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Most companies have a solid disaster recovery plan in place to handle a "complete failure" of its Active Directory, which is really quite rare. What most recovery plans are missing, and the most common scenario, is a means to efficiently restore single directory objects. In this paper, we'll explore what most disaster recovery plans already address, highlight potential weak points, and suggest solutions that help fill those gaps-without requiring you to completely re-do your existing plan.
Get the latest on storage technologies that allow IT professionals to better cope with new IT demands. Learn how storage technologies can help you successfully tackle e-Discover, regulatory compliance, green data center initiatives and the data explosion. Get all the details now.
IT professionals like the idea of consolidating hundreds of servers into only a few, but it takes a lot more to cost effectively consolidate and virtualize servers. Watch this six-chapter webcast, "Reduce Complexity and Cost - Windows Server Consolidation with Virtualization" to learn how to effectively consolidate your Windows environment. One of the themes explored includes the characteristics of an orchestrated data center, which includes: Resource management, dynamic provisioning, job management, policy management, accounting and auditing and real-time availability. Learn more about orchestration and much more today. Register below to learn more and be entered to win an Archos 605 Portable Media Player.
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Foundry Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FDRY) is a leading provider of high-performance enterprise and service provider switching, routing, security and Web traffic management solutions. Foundry's customers include the world's premier ISPs, metro service providers, and enterprises.
For further information on Foundry Networks please click here.
Today's enterprise network provides more than simply a technology infrastructure. It's an enabler for the enterprise, supporting mission critical applications, creating operational efficiencies and increasing productivity gains. Foundry Networks provides the ideal foundation for a multi-vendor network.
I've just spent the last two weeks doing interoperability testing of VoIP equipment for NetWorld+Interop. You can get the full results next month in Las Vegas at the show or in the May 10 issue of Network World, but here are some quick observations to whet your appetite:
H.323 is dead. Oh, man, is it dead! In past years, we've struggled to get H.323 devices to interoperate. They don't do it well and, what's worse, debugging is a total pain. Not so with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-controlled telephony. We had incredibly good basic interoperability in just minutes between SIP phones. When we wanted to debug problems, having all the control messages show up in plain text made it easier than H.323 ever was. For debugging, we used ClearSight Networks' VoIP analyzer as well as WildPackets' EtherPeek NX, but rarely needed the power and advanced features of either tool.
If you want to do a single-vendor VoIP telephony deployment, you don't care what protocol is underneath it all. Go ahead and get whatever makes sense from Avaya, Cisco, Nortel or your favorite vendor. But if you want to go for massive interoperability, mixing and matching vendors, phones and equipment, then SIP is the only way to go.
Not all phones are created equal. In the network world, we've become accustomed to treating equipment as a commodity. You can argue the fine points forever, but when it comes to most companies, it often doesn't matter what brand of network interface card, switch or server you buy. Not so with phones. We saw tremendous difference in the voice quality and performance across different products. Managing jitter across the network, encoding and decoding speech, and just sounding good or lousy - devices were all across the map. There is definitely a human factor involved with phones that's going to be unfamiliar to most IT people.
We found lots of variance in configurability and flexibility. You can tell the maturity of a product by how many knobs it has on it. Newly released, bargain-basement devices let you get on the network and little else. The battle-scarred veterans have 50 or 100 settings to tune the device for optimum performance in your network. The nice thing about SIP was that even without tuning, we had great interoperability results.
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