Improve Productivity and Reduce Application Management Costs with One Solution

For businesses seeking to provision Microsoft Office 2007 to end users while decreasing deployment and support costs, Citrix XenApp (the new name for Presentation Server) offers the ideal solution. XenApp is frequently used to provision Office because it solves the challenge of installing the suite on workstations, which is especially helpful with a distributed workforce or branch offices. Since XenApp is installed at the data center, it reduces or even eliminates the need to visit individual workstations to load the client software. This significantly reduces costs compared to traditional deployments. And with its virtualization technology features, XenApp also addresses several other Microsoft Office 2007 deployment challenges:

• Lowers System Hardware Requirements – Office can be delivered to workstations that don’t meet minimum hardware requirements. They only need lightweight clients and minimal hard disk space.
• Decreases Operating System Upgrade Requirements – with Microsoft Office 2007, IT might normally need to upgrade workstation operating systems. But since Office is installed on the server in the datacenter, the only change to the client environment takes place right in the data center.
• Eliminates Lengthy Deployment Timeframes – Once Citrix XenApp is installed and Microsoft Office is installed onto XenApp, Microsoft Office can be immediately published to all users.
• Provides Easy Access To Users: New users can immediately use Office, and all users have on-demand access from any workstation, anywhere, at all times.

For more information on these and other advantages of deploying Microsoft Office 2007 via Citrix Presentation Server, download the Deploying Office2007 using XenApp 4.5 today.

VMware Site Recovery Manager: A Single Solution To Make Your Life Easier

For businesses with a VMware virtual infrastructure, one single solution can automate and simplify disaster recovery management while also accelerating data and application recovery: VMware Site Recovery Manager.

The software integrates disaster recovery as an element of the overall VMware infrastructure and ensures reliable recovery by eliminating complex manual steps while enabling non-disruptive plan testing. Adding to these capabilities, the software integrates with VMware VirtualCenter as well as replication software from all of the leading storage vendors. This enables businesses to expand protection to all of their important systems and applications.

Key Capabilities:

• Disaster Recovery Management – discover virtual machines protected by storage replication using integrations certified by storage vendors; create and manage recovery plans directly.
• Non-Disruptive Testing – use storage snapshot capabilities to perform recovery tests without losing replicated data; connect virtual machines to existing isolated networks for testing.
• Automated Failover – initiate recovery plan execution with a single button; automate promotion of replicated data stores for use in recovery scenarios with adapters from leading storage vendors.

Key Benefits:

• Accelerate recovery by automating failover execution.
• Simplify creation and management of recovery plans.
• Improve reliability of recovery plans by simplifying recovery and testing.
• Enhance compliance with disaster recovery documentation and testing requirements.

VMware Site Recovery Manager ultimately makes your disaster recovery more rapid, more reliable and more manageable. And as your environment changes, you can update and modify recovery plans at any time. For general information, detailed product specifications, or to purchase VMware Site Recover Manager,click hereto contact IPM

Finally a data availability solution that’s got it all.

Maintaining server uptime and sustaining user productivity is challenging – especially since most solutions that provide high availability are complex and costly. But in conjunction with VMware virtualization technology, EMC’s RepliStor offers a simple solution that eliminates the costly hardware requirements. And by leveraging VMware, just one server can protect multiple physical servers within a high-availability or disaster-recovery configuration.

Taking this approach makes even more sense given that consolidating legacy servers to a VMware platform to centralize operations and reduce costs is becoming quite common.

But traditional high availability methods, designed for physical infrastructures and that involve tape backups, don’t provide up-to-the-minute data coverage. Solutions such as array-to-array replication can be costly and are useless where there is internal disk. The answer lies in the combination of RepliStor and VMware

An Unbeatable Combo

By using a combination of data replication technology such as RepliStor and VMware, a single, comprehensive solution addresses all of these challenges while still adhering to even the strictest SLAs. Hardware-agnostic RepliStor replicates data regardless of the source data’s underlying storage. Furthermore, by capturing the data continuously, the target location always has an updated copy of the data – unlike tape backups. And with proper planning and coordination, a minimal amount of downtime is required to complete the migration process.

For More Information

Click here for this free white paper from EMC that focuses on high-availability, migration, consolidation, and disaster-recovery solutions for Microsoft Windows environments. The document also provides an overview of use cases and presents a simple solution based on the RepliStor and VMware combination to address each task.