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We look forward to another great season of racing with you!

Dell has taken significant steps over the past three years to develop its software and services portfolio to empower customers to create a competitive advantage with cloud computing, consumerization of the enterprise and the increasing demands for secure, anytime, anywhere access to applications and data. Customers and channel partners will benefit from an expanded Dell security solutions portfolio, which includes security services, cloud security solutions, data encryption solutions and vulnerability and patch management.

Dell SonicWALL offers comprehensive security solutions that combine advanced capabilities with ease of use, and makes security a business enabler, not a business barrier. It offers its customers Next-Generation Firewalls and Unified Threat Management (UTM) Firewalls that help drive network efficiency, employee productivity and enables secure collaboration with partners and service providers.

Read the article here.
 

The free, half-day event is set in a fun, casual and interactive atmosphere, where attendees can ask questions and receive answers about their own network environments. The seminar will include business and technical information as well as Riverbed and Dell product demonstrations. A buffet lunch is included as well as a complimentary beer tasting.

Attendance is free, but seating is limited to ensure a comfortable and conducive learning experience, peer-networking opportunities, and access to our expert presenters. Early registration is highly recommended.

Riverbed’s solutions greatly impact the performance of critical business applications and network communication allowing IT to provide access to data and applications throughout the entire enterprise with optimum performance. It’s the only solution to span mobile workers, branch offices, and data centers, allowing your distributed workforce to collaborate in real time. And it does all this while streamlining operations, improving visibility, and reducing the costs of IT infrastructure.

Attendees will learn how the Riverbed product family can remove performance limitations associated with network-based backup and data replication, centralize backup and recovery using existing WAN links without costly bandwidth upgrades and how to minimize costs and dramatically accelerate the complete disaster recovery process.

Reserve your seat today!

About UltraLevel, Inc.:
UltraLevel, Inc. is a national cloud computing and virtualization solutions provider headquartered in Detroit, MI with offices throughout the mid-west, Florida, and Texas. UltraLevel, Inc. helps organizations consolidate and simplify their IT infrastructure while optimizing IT spend.

About Riverbed:
Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization.

It is no secret that Dell has been on an acquisition spree for several years, yet the pieces of these acquisitions have not quite shown a clear vision of their purpose — until recently.

Many have speculated as to the long-term vision of what all these acquisitions mean. What they really reveal is a complete end-to-end computing strategy that can handle every aspect of a business’ infrastructure, whether it be on-premise, cloud-based, private cloud-based or a hybrid cloud scenario.

First off, Dell’s core business has been hardware for many years.

While cloud computing definitely shifts the balance of computing power from on-premise to off-premise, you still need devices such as computers and laptops, as well as thin client devices, i.e. Dell’s core business.

With the acquisition of Wyse they now can provide thin clients along with all the on-premise computing devices that they have been producing for many years.

Read the entire post on Wired's Cloudline blog.

The free, half-day events will be presented in a town hall meeting style, where attendees can ask questions and receive answers about their own data centers and cloud initiatives. The seminar is split into two sessions, respectively; business and technical.  Lunch is included and will be served during the first session. All attendees are encouraged and welcome to stay after lunch for the technical session.

Join UltraLevel as they unveil their new SAFE Data Center, an end-to-end solution that combines Dell, VMware, and CommVault technologies, to help companies consolidate, virtualize, and simplify IT infrastructure while optimizing IT spend.

Learn how UltraLevel SAFE:

• Provides maximum operational efficiency and improved staff productivity.
• Provides ultimate business agility while delivering scalability, reliability, and predictability.
• Inherently enables business continuity and disaster recovery.

“Our role as value added resellers changes as information technology solutions increase in complexity and scope. UltraLevel has partnered with some the best technology manufacturers in the industry to deliver an all-encompassing  data protection solution that is the best bet for our customers’ IT and data,” said Jeremy Wilkinson, CTO of UltraLevel. “The SAFE BET solution will show you how Dell, VMware, and Commvault come together to provide a powerful, scalable, and truly cost-effective environment.”

To learn more and reserve your seat for an UltraLevel SAFE event, please visit below:

Tuesday, May 1st at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Mishawaka, IN (South Bend)

Wednesday, May 2nd at Eddie Merlots in Ft. Wayne, IN

Thursday, May 3rd at New Orleans on the Avenue in Indianapolis, IN

Complimentary admission is granted on first-come, first-serve basis for registrants. Attendance and seating is limited to ensure a comfortable and effective learning experience, valuable peer-networking opportunities, and access to our expert presenters.
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About UltraLevel, Inc.:

UltraLevel, Inc. is a national cloud computing and virtualization solutions provider headquartered in Detroit, MI with offices throughout the mid-west, Florida, and Texas. UltraLevel, Inc. helps organizations consolidate and simplify their IT infrastructure while optimizing IT spend.
 

The free, half-day events will be presented in a town hall meeting style, where attendees can ask questions and receive answers about their own data centers and cloud initiatives. The seminar is split into two sessions, respectively; business and technical.  Lunch is included and will be served during the first session. All attendees are encouraged and welcome to stay after lunch for the technical session.

Join UltraLevel as they unveil their new SAFE Data Center, an end-to-end solution that combines Dell, VMware, and CommVault technologies, to help companies consolidate, virtualize, and simplify IT infrastructure while optimizing IT spend.

Learn how UltraLevel SAFE:

• Provides maximum operational efficiency and improved staff productivity.
• Provides ultimate business agility while delivering scalability, reliability, and predictability.
• Inherently enables business continuity and disaster recovery.

“Our role as value added resellers changes as information technology solutions increase in complexity and scope. UltraLevel  has partnered with some the best technology manufacturers in the industry to deliver an all-encompassing  data protection solution that is the best bet for our customers’ IT and data,” said Jeremy Wilkinson, CTO of UltraLevel. “The SAFE BET solution will show you how Dell, VMware, and Commvault come together to provide a powerful, scalable, and truly cost-effective environment.”

To learn more and reserve your seat for an UltraLevel SAFE event, please visit below:

Wednesday, March 14th at Brio Tuscan Grille in Columbus, OH

Thursday, March 15th at Montgomery Inn at the Boathouse in Cincinnati, OH

Complimentary admission is granted on first-come, first-serve basis for registrants. Attendance and seating is limited to ensure a comfortable and effective learning experience, valuable peer-networking opportunities, and access to our expert presenters.

About UltraLevel, Inc.:
UltraLevel, Inc. is a national cloud computing and virtualization solutions provider headquartered in Detroit, MI with offices throughout the mid-west, Florida, and Texas. UltraLevel, Inc. helps organizations consolidate and simplify their IT infrastructure while optimizing IT spend.

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Transcript:

Conclusion: VMware Cloud Infrastructure Solutions

So what does all this mean? Let’s go back to where we started this section; Can you “Trust Your Cloud?” Your Private Cloud, Public Cloud or Hybrid Cloud.

We talked about three things, and the answer is certainly yes!

Sensitive data, can we make sure we’re protected from that? Absolutely, vShield protects you from that.

What about every VM whether it’s going around the entire edge of the datacenter, the Trust Zones, or with anti-virus protecting the actual VM? Check and check.

We talked about how you can run almost any application on vSphere 5. Frankly, we challenge you to find an application in your environment that isn’t going to fit in the monster VMs based on the scale and performance that we have.

In terms of support, almost every major ISV that you can think of has a support statement and we talked about the 1,420 ISVs and 2,400 applications that are already supported.

Let’s not forget ESXi, raising availability; lowering the attack footprint; and, lowering the amount of patching required.

We talked about availability, how you can extend disaster recovery to 3 times as many VMs as we have with Site Recovery Manager 5.

We talked about the challenge of wanting to drive costs down, both CAPEX and OPEX, and VMware’s approach to responding to business faster with greater agility.

We introduced the concept of Intelligent Policy Management, this idea of being able to tier the underlying infrastructure and how we’re delivering that today with storage tiering and Storage DRS. How Auto Deploy will allow you to add hosts, as many as 40 hosts in under 10 minutes.

And, we talked about how vCloud Director lets you create pre-populated, pre-pooled tiers of storage, compute and networking and then allocate them to separate organizations to deliver Infrastructure as a Service.

And finally, we’ve talked about the ability to protect your entire environment so that you can Trust Your Cloud. And let’s not forget that ‘your cloud’, as we said, is not just about your main site but a Hybrid Cloud extending to public cloud partners.

Now that you know more about the value the game-changing capabilities that VMware Cloud Infrastructure Solutions, let’s set up some time to review your position with respect to the cloud and talk in more depth about how these new features can help you get the agility you need from IT to help your business move forward even faster!

<< VMware: Trust Your Cloud – Protection

Transcript:

Step 10: Trust Your Cloud – Protection

What does it mean to protect every VM, say from a hacker who’s coming in?

Number 1, you may want to protect the actual edge of your entire datacenter with a VPN solution and VMware will do that.

Another part is what to do when a certain VM is compromised, or if a certain VM tries to do something it shouldn’t do. We need to make sure that you’re protected and we use something called a Trust Zone for that.

What the vShield technology will do with trust zones is allow you to take a VM or groups of VMs and firewall them from each other.

It’s not just hackers we have to be concerned about. What about viruses?

Typically, we install an agent in every VM to combat viruses. So viruses equal agents. That’s good but, especially in a virtualized environment, this can lead to an AV Storm.

An AV Storm is when every one of these agents that we have put in our VMs tries to scan at the same time—dragging down performance dramatically. As a consequence, you may tend to put fewer VMs into your environment than otherwise and don’t achieve the ROI you want from our solution.

If you want to solve the AV Storm issue you need to stop using agents. With VMware and vShield you can get rid of these agents and serve our AV partner solutions directly from our virtualization layer.

Eliminating the agents and the AV Storms lets you run more VMs in your environment. In fact, a third party has said that you can run a 30-100% denser environment. That’s 30-100% more VMs in an environment if you get rid of the agents; greatly increasing the value you can get from the solution.

<< VMware: Trust Your Cloud – Risk
VMware: Cloud Infrastructure Foundation Solutions >>

Transcript:

Step 9: Trust Your Cloud – Risk

When we talk about being able to trust your cloud, a key concern for a lot of folks is this: “If I bring more agility into my environment in order to be able to respond to business faster; then what happens if some developer takes a VM, copies that VM and there happens to be sensitive information in that VM?”

That VM might be deleted in a week but what if it isn’t? What if it stays for a month, or two months, only for an auditor to find it and then you fail your compliance audit?

To keep this from happening, one of the new features that is coming out in vShield is Sensitive Data Detection.

vShield has a set of pre-defined templates. Based on where you are geographically and your industry it knows what to look for. In fact, vShield will sift through all of your unstructured data, whether it’s sitting in a flat file, in a file server, or on a SharePoint and search for sensitive items. If anything is found, it can leverage other parts of the vShield technology, quarantine that VM, and then you can figure out what to do about it.

Just as important is simply protecting a VM from a hacker or anything else that could happen; an intruder who’s trying to get access to your data. So let’s talk about protecting every VM next.

<< VMware: Trust Your Cloud – Private, Public, Hybrid
VMware: Trust Your Cloud – Protection >>