AV Global tackles downtime challenge

Downtime in any business results in loss of business opportunity. Hence, corrective measures need to taken to ensure business continuity at all times.

EXPRESSCLUSTER family of integrated High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) software enables fast recovery and continuous protection of critical applications and data by monitoring system operations, detecting failures and automatically transferring operations to a standby server that continues to carry out application workloads.

Unplanned downtime mitigation against hardware, software, and site failures and planned downtime mitigation against periodic hardware and software maintenance tasks that require system restart are also addressed by the solution.

This solution can work with heterogeneous environments and offers powerful and accurate failure monitoring features, failover features that quickly inherit jobs to a healthy server when a failure occurs, and operation management features that determine where failures have occurred at a glance.

With NEC’s fault tolerant server, ExpressCluster X solution provides synchronous data mirroring technology which guarantees data integrity between productions.

EXPRESSCLUSTER software was chosen to achieve fast, automatic failover that ensured business continuity and disaster management at AV Global for its mission critical logistics application, and hereby ensuring its customers experience quality services without experiencing any downtime even during peak workloads in the most efficient and cost effectively manner.

(http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20110815/expressintelligententerprise04.shtml)

Projecting Future Trends

Holistic IT solutions/wide product and solutions portfolio offered, helps education institutes increase operational efficiency and lower their total cost of operation. A focused learning environment for students is the key for excellence. Incorporating technology in the curriculum at any level can greatly increase the effectiveness of teaching. The world is quickly learning the benefits of adding multimedia capabilities to educational environments.

Emerging technologies, market trends, product strategies for the education segment.

http://www.digitallearning.in/interview/interview-details.asp?interviewid=790

Ensuring Business Continuity in the event of planned and unplanned disruptions

Due to recurring natural disasters and increasing security threats in India, business continuity and disaster management have assumed significant importance in the enterprise community. Unified middleware Expresscluster family of integrated High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) software provides wide range of solutions enabling fast recovery and continuous protection of critical applications and data, ensuring business continuity in the event of planned and unplanned disruptions.

The series offers powerful and accurate failure monitoring features, failover features that quickly inherit jobs to a healthy server when a failure occurs, and operation management features that determine where failures have occurred at a glance.

The solution addresses unplanned downtime mitigation against hardware, software, and site failures and planned downtime mitigation against periodic hardware and software maintenance tasks that require system restart. The series supports non-disruptive failover for virtual machines through reinforced linking functions with virtualization software. Moreover, the time required to initially synchronize data between the active server and the standby server gets significantly reduced, in addition to usability improvements in the graphical user interface (GUI).

http://www.cxotoday.com/story/nec-india-unveils-expresscluster-x-to-ensure-business-continuity/

Indian Educational Institutions focusing on leading edge in-classroom technologies for better knowledge delivery

Leading edge technologies as adoption of 3-D technology makes education a little more relevant, specifically because its impact is probably 10 times more than the audio or plain words. If a student wishes to design a skyscraper or wants to plan a town, with the help of 3D technology he can have an immersive view of the entire project. He can fly through it; rotate it; move it up and down; have multiple angle snap shots, and thus plan it in a better way.

Educational content providers are working towards generating 3D enabled content—as content is the key for 3D usage. Progressive 3D usage in projection and other technologies will be experienced as soon as the content becomes available. Besides this, Digital Signage is expected to catch up among the most important in-classroom technologies.

Efforts are being made towards combining projection technologies and interactive multi-touch technologies. With incorporation of such a combination, current teaching methodology is in for some big changes. It will be possible to interact, have discussion boards, whiteboards and comments coming in on the same screen with multiple people contributing online.

In-classroom technologies are just tools. Unless a basic infrastructure exists on a sustainable basis, to run and utilise the tools, and the people are trained, it may not be possible to derive total benefits and ROI by deploying the technology. This pertinent aspect needs to be focused upon on priority.

(http://www.edu-leaders.com/content/indian-educational-institutions-make-learning-fun#) 

Rebel Without a Cause

Took a break from the mundane.. found old alma-mater stuff.. box in the attic.. came across old DVD collection.. pulled out East of Eden & Giant and relished them over the imperious afternoon.. reminiscent of the days influenced by James dean, the who, Led Zeppelin.. Yell Rebel!.. typical teenager, caught at the crossroads where no one understand you..

Coming to the movies..East of Eden, Paul Osborn's adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel of the same name is one of Kazan's (On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire) richest films and James Dean's first significant role, part of his short but resplendent career and is arguably his best performance. The film aptly depicts the interaction between Dean and his father (played by Raymond Massey) as the quintessential generational conflict. Dean's performance in the film portends his role as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause. Both characters are angst-ridden, protagonists and misunderstood outcasts, desperately craving approval from a father figure. It can also be interpreted as Kazan's updated re-telling of the Biblical story of rival brothers, Cain and Abel and a paradise lost. All characters do justice to the movie. Julie Harris as Abra is great and Jo van Fleet as Kate (Dean's mother in the film) won the Academy award for best actress in a supporting role.

Giant, I remember having watched before in my early teens, has Dean play a supporting role to legendary actors Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, and standing on his own with remarkable grace and ease. His role in Giant is in quite contrary to his earlier roles as Jim Stark and Cal Trask, typical teenage rebel in his earlier films. Here he plays Jett Rink, an oil rich Texan and his effort is great as he seamlessly portrays both the young energetic and an older version of his character with ease. In one scene, Dean dyed his hair gray and shaved some of it off to give himself a receding hairline. Giant was Dean's last film due to his untimely demise in car crash in 55.

Dean's enduring fame, popularity and iconic status lies on these three films with his death at an early age cementing his legendary status.

De-duplication will find many takers

In storage trends that will gain momentum in 2010 are virtualization, de-duplication and the introduction of energy-effcient features. Deduplication will gain prominence as a feature, rather than a standalone technology. Majority of enterprises still have not deployed de-duplication, but will leverage easier deployments next year as it becomes built into most storage offerings – everything from back-up software, to primary storage, to replication and archiving software.

As more enterprises reap the benefits of de-duplication and the gap it bridges with information management, the primary issue will become management of storage resources. As a result, enterprises will look to vendors to deploy simplifed and cross-platform de-duplication management that save time and money.

In 2009, organizations began to shift from implementing ‘green’ technologies primarily for cost reduction purposes, to a more balanced awareness, of also improving the organization’s environmental standing. In 2010, these two drivers will push most enterprise organizations to implement a ‘green’ strategy. IT decision makers are increasingly justifying green IT solutions by more than cost and IT effciency benefts.
In line data deduplication capabilities reduce storage capacity at a time when most midmarket IT organizations are struggling to keep pace with rapidly growing amounts of data.
(http://www.thectoforum.com/content/de-duplication-will-find-many-takers-nec)

India's 1st Nuclear Submarine, INS Arihant

India today reached a milestone when PM Dr. Manmohan Singh and his wife Madam Gursharan Kaur launched the country's first indigenous nuclear-powered submarine 'INS Arihant' for sea trials for two years before being commissioned into full service. With the launch of the submarine India join's the exclusive club of US, Russia, China, France and the UK with similar capabilities.

INS Arihant has been built under the Advanced Technology Vessels (ATV) program by the Shipbuilding Centre (SBC) Visakhapatnam. This is tremendous achievement... to see the fruitful culmination of efforts over the last two  decades. 

It gives me a great feeling...immense pride for having been associated with this prestigious project... Recalling  those days of numerous technical discussions, solution architecting, countless interactions amongst all involved on technology aspects from CAD/CAM/CAE to Universal Virtual Prototyping, from PLM to use of Digital Mock-Up and Virtual Reality technology, to systems, network, workflows...

It was great being part of the team and at the forefront of having provided technology solutions for ATV Project.  

Great feeling to have contributed....

Cheers!