5/15/2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Kristi Paul

952-471-8558

kpaul@acmn.com

 Spring Park, MN – (5/15/2010) – Applied Communications of Minnesota, a business specializing in information technology solutions and services, received national certification as a Women’s Business Enterprise by the Women’s Business Development Center (WBDC-MN) a regional certifying partner of the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC).

WBENC’s national standard of certification implemented by WBDC-MN is a meticulous process including an in-depth review of the business and site inspection. The certification process is designed to confirm the business is at least 51% owned, operated and controlled by a woman or women. By including women-owned businesses among their vendors, corporations, and government agencies demonstrate their commitment to fostering diversity and the continued development of their supplier/vendor diversity programs.

To learn more about Applied Communications of Minnesota, please visit www.acmn.com.

About Applied Communications of Minnesota

Founded in 1983, Applied Communications is an information technology solutions provider that develops and implements data networking, security and storage IT solutions for medium and large enterprises. 

 About WBENC

The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council is the nation’s largest third party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women in the United States. WBENC is a resource for the more than 700 US companies and government agencies that rely on WBENC’s certification as an integral part of their supplier diversity programs.

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http://www.startribune.com/business/91923524.html?elr=KArks:DCiU1OiP:DiiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU

eToggle™, the Extreme Networks^® iPhone™ Application for Conference Rooms, allows you to easily enable and disable ports on your Extreme Networks Ethernet switches, making public conference rooms more secure. You can set a personal identification number (PIN) to prevent unauthorized access to the application.

Applied Communications’ newest security partner has announced their position in the Gartner 2010 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls. Key points outlined in the report include:

• Palo Alto Networks was recognized as a visionary in the Gartner 2010 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls.
• According to Gartner, “The rapid growth of business applications moving from the internal data center to external software as a service (and someday cloud services), along with the impact of what Gartner calls “the consumerization of IT,” has rapidly changed the definition of a “trust boundary” and the types of security controls that are required at that boundary.”
• Furthermore, Gartner notes: “In 2009, Gartner saw market pressures accelerate the demand for next-generation firewall platforms that provide the capability to detect and block sophisticated attacks, as well as enforce granular security policy at the application (versus port and protocol) level. ”

Palo Alto Networks’ next-generation firewalls enable policy- based visibility and control over applications, users and content. With this technology, enterprises can accurately identify and control applications, scan content to stop threats, and prevent data leakage – all with a single network device. By reducing the number of security devices in their networks, companies can save both capital expenditures and operational costs.

Download Report

The adoption of virtualization and outsourcing of infrastructure to managed hosting and cloud providers is driving demand for high performance and increased scale in the data center network. Extreme Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXTR) has responded with next-generation data center products to enable the migration to virtualized data centers and new infrastructure solutions that feature market-leading scalability, performance and simplicity.

Hosting companies and enterprises alike are scaling their data centers to realize the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure and cloud-based applications and systems. This new architecture enables resources to be dynamically managed and deployed and therefore delivers great organizational flexibility, agility and scale.

The physical network — providing essential interconnect and backbone within and between Data Centers globally — is the foundation for the new virtualized architecture and topologies. It is therefore essential that the network technology and systems be highly scalable, deliver powerful performance, capacity and capabilities to support large data center implementations. Whether these deployments are based upon Layer 2 or Layer 3 designs, the network must support a rapidly expanding number of virtual machines and a very large numbers of users within a limited power and physical footprint.

On January 26, Extreme Networks introduced new core and edge data center switching solutions that boost the physical network to deliver the scale and flexibility for a broad range of deployments. The BlackDiamond(R) 8900-xl modules and Summit(R) X480 stackable switches offer industry-leading data center solutions that allow for a variety of network architectures and topologies to be deployed by managed hosting companies and enterprises.

To learn more about Extreme Networks high performance data center solutions, visit:

http://www.extremenetworks.com/solutions/datacenter.aspx

Riverbed Technology is a leading provider of WAN optimization technology (branch office, data center, and mobile worker acceleration).  Solely focused on providing customers with solutions that enable faster, more efficient IT infrastructure, Riverbed has already helped more than 5,000 customers improve their busienss and accelerate critical business applications.  Not only will SharePoint implementations benefit from Riverbed solutions, but any applications that need to be accessed remotely will improve as well.  Steelhead appliances have also been instrumental in providing robust data protection and disaster recovery environments, including the enhanced security of encrypting data in flight.

www.infoworld.com/pdf/whitepaper/Why_SharePoint_Needs_Riverbed_WAN_Optimization.pdf

www.riverbed.com

One of the features in the new version of Data ONTAP 8.0 is the ability to use 64 bit aggregates, prior to this all aggregates were 32 bit.  The main reason to use a 64bit aggregate is to break the 16TB aggregate limit found in 32 aggregates.

ONTAP 7.3 helped with this in that it changed the way the 16TB was calculated, it no longer counted the parity drives in the 16TB which gave you an extra ~20% usable space in your aggregates (actual savings varied based on disk size).  As mentioned before, to expand beyond the 16TB a 64 bit addressing scheme needed to be used, the following shows the limit of either aggregate type:

32 bit aggregates are calculated by 2^32 * 4KB = ~16TB
64 bit aggregates are calculated by 2^64 * 4KB = ~67,108,864 (67 million petabytes)
Note: There are limits to the maximum sizes of 64 bit aggregates which are based on controller model

Those limits are currently:

A few things to note with that are that the maximum file/LUN size is still 16TB and that the maximum volume sizes for dedupe volumes remains the same.

When sizing your system keep in mind that the root aggregate must be 32 bit, it is also important to note that you cannot currently convert a 32 bit aggregate into a 64 bit aggregate (or vice versa).  The next major release of ONTAP 8 will have the ability to convert 32 bit to 64 bit non-disruptively however.

Along the same lines, you cannot perform block level transfers between aggregate types – Volume SnapMirror(VSM) between 32 bit and 64 bit aggregates will not work.  (Qtree SnapMirror(QSM) however will work as it is file based, as will NDMP)

The default type for creating new aggregates is 32 bit, for 64 bit you need to specify a -B 64 if using CLI or select the checkbox if using FilerView.  After upgrading to ONTAP 8.0 7-mode all existing aggregates will remain 32 bit (as mentioned before you cannot non-disruptively convert them yet to 64 bit)

Originally posted at: http://mtellin.com/2010/01/06/netapp-64-bit-aggregates-in-ontap-8-0/

xsigo demo

Obviously you need to be aware that enabling compression will add additional load onto your system but keep in mind you can use FlexShare to set lower priority to system level (e.g. SnapMirror) operations.  Another thing to keep in mind is that FlexShare is assigned per volume, so it doesn’t have to assign ALL of your SnapMirror transfers a low priority.

Enabling compression is as easy as modifying the /etc/snapmirror.conf file, you can enable compression on existing SnapMirror relationships.  The changes you need to make are as follows:

At the top of snapmirror.conf you need to establish a connection name and assign the source and destination filers to it.  For my example this will be:

sm1=multi(940-1,940-2)

<connection name>=multi(<sourcefiler>,<destinationfiler>)

Now you need to modify the existing line for the SnapMirror schedule, my example looks like this:

sm1:test_vol 940-2:test_vol_recv compression=enable – 10 * * *

Example:

For my example I was setting this up on a FAS940, I ran ‘sysstat –s 1’ before running the snapmirror and it averaged about 1% CPU usage

Source NetApp:

Destination NetApp:

After kicking off the initial snapmirror transfer I re-ran the same command and it returned an average CPU usage of 72% on the destination and 100% on the source.

Source NetApp:

Destination NetApp:

So again if you have a busy system, you will need to decide if the decreased WAN traffic outweighs the added load on your system.  I kicked off a ’snapmirror initialize’ and then monitored the transfer with ’snapmirror status -l’ and saw that I was getting a steady 8.0:1 compression ratio on my transfer.

Originally posted at http://mtellin.com/2009/11/23/using-compression-with-snapmirror-transfers-in-ontap-7-3-2/

A user community of EXOS Scripts!  Check it out!

In most cases, smaller organizations don’t have the capital to build a complete I.T. infrastructure. They may be left without a plan to secure and back up their important data.  In addition, hiring full-time support is too costly, so they often rely on one or more of their more technical employees to handle desktop and server issues.

According to Fredrickson, “At first, Applied Services was going to serve the smaller business community by providing desktop and server support, as well as a selection of security options such as managed firewalls and antivirus .  The more we talked to business owners, the more we began to fully understand their requirements.  Not only do they need the daily support we initially planned to offer, but they are also concerned about protecting their important business data.  They want to recover data quickly if they mistakenly delete an important document or a disaster hits their office building.” 

In addition, Applied Communications started to talk to current customers about Applied Services.  Says Kristi Paul, President and CEO, “The more we discussed the potential offerings, the more the feedback pointed us towards a more extensive portfolio of services.  Some of our current customers shared that they were finding it difficult, in the current economy, to afford some of the innovative functionalities of virtualization. In addition, it is too costly to secure space and build an offsite infrastructure for disaster recovery.” 

In response to this important input, Applied Services decided to build a complete data center using the best of breed solutions that Applied Communications has offered its enterprise customers over the years.  Not only will Applied Services provide managed desktop, server and security services, but they will also offer Applied Services Virtual Private Server and Virtual Data Center.

For additional information:

Contact us!

NetApp released v1.0 of their VSC for VMware vSphere, VSC is a plugin for vCenter which allows anyone connecting with the VI Client to access it.  What is nice about the tool is it allows you to see an overview of your storage environment and ensure things are configured inline with NetApp’s recommended best practices and, if they aren’t, allows you to set the recommended values.

Click on the pictures for a larger view, you can see it adds a new tab called NetApp when the ESX server is selected.  In my environment we are using all NFS for storage to the ESX boxes, so in the next screen I show the ‘Storage Details – NAS’ option:

What is nice about this view is I can quickly see I need to make a couple changes on the NetApp, the ucode settings should be set to on and the atime update should be set to on as well.

As mentioned before, there are also ESX specific settings that should be set to follow best practices, by right clicking on the ESX hosts listed in the NetApp tab (see 1st picture) there is an option to ‘Set Recommended Values’

Finally you can also set guest timeout settings, under the Tools option there is a download link for the .iso for Windows and Linux guests.  For some reason in my environment I couldn’t download the ISO from this page – if you have the same issue you can find it in the Program Files\NetApp\Virtual Storage Console\webapps\public folder.

Once you load the ISO in the VM, double clicking on the CD drive will ask you if you want to add the info in the windows_gos_timeout.reg file to the registry.

While I only have NFS mounted storage, you can also use the VSC to check things like:

• Storage adapter timeout settings
• Multipathing settings
• Collecting diag info from fibre channel switches (or ESX hosts/NetApp controllers)

Also remember to check NetApp TR-3749 for best practices with NetApp and VMware vSphere.

Two of Applied Communications’ solution partners are tackling these new threats.

Lightening Fast UTM!

Long time partner, SonicWALL has introduced their “lightning-fast active/active UTM (unified threat management) approach.  UTM firewalls enhance the completeness of threat blocking capabilities to include Anti-Virus, IP Security, and more. An Application Firewall extends that protection beyond threats to the management and control of data and applications which pass through the network security appliance. This extended capability provides bandwidth management and control, application level access controls, data leakage control functionality, restrictions on the transfer of specific files and documents, and much more. The Application Firewall is available as part of gateway anti-virus, anti-spyware and intrusion prevention on all SonicWALL E-Class NSA, NSA and TZ 210 solutions.

Sonicwall and Gartner on next generation firewalls

It’s time to reinvent the firewall!!!

We are excited to introduce Palo Alto to our line of solutions.  Palo Alto Networks was founded by security visionary Nir Zuk, with a mission to re-invent the firewall so it can once again become the most strategically important security device in the network.  Today, Palo Alto Networks offers real innovation in the firewall, enabling unprecedented visibility and control of applications and content – by user, not just IP address – at up to 10Gbps with no performance degradation.  These next generation firewalls accurately identify applications – regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or SSL encryption – and scan content to stop threats and prevent data leakage. Enterprises can for the first time embrace Web 2.0 and maintain complete visibility and control, while significantly reducing total cost of ownership through device consolidation.

Palo Alto Networks delivers the only next-generation firewall that provides policy-based visibility and control over applications users and threats.

https://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb47221