Los Angeles, CA - August 18, 2011 - ENow, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in infrastructure consulting and development of software to simplify Microsoft system management, announced the much anticipated launch of Compass, a new Microsoft Active Directory Management solution. ENow's Compass is designed to help organizations proactively monitor their Active Directory infrastructure, including replication monitoring and verifying DNS configuration. Compass includes a suite of reports that ensure the critical resources of an organization are adequately protected. The robust reporting capabilities were designed to save time when preparing for an IT audits. Compass is built on top of the award winning One Look management platform which features a customizable dashboard with red, yellow, and green lights indicating the health of each monitored server. The One Look solution enables IT support staff to proactively monitor servers in real time. In addition, ENow's management platform is also popular for its customizable reporting, which gives administrators complete flexibility in not only how they create reports, but also how they disseminate the information. "Traditional reporting products only allow you to email a report, resulting in static data," explains Jay Gundotra, CEO of ENow. "But with Compass Personalized Dashboards, each key role in your organization can have access to a customized dashboard that meets their needs and automatically updates." This unique feature empowers help desk personnel to better service their users and improve response time. "After the success of Mailscape, our Exchange Monitoring and Reporting product, we have an international customer base spanning 27 countries. These companies expressed a strong interest in having us to replicate our approach for Active Directory," states Jay. "Compass was created with the same core ingredients, comprehensive monitoring and reporting features combined with our personalized dashboards
I would like to share with you a couple of points taken from Ian Foster's presentation about the future of research computing and the current trend of moving the administrative load to the cloud. While, the big science projects are the ones that most often get the required funds and resources, the small to medium projects on the other hand are struggling to take off. Small-to-medium projects may end up using inappropriate tools and fail to materialize! Research projects' requirements are substantial and they depend on reliable results which need to be processed in a reasonable time. Let alone the competitive element which a business may be relying on! The current approaches taken by the small-to-medium scale projects are unsustainable mainly due to the high administrative costs related to them. Therefore, the effort put in by the R&D staff should focus on the project goals or business value rather than on the administrative part. For that reason, the trend is to outsource the IT functions. For instance, the Cloud service model IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) would offer great benefits in data analytics and content distribution whereas IaaS combined with SaaS (Software as a Service) would reduce research IT costs and provide access to powerful tools. Ian Foster refers to this model as research IT as a service and gives a list of time-consuming tasks and examples related to science projects. The market is providing researchers with some choices such as, commercial cloud providers, open source grids, XSEDE supercomputers and campus systems. The concept of Research IT as a service may be seen as a combination of other services such as, research data as a service, data analysis as a service, etc. The whole concept would lead us to a new cyber-infrastructure strategy aiming at more capability for more people at less cost.
The XIV is a proven series of high-end storage systems by IBM. The IBM XIV Gen3 is the latest addition to this series that integrates seamlessly with virtualization, databases, email, analytics and data protection solutions from Microsoft, SAP, VMware, Oracle and others. The XIV series are well known for their solid architecture that can allocate resources effectively and maintain availability. The XIV Gen3 provides up to 4x the throughput featuring a sequential bandwidth of 9.3GBps, up to 3x faster I/O response time, larger memory capabilities, faster disk controllers, more processing power and future SSD caching upgradeability. The enhanced architecture will improve application performance and support development and prototyping. IBM describes XIV Gen3 as the model that gives applications a tremendous performance boost, helping customers meet increasing demands with fewer servers and networks. Providing Tier 1 enterprise storage at Tier 2 prices! To read more about IBM's XIV Gen3 go here.
Zoho's Customer Relationship Management solution now supports mobile devices. iPhone users can now follow sales leads, follow up ongoing deals and access accounts and other info while they are travelling even in offline mode! To read more about Zoho's CRM Mobile Edition for iPhone go here. For the Android users Zoho has released a mobile application that can create invoices and record expenses, receive payments online and store business contacts while you are on the move and right from your smartphone. To read more about Zoho's Invoice For Android go here. That's not all! iPad users can now use their tablets to benefit from an optimized version of Zoho Mail. To try Zoho's Mail with your iPad go here. Zoho are moving fast with mobile-friendly apps/add-ons for their solutions and this shows their commitment towards the changing requirements of their existent customers while attracting new ones!
You can install a DNS server on a Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 using the command line to perform the installation part and a remote connection to configure and manage DNS services. This option may become handy when your environment requires a separate DNS service and the use of a dedicated Virtual Machine (VM) is not justified. Also, note that you can still install a DNS server on a Server Core installation acting as a stand-alone or member server! The following command allows you to install the DNS server: start /w ocsetup DNS-Server-Core-Role And to uninstall it, type the following: start /w ocsetup DNS-Server-Core-Role /uninstall The second part of the DNS implementation requires you to configure the server using the DNS Manager snap-in. You need to start the DNS Manager from a remote location and connect to the Server Core installation by right clicking the root icon in the DNS Manager console tree and then choose Connect to DNS Server. If you are planning to install a DNS server along with a domain controller on a Server Core installation then you can use the command Dcpromo with an answer file. For instance, at the command prompt type: Dcpromo /unattend:<unattendfile> Where unattendfile is the name of the answer file.