voice quality, faulty speech recognition software, an agent mumbling or having an accent that is difficult to understand.

The report was based on a survey of 3,925 consumers in the United States, U.K, Germany and France, and makes a good point about the level of investment a call centre requires to really deliver.

Call centres are implemented to serve people and are generally the focal point of contact a customer has with an business.  Companies often don’t invest sufficiently in the right technology and people to deliver the service that would satisfy their customers, let alone please them.

Customers contact call centres for assistance, so they key is to not leave them dissatisfied when they make may be their only call.  An inbound call centre is an opportunity for a business to really impress its customer base and deliver exceptional customer service, which is what is required to ensure repeat business.