Welcome to the Data Center Community

If you were to take a day in the life of an IT professional, how much of that day would revolve around email? This year at our IT conference BrainShare, we’ll be talking about a day in the life of someone like you, and that means we’ll be talking plenty about email and Novell GroupWise.

I want to invite all of my readers to join me at BrainShare 2013. Registration is now open.

Give your input on the Domain Services for Windows roadmap.

IT Transformation is and has been a hot topic for >20 years. Wow!

I live in the Washington, DC metro area, specifically the 51st state – Northern VA or better known as NoVA. Fortunately, I was not affected by the storms and power outages of a couple weeks ago. However, Amazon and their Ashburn data center once again. Once again, many of us social media users found the pain of the outage.

How many outages will occur before plans are put together for better monitoring and DR? One way to look at it is this is their business and livelihood, so DR should be relevant. Another is that many of us use these sites during times of destruction to communicate with the rest of the world, not just for fun or business.

As a marketer and business person, I find it interesting none of these folks have found it a competitive advantage to have the best plan and be alive when their competition is down. However, many are blaming Amazon and leaving for another provider, another provider does not solve the challenge.

Previously I posted, "Why Service Management" discussing the melding of IT and the business for common objectives in managing, measuring and communicating service performance.  The recent Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) also provoked the status quo of IT Operations and Cameron Haight began to challenge and discuss a new term, DevOps, where development and operations are more closely aligned.  The post event Trip Report provides a glimpse into the many thought provoking challenges and discussions of the week.

I'm back from a couple of weeks of travel and most notably, the annual  Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) the first week of June.  There were more than just a handful of aha moments, much churn in what has been a mature market and many great conversations on the solution showcase floor and hallways.  Let's start with the opening keynotes on the first day:

Michele Hudnall explains why IT departments should learn how to market their unique contributions to the profitability of the company.

Add new monitoring capabilities for your OES server.

Why are IT organizations becoming increasingly marginalized by business users when they're getting better and better at delivering quality service with technology for secure and reliable operations? 85%of what IT does is “keep the lights on” or 1 – 2 % of revenue annually.