Even if it ain’t broke, you might fix it

Some of the famous last words in IT are, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." They define the two sides of a coin toss: one side keeps idle hands from causing problems messing with things that should be left alone, while the other side can often perpetuate ______ (software, hardware, processes...) that end up [...]

Federal shutdown highlights need for network automation amid the trend toward doing more with less in IT

The Uplogix CTO offers an editorial on the overlooked importance of network automation in federal initiatives for data center consolidation and the cloud. With the current federal shutdown, many federal employees are on furlough, yet essential operations continue. For IT groups, this is an expansion of the current trend of being asked to do more [...]

Experts predict federal IT staff reductions next year

Belts are going to tighten in Federal IT, making Cloud,data center consolidation and network automationeven more important. A recent article in the Federal Times says that federal IT staff sizes will likely go down next year due to continued pressure from sequestration cuts, ongoing migration of federal IT infrastructure to the cloud, and program consolidation [...]

Perfect storms of impossible events

When planning for a perfect storm, automation is a critical component of engineering for resiliency. The recent failure of two network switches in a data center in Utah rippled across the network bringing down four major US web hosting firms and impacting millions of their customers. The breadth of the impact demonstrates some of the [...]

Does your data center have “green fatigue?”

A recent survey by the Uptime Institute indicates that fatigue is beginning to hit some data centers when it comes to the quest for greener and greener operations. In the most recent survey, only half of North American respondents considered energy efficiency to be very important to their companies. This continued a two-year trend, as [...]

The end or the beginning? IT predictions for 2013

Assuming the world doesn't end with the ancient Mayan calendar on Friday, December 21, 2012, this is the time of year when many people start looking toward the next year and making predictions for the future. Here are a few forward-thinking topics combed from various sources relating to IT issues in some of the key [...]

It just makes sense – Local Management for regional banking

You've likely noticed that many of the banks you drive by every day tend to change names often. Mergers, acquisitions, consolidations... it's a busy time in banking. Not all changes in banks just involve rebranding, often there are massive IT hardware changes and major systems that must be integrated when banks change. While Uplogix has [...]

Taking our story down-under

The winding waterfront of Melbourne A week ago, James Dollar, the founder and CTO of Uplogix had a chance to address the CIOs of one of the largest corporations in the world at a gathering in Australia. It was a chance to introduce a global audience to the concept of local management, as well as [...]

Managing devices locally for a greener network

Many network environments have redundant gear that is always powered-on just waiting to be needed. Day-in and day-out this gear hums along burning electricity without providing any service other than insurance. Chalk it up as a cost of providing 99.99%-plus uptime; redundancy is a fact of life. This practice is common in many offices and [...]

How smart is your data center?

One in five data centers are soaring at peak efficiency. A January 2012 global study of CIOs and IT managers by IBM concluded that only about one in five data centers have reached the peak of efficiency. How exactly do they define peak efficiency? Like many things -- it depends. For some data centers it [...]