Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSD) are growing at a rapid rate. The latest information states 510 Million and growing 50% over the next year. This is still a small number compared to traditional hard drives and Seagate just released a hybrid to enhance hard drive performance. Solid state technology is going down in cost and the controller technology is advancing to make SSD more attractive in more applications. Solid state technology does have a strong appeal as everyone knows that the more moving parts the more likely you will have a failure.

Here are a couple of articles on SSD Drives:

http://www.reportlinker.com/p0196489/Enterprise-SSDs-Technologies-and-Markets.html?request=news

http://hothardware.com/News/5Way-SSD-RoundUp-Sandforce-vs-JMicron/

Managing Cloud Computing

I read an article in CIO Magazine “Cloud Computing: What CIOs Need to Know About Integration” by Kim S. Nash. The article discusses the use of cloud based solutions and how they show up at companies the way a PC did in the 80s – often not through the IT department. IT departments role will be to integrate and manage at some stage. Clearly this creates an interesting challenge for the CIO.

The article also discusses running internal systems in parallel with cloud computing in order to accommodate peak requirement period i.e. between Thanksgiving and Christmas for retail and January through April 15th for accounting businesses. This appears to make a great deal of sense. The challenge becomes how to manage this! The business needs to recognize the savings and not consume them in management. It is still early days so it will be interesting to see the developments.

Nortec’s cloud offering is Nortec 24/7 and it includes hosted service including Exchange email, network monitoring and managed services. The cloud services are growing rapidly and going extremely well. In the hosted Exchange email solutions we implemented entirely cloud based solutions. On the existing Exchange email cloud services migrating premise to the cloud or from one cloud service to another is like any other migration and takes planning and time to implement. We are now working with Exchange 2010 in many clients and with this Microsoft offers a seamless passing back and forth to the cloud. Cloud technology is evolving without a doubt….

Link to article “Cloud Computing: What CIOs Need to Know About Integration”:

http://tinyurl.com/2cgl3b7

Creating Smart IT Leaders by Susan Cramm

I attended a conference call presentation by Susan Cramm on Creating Smart IT Leaders. Here are a few take away concerns and concepts:


1. Users are frustrated with IT, “they stifle creative entrepreneurialism that is critical to advancing the state of business”
2. Users are younger, tech smarter, and demanding; If IT department doesn’t do something, they will do it without their help
3. 30% of what IT has planned to do is “stupid, dumb work”
4. IT needs to empower the users to self serve
5. Ensure IT can be managed and measured
6. Use fast-cycle, value driven deliver – i.e. Agile development and Scrum method
7. Only 10% of companies are IT Smart!

I enjoyed the presentation and now I need to read the book!