Celerity Becomes Gold NetApp Partner

Celerity is delighted to announce we have become a Gold NetApp Partner.  With the combination of market momentum, increased demand for storage products and innovative technology becoming a Gold NetApp Partner will allow Celerity to deliver innovative storage and data management solutions to satisfy customer requirements.

Chris Roche, Managing Director at Celerity commented “We are delighted to have become a NetApp Gold Partner which will enable us to help our customers adopt future-ready storage solutions that advance their business, at the same time reducing IT costs and potentially decreasing their storage requirements by up to 80%”.

To read this article on Celerity's newly launched website please click here

Celerity Recognised for Technical Expertise & Investment in IBM Arena

Celerity is delighted to have achieved IBM PureFlex and Flex Systems and IBM System X Business Partner Specialties. We have also been recognised as an IBM System Storage Specialty Partner for the third consecutive year.

The IBM Specialties are designed to recognise business partners who make a significant investment in skills, certifications, and client relations, and who have the ability to successfully sell and deploy IBM solutions.

Chris Roche, Managing Director, commented “I am delighted that Celerity has been recognised for our efforts and investment in IBM Technology.  Specialty Status assures our customers that they really are working with an experienced Partner whose technical vitality, commitment, skills and expertise are second to none.”

For any queries in relation to the above article please contact marketing@celerity-uk.com

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Backing Your Data Up To The Cloud

By Darren Sanders, Principal Consultant, Celerity Limited

Your corporate data is your company’s most valuable asset. Protecting this data is critical to the success of any organisation. Cloud based backup solutions are changing the way we all look at data protection, due to the technical, economic and security benefits they can provide.

As your data continues to grow, the costs associated with backing up this data to a traditional backup solution are also rising. More data to store means more disk and tape storage capacity is required along with increasing backup software costs to manage the volume of backup data.

There are many advantages of adopting a cloud based backup solution when compared to the traditional methods you may be currently running.

• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

• Improved Data Protection & Peace of Mind

• Agility & Scalability

• Sturdier Compliance Safeguards

• Smarter use of IT Resources 

• Ease of Use

If you are considering moving to a cloud based backup solution it is important to have a clear understanding of the service levels that are being offered and the impact that it will have on your organisation’s business processes and procedures and, of course, how it will actually integrate into your current infrastructure.

Celerity understands the importance of this decision and would welcome the opportunity for you to have a discussion with one of our data protection specialists.

Celerity’s Data Custodian product set can deliver a number of services around data protection. These services range from a managed backup service, for both on-premise and hosted backup environments, to a fully managed cloud backup offering.

To read this article on Celerity's new launched website please Backing Your Data up to the Cloud Click here

Unix ... "It's Everywhere Man"

Johnny Cash once sang a song called “I've Been Everywhere, Man” and the chorus of the song lists all the places he has visited on his travels:-

I've been to:

Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota,

Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota,

Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma,

Tampa, Panama, Mattawa…..etc

Developed in the 1970s, Unix was primarily used in Universities and it was not until the 1980s with servers and workstations from companies like Sun, that it became commercially prevalent.  In the 90s HP, IBM and Silicon Graphics, entered the market with their own version of Unix on proprietary hardware. For the next 10-15 years these companies all competed to try and outdo each other.

Around this time a young Finnish software engineer named Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and made it available to the world for free. He invited others to add to the kernel provided that they keep their contributions free. As such Linux gained a dedicated following with thousands of programmers developing the code. Seen as the reserve of hobbyists and bit twiddlers, Linux certainly was not considered a rival to the likes of Sun, IBM and HP, however, it had one distinct advantage over the others in that it did not require proprietary hardware and would  run on pretty much any Intel x86 PC to Server.

For those who did not want to run freeware, along came Enterprise Linux. This is a term used to reference any distribution of an open source Linux operating system that is packaged for the commercial market. Some of the different Enterprise Linux distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Oracle Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLES).

These days Linux runs on just about any hardware you can name, from Android - an operating system based on the Linux kernel for mobile phones - to supercomputers. Most firewalls and virtualisation software such as VMware are based on Linux. The open source nature of the kernel and software means it can be ported to any architecture and, as such, has replaced the proprietary versions of the big players with the exception of IBM’s AIX. 

So if you think Unix is only for nerds, the fact of the matter is you’re already using it because Unix is …“Everywhere, Man “

For further information on Unix, please do not hesitate to contact Celerity Limited.

Neil Hulme, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited

Enterprise Wireless

I have previously written about securing mobile phones and tablets in the workplace with IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices. With a great number of devices such as phones, tablets and laptops appearing in the office, more demands are being put on our wireless networks. It’s not just the number of devices though; we are expecting more from our ‘gadgets’, so bandwidth demands are higher now too, and these demands will only increase.

Wi-Fi standards have been improving over the years, with 802.11n being the standard on most devices today. This has been fine for most of our needs, so much so that very few people in Celerity connect to our network with an Ethernet cable. On the rare occasion I would use Ethernet is when I want to upload an ISO into a VMware datastore. Even those days might be numbered soon, as Wi-Fi is trying to catch up to the speeds of Ethernet with what they’re calling Gigabit Wi-Fi…

Well… they’re calling it Gigabit Wi-Fi, but faster than gigabit speeds are only really going to be achieved in optimum conditions. 802.11ac, as it’s snappily called, is the fifth generation Wi-Fi standard and is being released in 2 waves.

Wave 1

Wave 1 was finalised in December last year and products are already on the market. The theoretical speed of 802.11ac is 1300 Mbps, using triple stream SU-MIMO (Single-User multiple-input and multiple-output) antennas with wider channels (now 80 MHz). This more than triples the theoretical speed over 802.11n. The number of spatial streams have doubled from four to eight, potentially doubling the number of clients too. Beamforming, which overcame RF interference by optimising transmissions, which was introduced in 802.11n is now standard, and a full move to the 5 GHz band means that 802.11ac suffers from less interference and crowding than the 2.4 GHz band of 802.11n and below. This means that you’ll need a dual-band access point if you want full backwards compatibility with older 2.4 GHz band devices, otherwise you’ll only be able to go back as far as the 5 GHz variant of 802.11n, luckily most 802.11ac access point are dual-band. All taken together, Wave 1 of 802.11ac offers an efficient evolution of Wi-Fi.

Wave 2

Wave 2 is expected next year and offers doubling, and possibly even quadrupling, the number of compatible clients an access point can support at once using MU-MIMO (Multi-User MIMO) antennas. Beamforming in Wave 2 is planned to allow for communication of multiple single stream devices on the same channel. A further increase to 160 MHz channels will allow for a higher throughput in less congested areas too. All taken together, the maximum data rate of Wave 2 is hoped to be 6.9 Gbps. However, Wave 2 isn’t finalised yet, so these figures could change.

So when is the right time to upgrade?

Manufacturers are planning ahead and have future-proofed some of their access points by making them modular. These field replicable Wave 1 modules will be able to be swapped out for Wave 2 modules making future upgrades easier.

                          cA Ciso Aironet 3700i and 3700e access point with Wave 1 module

Some aggressive pricing means that currently some 802.11ac access points aren’t too much more expensive than 802.11n access points. Now would be a good time make the move if your wireless network is struggling under the strain.

Want to know more?  Contact Celerity today.

John Carson, Technical Limited

Celerity Limited

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