Why I am thankful….

1. FAMILY: I am thankful to have a wife, children, parents, etc. We are all blessed to be part of an incredible family unit, one that has been elatively free of illness and tragedy and that are all loving and supportive.
2. FRIENDS: I am thankful to be surrounded by some pretty amazing people.  People that you can always count on to be there for you no matter what. People that make my life fun and enjoyable. Each one unique in their own manners and that I wouldn’t change for anything.
3. JOB: I am thankful to have a career that I absolutely love!  One that allows me to meet countless people as customers, vendors, and business associates. One that let’s me help solve business needs. One that challenges me daily.  One that never lets me stop learning. One that I look forward to every day!
4. HEALTH: I am thankful to be “strong like bull”. I am fortunate to have virtually no ailments, no illnesses, no addictions or anything that would keep me from living a vibrant life. Could stand to lose about 10 pounds …… but i’m working on that
5. LIFE: I am thankful that I am able to sit here today and ponder this list.

Some amazing people…

A friend of mine recently invited me to play with his group for the ARC of Monroe Charity Golf Tournament. As a golf fanatic, I was excited at this opportunity to play a round with some friends. The day was filled with great people, good laughs, and a decent day of golf at a beautiful course.

The reason for this post though, was the realization that I came to as I was sitting there during the dinner ceremony. Let me give you a little background first……

For those that don’t know, ARC of Monroe County has been providing a variety of programs and services for over 3,500 individuals with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities and their families in the Rochester community for over 50 years. This charity golf tournament is held every year to raise money for the ARC so that they can continue to provide these outstanding programs and support. Quite a few ARC of Monroe staff members, board members (which my friend is on), and volunteers work diligently to put on this event, which is no small undertaking I’m sure.

OK, here is where my realization kicks in…..

Many of the individuals that the ARC of Monroe support are able to attend the event each year. A couple were able to actually participate in the golf tournament, many were able to join some of the fun games held after the tournament and most of them joined us for the dinner ceremony after the tournament. Each table got the privilege to eat with at least one of these individuals and an ARC staffer. As the dinner ceremony progressed I was absolutely impressed with the love and dedication the ARC staff, and you could see it in the smiles, laughter and hugs of the people they support! I realized
that the ARC Staffers are strong people. Stronger than me because I have children and feel I do a reasonable job at this task, but my children do not have the challenges that I saw that night. The individuals that ARC supports have disabilities that include Autism, Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Asperger Syndrome, and Pervasive Developmental Disorders among others. To work day-in
and day-out with these kinds of challenges takes a strong soul, patience of a Saint, and a heart of gold and I hold the utmost respect to those that work in such a field.

They truly are amazing people….

 

VMware Unveils vSphere 5 and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite

On July 12th, VMWare made a major announcement about new products and enhanced offerings.  VMWare CEO Paul Maritz unveiled VMware vSphere® 5, VMware vShield™ 5, VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5, and VMware vCloud® Director 1.5

This marked an unprecidented release of a collection of software by VMWare to improve IT infrastructures and transition to cloud-based technologies. As a VMWare Enterprise partner, Info Advantage is excited to share the over 200 new or improved features that these suite of products can offer your organization.

This full article can be found here: http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2011/07/vmware-unveils-vsphere-5-and-the-cloud-infrastructure-suite.html

Tandberg Data Is New Owner of RDX® Technology

Tandberg Data, the global supplier of data protection solutions, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the RDX® business from ProStor Systems. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Tandberg Data will acquire the RDX business, including intellectual property and key members of ProStor’s RDX engineering team. The RDX removable disk technology has become the industry standard in removable disk storage for backup, data protection and archive. Tandberg Data has established itself as a market leader in the removable disk market since the introduction of RDX in 2006.

Read the full Press Release:  http://www.tandbergdata.com/us/index.cfm/news-and-events/press-releases/new-owner-of-rdx-technology/

VMWare announces Zimbra as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange!

Next-Generation Messaging & Collaboration for your Organization

   

Zimbra is an enterprise-class, open source email, calendar and collaboration platform. Zimbra simplifies IT with more efficient administration and flexible deployment options – both in the cloud or on premises. With the most innovative web application available, Zimbra boosts end user productivity on any device or desktop-any time, any place- at dramatically lower costs compared to other providers.

Overview

Zimbra’s innovative email, calendar and collaboration platform offers administrators and their end users innovative features that solve the challenges faced by organizations that use today’s legacy communications infrastructure. Key advantages include advanced web collaboration, compatibility with all desktop clients, over-the-air sync to smartphones (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) as well as better scalability and ease of maintenance. Zimbra’s open standards and technologies provide the flexibility to integrate new applications as “tabs” or mash-ups in the user experience (such as Salesforce.com, WebEx, Facebook or internal applications like Oracle).

Designed for virtualization, Zimbra delivers faster provisioning and easier administration with built-in support for high availability, disaster recovery, backup and lifecycle management using VMware vSphere. Zimbra simplifies all of those critical functions through easy-to-use, web-based administration and enables organizations to deploy and manage email and collaboration with fewer resources, lower costs and less risk — in the cloud or on premises.

Contact Info Advantage TODAY to learn how Zimbra can help your business!

585-254-8710     |      sales@info-adv.com

You can also learn more about the complete line of VMWare products here

July 31st Deadline for Cisco 3-Yr 0% Financing Offer!

Earlier this year, Cisco made an announcement for a unprecidented offer for their new and existing Small- and Medium-sized Businesses. The offer was for Three-Year, Zero Percent Financing on all technology and services from $1,000 to $250,000!

If you are a Small-to-Medium Business looking to make some upgrades to your network infrastructure, YOU CANNOT PASS THIS OFFER UP!

Contact your Info Advantage representative at (585) 254-8710 for details, or to see the official announcement and all the program details, please go here: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_012510b.html

Google Voice for Everyone in U.S.

This has been under development from the team at Google for some time now but they just announced free, open sign-ups to all U.S. residents.  For those of you that don’t know what Google Voice is, here is an exerpt from the recent blog announcement, follow the link for all of the details….pretty cool! 

Google Voice for everyone

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 | 10:00 AM 

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.

 http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/

IA Tech Expo 2010: Technology for Business Continuity

Info Advantage is pleased to announce their annual Tech Expo for June 9th, 2010 and has gathered dozens of outstanding Information Technology manufacturers and vendors in the areas of Data Storage, Virtualization, Security, Unified Communications, Telecommunications and other technology markets.  Although the IA Tech Expo is an overall technology expo, the underlying theme for this year’s event is Technology For Business Continuity. The term Business Continuity describes a mentality or methodology of conducting day-to-day business without downtime or interruption. Business continuity encompasses almost every aspect of an organization’s daily operations and should include Security Management, Document Management, Change Management, Audit Management, Service Level Agreements, and more. Disaster Recovery Planning is also a very critical subset of comprehensive Business Continuity procedure.

“We at Info Advantage know that it is imperative for information technology and business professionals to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. Business continuity is the activities performed to ensure this happens and technology plays an instrumental role in these activities,” says Ray Sheley III, Sr. Vice President of Info Advantage. “To that end, we have pulled together almost 40 industry-leading technology vendors to participate in an expo that is free to all end-users involved in business or technology functions for their company. The Expo offers vendor booths, breakout sessions and presentations, knowledge sharing, and social networking, all under one roof.”

Can Microsoft win the virtualization war against VMware?

As a Partner at a Systems Integrator that specializes in Network Infrastructure, I am keenly aware of the battle for “virtual supremacy” that is being waged right now by software powerhouses VMWare, Microsoft, and Citrix, as well as a couple of other up-and-comers. Although the theoretical application of virtualization is the same across all vendors, each seems to offer their own unique feature sets and are carving out the playing field according to their strengths. As with most technology solutions, there does not nor will not be one “magic bullet” that will work for every organization. Each solution has it’s own set of pro’s and con’s that is drawn out by each organizations specific parameters for deployment and management.

What virtual camp are you in? I came across an interesting article that was posted earlier this year by Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at SearchServerVirtualization.com

“Whether Microsoft can do to VMware what it’s done to other tech incumbents over the past 20 years depends very much on whom you ask. Microsoft’s history is rife with examples of how it came to a market late, launched a product that was underfeatured but cheaper than a competitor’s rival technology and ultimately owned the market.

Microsoft partisans — IT professionals in Windows shops and Microsoft Gold partners — say that the software giant can and will displace VMware Inc.’s server virtualization dominance much as it dispatched Novell’s NetWare franchise.

The VMware camp, on the other hand, contends that unlike Novell or WordPerfect or Lotus or Netscape Communications, which faced Microsoft incursions, VMware keeps changing the rules. The VMware-ESX-versus-Hyper-V hypervisor war is now moot as VMware pushes further into virtualization management, the cloud and other areas, they say.”

Read the full article here: http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1378652,00.html

CEOs say IT plays a key role in recovery

Just read a very interesting article posted by Valerie Helmbeck on Finance|Tech News called “CEOs say IT plays a key role in recovery”

See full article here: http://www.financetechnews.com/ceos-say-it-plays-a-key-role-in-recovery/