The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) manages a large IT environment supporting over 200,000 inmates and staff across numerous facilities. To meet growing demands, CDCR implemented VMware virtualization, consolidating over 800 servers onto fewer physical servers. This reduced costs, improved disaster recovery, and allowed the agency to avoid $250,000 for one project by reducing required servers from 37 to 5. Virtualization also improved flexibility, reduced patch deployment time by two-thirds, and helped CDCR meet state energy reduction mandates by decreasing its data center from 70 racks to 3 racks.
VMworld 2013: Exploring Technology Trends within Financial Services VMworld
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"This paper examines the results of an IDC study of enterprise organizations that have
deployed IBM Power Systems to achieve workload consolidation, improved uptime, and
reduced operational costs. These systems are highly virtualized platforms that supported
consolidation of workloads and provided near-term payback from the initial investment."
Stay Connected even if Exchange and your BlackBerry Bes server goes down! This is a great presentation of Dell's Email Continuity SaaS service and our Blackberry Continuity service.
Ar Accelerating Converged Infrastructure With FlexpodMichael Hudak
IDC investigates the transformation of IT delivery in the datacenter and the emerging role of pretested solutions that focus on unified, shared infrastructure. The paper focuses on the advent of converged infrastructure solutions that simplify the deployment and management of virtualized environments spanning server, storage, and networking components. The paper then takes a closer look at the FlexPod datacenter solution offered by NetApp and Cisco, with a focus on the VMware vSphere design configuration. IDC examines the importance of professional services to delivering the solution and the key role of a collaborative support model aimed at streamlining the support process for customers and channel partners.
"Enterprise applications support the daily operations of a business, which means that
they are vital to its ability to generate revenue and profit growth — and to account for
it. Whether those applications support a supply chain, general accounting, personnel
management, or customer relationship management, they must be available to end
users and must be accessible enough to create ""snapshots"" of the business on a
daily, hourly, or, in some cases, near-real-time basis."
Nec smart enterprise_trends_2014-slidesTodd Landry
Starting 2014 trends for enterprises will shift towards more converged IT infrastructures, move away from silo practices. This shift is critical for enterprises in the coming years as it will establish the foundation for agility, resiliency, and the ability for IT be a significant contributing factor to the business.
Communicating Virtualization to Non-IT AudiencesAkweli Parker
Virtualization brings numerous benefits including cost savings, reduced carbon footprint and potentially reduced IT workload. Implementing it successfully requires adaptation that some employees may find challenging. This paper explores those challenges and explains how to cultivate broad-based support for your virtualization project.
VMworld 2013: Exploring Technology Trends within Financial Services VMworld
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Scott Key, VMware
Brian Martinez, VMware
Learn more about VMworld and register at http://www.vmworld.com/index.jspa?src=socmed-vmworld-slideshare
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Las interrupciones son una experiencia común y costosa en los negocios. Descubra los resultados que se desprenden de un Informe Europeo sobre la recuperación ante desastres a través de una infografía con un completo análisis del estado de los datos.
"This paper examines the results of an IDC study of enterprise organizations that have
deployed IBM Power Systems to achieve workload consolidation, improved uptime, and
reduced operational costs. These systems are highly virtualized platforms that supported
consolidation of workloads and provided near-term payback from the initial investment."
Stay Connected even if Exchange and your BlackBerry Bes server goes down! This is a great presentation of Dell's Email Continuity SaaS service and our Blackberry Continuity service.
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IDC investigates the transformation of IT delivery in the datacenter and the emerging role of pretested solutions that focus on unified, shared infrastructure. The paper focuses on the advent of converged infrastructure solutions that simplify the deployment and management of virtualized environments spanning server, storage, and networking components. The paper then takes a closer look at the FlexPod datacenter solution offered by NetApp and Cisco, with a focus on the VMware vSphere design configuration. IDC examines the importance of professional services to delivering the solution and the key role of a collaborative support model aimed at streamlining the support process for customers and channel partners.
"Enterprise applications support the daily operations of a business, which means that
they are vital to its ability to generate revenue and profit growth — and to account for
it. Whether those applications support a supply chain, general accounting, personnel
management, or customer relationship management, they must be available to end
users and must be accessible enough to create ""snapshots"" of the business on a
daily, hourly, or, in some cases, near-real-time basis."
Nec smart enterprise_trends_2014-slidesTodd Landry
Starting 2014 trends for enterprises will shift towards more converged IT infrastructures, move away from silo practices. This shift is critical for enterprises in the coming years as it will establish the foundation for agility, resiliency, and the ability for IT be a significant contributing factor to the business.
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As a product designer, I'm interested in User Experience Design. Actually, I'm still in ongoing learning process of it. Even though I'm kind of new bee in this field, the reason why I choose this topic is to share my perspective of UXD. In this presentation, I'm not going to only explain what the UX Design is, but also how user experience is applied in some area with some examples.
Comparison and Analysis Of LDM and LMS for an Application of a SpeechCSCJournals
Most of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are based on Guassian Mixtures model. The output of these models depends on subphone states. We often measure and transform the speech signal in another form to enhance our ability to communicate. Speech recognition is the conversion from acoustic waveform into written equivalent message information. The nature of speech recognition problem is heavily dependent upon the constraints placed on the speaker, speaking situation and message context. Various speech recognition systems are available. The system which detects the hidden conditions of speech is the best model. LMS is one of the simple algorithm used to reconstruct the speech and linear dynamic model is also used to recognize the speech in noisy atmosphere..This paper is analysis and comparison between the LDM and a simple LMS algorithm which can be used for speech recognition purpose.
The principles of user interface design are intended to improve the quality of user interface design.
• The structure principle: Design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with overall user interface architecture.
• The simplicity principle: The design should make simple, common tasks easy, communicating clearly and simply in the user's own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.
• The visibility principle: The design should make all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don't overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information.
• The feedback principle: The design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.
• The tolerance principle: The design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions.
• The reuse principle: The design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.
Mohave County Arizona Experiences Software-Defined Storage with DataCoreDataCore Software
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November 2014 Webinar - Disaster Recovery Worthy of a Zombie ApocalypseRapidScale
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The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense, has always taken a strategic approach to using information technology (IT) for achieving its mission. However, its goal of becoming a high-performing agency ran head-on into shrinking budgets and sequestration constraints. To improve its agility in the event of an emergency or catastrophic events, DLA adopted a telework, and later, a Home Use computing program. Learn more about the strategy used to make this a reality in this whitepaper.
NEC Backup as a Service reduces administrative tasks, helping it departments...InteractiveNEC
Cloud solutions continue to grow not only in adoption but also in importance in customer IT strategies. In typical risk-averse practices, cloud solutions were initially used near the fringes of IT environments, delivering test and development functions far outside most of the core mission-critical workloads sustaining internal and external business operations. Likewise, customers in regulated industries such as healthcare or government were initially wary of the security and performance of services delivered from third-party data centers. These dynamics are changing rapidly, however, as both the customer and vendor behavior around cloud have matured considerably. Cloud providers have expanded their data center locations, added almost every flavor of regulatory compliance, and enhanced security capabilities. These developments have dramatically lowered the traditional barriers to cloud adoption, allowing customers in almost any industry to have at least the possibility of deploying most of their workloads through cloud delivery methods.
DATA CENTER CONSOLIDATION AT GUARDIAN LIFE As one of the larsharondabriggs
DATA CENTER CONSOLIDATION AT GUARDIAN LIFE
As one of the largest mutual life insurance firms in the United States, Guardian Life (www.guardianlife.com) has more than 5000 employees and over 3000 financial representatives in 80 agencies. Guardian and its subsidiaries provide almost three million people with life and disability income insurance, retirement services, and investment products such as mutual funds, securities, variable life insurance, and variable annuities. The company also supplies employee benefits programs to six million participants, including life, health, and dental insurance, as well as qualified pension plans. In addition to regional home offices in New York City; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Spokane, Washington; and Appleton, Wisconsin, the company has 55 remote sales offices and 80 remote agency offices.
Like other insurance companies, Guardian Life is an information intensive organization where data processing and communications network infrastructure have consistently been important contributors to its success. Guardian Life’s IT organization has earned numerous accolades including multiple CIO100 awards from
CIO
magazine [PRNE11]. According to Dennis Callahan, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for, Guardian Life, "A strong partnership between IT and the businesses enables
C7-1
Guardian to deliver cost-effective technology services that facilitate world- class customer service, product innovation, and operational efficiency.” Ensuring alignment between business and IT is important to Guardian Life and provides a consistent theme for many of the insurance companies IT projects including its data center consolidation initiatives [CIOZ12].
Data center consolidation has been an ongoing concern at Guardian for more than a decade. Guardian’s IT governance structure is team-oriented and the company’s data center consolidation initiatives are overseen by it Infrastructure team. The Infrastructure team is primarily co-located in New York, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania but it has key support teams in Spokane, Washington, Appleton, Wisconsin, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
Guardian Life began taking a serious look at data center consolidation in 2000, but in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, Guardian also became more concerned with business continuity issues. Guardian had four significant data centers, at its four home offices, but the primary data center was in New York City. After 9/11, Guardian wanted make infrastructure changes to ensure business continuity across its existing data centers and made plans to add two more data centers to the mix.
Guardian performed an assessment of its data centers to provide a basis for planning on the location of data processing resources. One surprising outcome of this assessment had to do with utilization. The assessment revealed that the four data centers had about 1000 UNIX and NT servers, with an average capacity utilization of 1 ...
Leveraging Cloud for Non-Production EnvironmentsCognizant
Moving to the cloud not only enables application development and testing organizations to reduce capital outlays; it can also reduce IT cycle times while improving quality.
FICO with VMware Virtualization TechnologyMainstay
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Peter Coffee at Southland Technology ConferencePeter Coffee
Cloud computing should do much more than merely relocate the current delays, risks, and costs of application development. Peter Coffee, former Technology Editor of eWEEK, explores the status and prospects of the multi-product, multi-vendor cloud, where complementary services offer proven development leverage and enable next-generation business processes.
Peter Coffee joined salesforce.com in January of 2007, after spending 18 years as an analyst and columnist at the enterprise technology journal eWEEK (including time under its former title PC Week). Based near Los Angeles, he works with corporate and commercial application developers to establish an international community of best practices on Force.com: the salesforce.com cloud computing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
1. T E L E C O M M U N I C AT I O N
C U S T O M E R C ase S tu dy / 1
C U S T O M E R case stu dy
California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation (CDCR)
California State Agency Maximizes Cost
Avoidance and Optimizes Disaster Recovery
Plan Through Virtualization with VMware
“VMware virtualization has simplified and enhanced disaster recovery
significantly by storing hardware configuration, firmware, operating system
install and application install as data in just a few files on disk.”
—— Joe Panora, Agency Chief Information Officer, CDCR
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDRC), one of the largest
correctional agencies in the nation, has the daunting task of maintaining an extensive
Information Technology environment and infrastructure. The department’s IT supports 66,000
employees responsible for more than 168,000 incarcerated adult and juvenile offenders and
113,000 parolees. Adding further complexity, the offender populations are supervised by staff
in 33 adult institutions, 42 camps and community correctional facilities, and 6 juvenile facilities;
in addition, the infrastructure supports more than 200 parole offices throughout the state
from the Oregon to Mexico borders. The department’s annual budget has exceeded $9 billion
per year over the past two years.
As a result of the size of the department and the complexity of its mission, the demands
on IT resources and the infrastructure have been unparalleled. The stakes are also high.
If the IT platform and applications fail to support the department in meeting its legislative
and court-mandated requirements, the impact can be catastrophic, resulting in serious
risks to safety and security of the department’s facilities and communities throughout the
state, increased costs to the state, and serious sanctions as a result of failure to comply with
legislative and legal mandates.
Looking to the Industry Leader
In order to meet these challenges, the department has established itself as a forerunner
in aggressively and proactively pursuing IT innovations such as virtualization. CDCR
first considered virtualization in 2005 to address the increasing demands placed on
its IT resources when several smaller correctional departments and boards, including
the California Youth Authority, were merged under the department’s umbrella. In response
to these demands, the department’s IT team upgraded its Microsoft Exchange and Active
Directory applications and migrated legacy hardware onto the latest Microsoft operating
system. However, it recognized it did not have the hardware resources required to support
some of the upgrades.
The department therefore became one of the first State of California agencies to turn
to virtualization to assist with solving this very common problem. CDCR looked to strategic
partners VMware and Enterprise Networking Solutions Inc. as industry leaders with a
proven track record of success, and embraced VMware virtualization as its hypervisor server
configuration standard. CDCR collaborated with ENS-Inc to develop a holistic virtualization
strategy to ensure not only near-term project success, but also the long-term operational
success desired to meet the department’s business needs. ENS-Inc in turn leveraged its
long-term track record of providing virtualization strategy consulting services, as well as its
extensive public sector experience. This ensured that there was not a lot of rework required
during the initiative, and enabled the department to share “lessons learned” with its State of
California peers.
profile
Industry
Government
Corporate Headquarters
Sacramento, California
Employees
66,000
Website
www.cdcr.ca.gov/
THE NUMBERS
• Reduced server environment by
approximately 60 percent
• Cost avoidance of $250,000
IN BRIEF
Objective
The California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation needed to scale its IT
infrastructure to meet growing demands
and increasing complexity. Failure to
do so could mean catastrophic results,
such as serious risks to public safety and
security, and serious sanctions as a result of
failure to comply with legislative and legal
mandates.
Solution
Virtualization allows the department
to meet increasing demands on its IT
resources in a more streamlined, efficient
and cost-effective manner.
Business Impact
• Implementing new servers takes a day,
instead of weeks or months.
• Better capacity utilization: one project
required only 5 servers, instead of 37,
reducing that project’s hardware costs by
$250,000.
• Change control is improved.
• Patch deployment times reduced by two-
thirds.
• Energy costs and power consumption
reduced.
• Disaster recovery capabilities improved.
2. C U S T O M E R C ase S tu dy / 2
C U S T O M E R case stu dy
Flexibility, Responsiveness and Cost Effectiveness
In the past, CDCR’s IT environment relied on deploying applications on dedicated
servers. With over 800 servers in use, the dedicated facilities for housing the servers
were running out of both space and power capacity. In addition, procuring and
implementing dedicated servers used to take weeks or even months. The VMware
environment and virtualization enabled the department to configure a new server
implementation within a day, and support redundancy and the 24-hour-a-day,
7-day-a-week availability necessary to support critical around-the-clock operations.
Today, more than one-third of the department’s Windows servers are virtualized and,
as a result of the increased flexibility and responsiveness realized through VMware,
over 40 legacy servers have been decommissioned.
VMware has also significantly improved CDCR’s ability to deploy new IT projects more
efficiently and cost effectively. In one example, the CDCR IT team leveraged virtualization
to implement an application refresh. Without virtualization, the effort would have required
37 physical servers. With virtualization, only 5 servers were required, resulting in a cost
avoidance of approximately $250,000. Virtualization has also facilitated more efficient
use of the department’s datacenter resources without expanding power usage. To date,
through virtualization, CDCR has reduced its total server environment by 60 percent.
CDCR has relied on virtualization to improve change control. For example, if a major
change is made to an application, it is cloned first; and if something goes wrong with
the upgrade, the department can revert to the old version. In addition, the department
leverages VMware tools to manage server patches and upgrades and analyze server
performance. The time spent on patch deployment alone has decreased by two-thirds,
allowing resources to be re-dedicated to other critical functions.
Green IT
CDCR has long recognized the benefits of Green IT; this department priority was further
reinforced when the State of California issued a policy and set forth guidelines
identifying energy-saving measures and initiatives as a priority for state agencies.
CDCR has been a forerunner in reducing the energy demands of its IT environment
through proactive measures such as server consolidation and dynamic management
of its computer assets. And VMware technology has played a major role in allowing
the department to significantly reduce energy costs through virtualization, server
consolidation, low period powering off, more efficient memory management and
increased hardware utilization. All of this has been accomplished without jeopardizing
data integrity or sacrificing reliability or service levels.
Rapid Recovery from Disasters
Disaster recovery is particularly crucial to a department tasked with supervising the
most serious criminal offenders and ensuring public safety and security. Disaster
recovery plans previously used by CDCR required timely and complex manual steps
to recover lost data and files and validate that systems were ready for use. “VMware
virtualization has simplified and enhanced disaster recovery significantly by storing
hardware configuration, firmware, operating system install, and application install as
data in just a few files on disk,” says Joe Panora, Agency Chief Information Officer,
CDCR.
By protecting these files using backup or replication software, the department has in
essence protected the entire system. These files can then be recovered to any hardware
without requiring any changes because virtual machines are hardware-independent.
Hardware independence also eliminates the complexity of maintaining the recovery site
by eliminating failures due to hardware differences. With VMware, the department can
“Within the next year CDCR will
close its datacenter and realize
a significant energy and cost
reduction by decreasing the
existing environment of 70
racks/800 servers to one high-
density virtualized environment
consisting of 3 racks at the FDC.”
— Joe Panora, Agency Chief Information
Officer, CDCR