 Windows 7
Time To Upgrade?
With Microsoft's support for Windows XP ending in April 2014, many businesses will now be planning the migration to Windows 7. The new OS has been hailed as the best yet, and it is expected that businesses will upgrade more quickly than for previous releases.
So far Windows 7 has received good reviews from commentators saying that it is secure, stable and reliable and most importantly is compatible with earlier versions of Windows, something that was a major problem for Vista.
The new release addresses the key irritations found with Vista - including reducing the number of "security" alerts and making the environment cope with older applications with its virtual XP capability.
Upgrading from Vista is possible, but a clean install is required where you're currently running XP. Tools are available to migrate users' files and settings, either individually or en-masse in the corporate environment.
Read more about Windows 7, including:
- Why you should, or should not upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit now
- Review the latest Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
Free Apps For Windows 7
With the availability of Windows 7, IT users can expect the usual round of application upgrades from commercial software providers - with their associated costs.
But is it possible for organisations to run their desktop computing for free, avoiding pricy enterprise licences?
There is already a wide range of popular applications and utilities available as free or open source for Microsoft's latest operating system, and experts suggest they could be a match for some commercial products.
"Open source applications and utilities have all the features and functionality found in proprietary software, and we see open source applications being adopted in enterprises on an increasing scale," says Chris Halls, managing director of independent open source consultancy Credativ UK.
Read more of this article from Computer Weekly here, including a discussion of applications of tools in four categories: network and file management tools; communications; desktop productivity; and graphics and multimedia utilities.
Also on Computer Weekly, Changebase, which provides tools to help businesses migrate applications, has found that 95% ofapplication compatibility issueswith Windows 7 can be fixed.
Read more about the issues on Computer Weekly.
 Comprehensive Data Protection
Just because your company isn’t a major corporation with hundreds of offices
and thousands of employees doesn’t mean you’re not under the same pressures
to maintain access to critical information in order to run your business and remain competitive. But buying the same complex and expensive solutions as
the major players in your industry can be cost-prohibitive—and unnecessary.
Next-generation data protection, or NGDP, is a term that describes a large number of disk-based backup and recovery technologies, including disk-to-disk (D2D), virtual tape library (VTL), snapshots, continuous data protection (CDP), remote office backup consolidation (ROBC), bare machine recovery (BMR), disaster recovery (DR), wide area file services (WAFS) and others.
NGDP solutions target the replacement or augmentation of traditional tape backup processes to help meet increasingly aggressive recovery point and recovery time objectives, as well as to help improve operational efficiency, business continuity and resiliency.
This whitepaper explores the subject in more detail.
IBM's Comprehensive Data Protection solution combines the latest in low energy hardware with the best in data backup and recovery software. The solution is easy to justify, paying for itself in a matter of months. This paper discusses the IBM solution in more detail.
Managing Complex Multi-Vendor Environments
 Hitachi IT Operations Analyser Software
Simultaneous demands for greater efficiency, availability and performance in the data centre are commonly expected but rarely achieved within the typical constraints of IT resources. So how do you manage growing data requirements amidst the complexity of multivendor, multiplatform infrastructures with limited staff or expertise? Hitachi Data Systems understands these challenges and has developed a proven solution to help simplify data center management and reduce IT time, cost and effort.
For smart and simple data centre performance and availability monitoring, Hitachi IT Operations Analyser software provides all the essential capabilities to diagnose and monitor heterogeneous server, network and storage assets — with automated root cause analysis, easy network visualisation, agentless architecture and a unified, intuitive Web-based interface.
If you have up to 250 server, switch and storage nodes, and you're one of the first 50 organisations to apply, we'll send you a 30 day free trial of Hitachi's IT Operations Analyser. Click here to contact us now and ask for your CD! Or simply reply to this email.
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