Category: Cloud

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service now available through SHI

Posted by at 5:20 PM

VMware introduced its vCloud Hybrid Service yesterday, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering that connects and integrates both onsite and offsite IT environments and enables IT to extend their data centers to the cloud. What you might not know is that SHI is one of the first partners to begin offering vCloud Hybrid Service.

One of the greatest benefits that we see is that vCloud Hybrid Service doesn’t force IT departments to reinvent the wheel. The in-house applications and infrastructure in which they have already invested don’t require reconfiguring, and there isn’t any hardware required. It’s a seamless transition.

Of course, there are considerations that will need to be made and we’ll share those with you in the coming weeks as we begin to migrate customers to this hybrid cloud service. If you want to be one of the first, email me at Ed_McNamara@SHI.com.

iomartcloud adds cloud backup and disaster recovery to SHI BaaS

Posted by at 1:47 PM

Yesterday we unveiled the new SHI Backup as a Service (BaaS) offering and today, at EMC World, we introduced one of the partners that is helping to power that solution. SHI BaaS uses iomartcloud‘s enterprise cloud platform for its scalable, secure, and easy-to-manage enterprise-grade data backup and recovery capabilities as well as its user-friendly interface.

The press release we issued this afternoon has all of the details. Click below to read the announcement in its entirety.

SHI Backup as a Service

SHI launches Backup as a Service to help customers manage Big Data

Posted by at 2:02 PM

Big Data can offer organizations a true competitive advantage, creating new ways to enhance their dialogue with customers and partners, evaluate and improve marketing and pricing strategies, and identify new revenue opportunities. But it also creates challenges for the IT folks tasked with storing, backing up, and protecting the massive amounts of digital information.

As the amount of data grows, and organizations also deal with accelerated virtualization, regulatory compliance, strict SLAs, and shrinking backup windows, IT departments will be forced to rethink their data backup and recovery strategies.

To better help our customers navigate this environment, SHI has partnered with EMC to create a Backup as a Service (BaaS) solution. SHI Backup as a Service is an end-to-end software and hardware backup and recovery solution that’s delivered as a self or managed service.

It combines SHI’s Management and Support Services with EMC Avamar and Data Domain to provide high-speed data deduplication, predictable performance, and simple scalability. With BaaS, organizations can cut down network bandwidth issues, reduce backup time, and keep data safe at minimal cost, without upfront expenditure.

SHI BaaS provides fast, daily full backups of physical and virtual servers, desktops, laptops, enterprise applications, and network-attached storage (NAS) servers. It easily integrates with many existing environments — Oracle, NetBackup, Microsoft, and VMware, to name a few — so organizations don’t have to worry about a major process or infrastructure change.

SHI BaaS is available in several deployment models to meet the needs of every IT department: Continue Reading…

Healthcare IT diagnoses itself with a big data problem

Posted by at 11:12 AM

If there was ever an industry built perfectly for the era of big data, it’s healthcare IT. With the exception of the Census Bureau, I doubt there’s anyone else with access to that much data. But due to changes coming from The Affordable Care Act, such as reimbursements being rewarded to hospitals and medical practices based on performance, it’s becoming incredibly important for hospitals to track specific information in real time to help them make intelligent business decisions.

At SHI, we’ve watched the growth of the healthcare IT industry for a chance to bring our unbiased vendor support to a heavily siloed industry. That’s why we jumped at the chance to partner with Cross Current Corporation, whose cloud-based, real-time business intelligence tool — Cross Current Business Analytics (CCBA) — makes gathering healthcare analytics easy and cost effective.

Healthcare’s big data hot spots

Through our partnership, we learned there are three hot points healthcare organizations need to focus on in terms of their business intelligence, and certain questions they need to ask themselves to help drill into their analytics. The first two are common to all businesses: operational and financial. What make hospitals unique are the clinical problems. Continue Reading…

Making sense of the software-defined data center

Posted by at 12:22 PM

Software-defined data center (SDDC) is the latest buzzword in our industry. SDDC is the phrase used to refer to a data center in which all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service. Management of the data center is automated by software — meaning the configuration of hardware is done through upper-level software systems. This allows new services to be turned on or off rapidly and existing services to grow and shrink as needed.

This is very different from traditional data centers in which the infrastructure is typically defined by hardware and devices that might require multiple IT administrators to configure them, which can greatly extend the time to market for these solutions.

There are three core components of the software-defined data center: network virtualization, server virtualization, and storage virtualization. There is also an overlying layer that has to support the business logic of SLAs and application performance demands of the organization.

The software-defined data center is considered by many to be the next step in the evolution of virtualization and cloud computing. What separates the software-defined data center from the cloud is its ability to support legacy enterprise applications as well as new services written with cloud in mind. Continue Reading…

The SHI Cloud: What’s next

Posted by at 2:00 PM

I guess I’ve been in a contemplative mood lately, reflecting on the lessons learned during our first year of offering the SHI Cloud. In remembering one of the most fast-paced years in the history of IT, I am reminded of how deeply our industry’s roots are in a tradition of innovation and service to the businesses we support. The customers we represent at SHI are a constant reminder of how technological change impacts people in their day-to-day efforts to build successful companies. And that is why collaborating with our early cloud customers to build a service that fulfills the needs of production IT organizations has been such a pleasure for the SHI Labs and Cloud Services teams.

Although cloud has become somewhat of an overused marketing term these days, what the cloud is and what it represents is a complete transformation of our industry and one that has been a long time in the making. Computing has always been heading in this direction. Just ask the great-grandfather of the Internet, J.R. Lickider, about the Intergalactic Computer Network. Continue Reading…

Lessons learned from a year in the SHI Cloud: The business model and transformative ease-of-use

Posted by at 10:23 AM

If you’ve been watching this space over the past few weeks, you know that my past two blog posts have been part of a series of posts dedicated to reflecting on the first year of the SHI Cloud.

When we launched our cloud offering last summer, we knew that interactions with our customers would validate the true differentiators in our service and help us identify areas for improvement. So far, I’ve covered how our unique networking design has helped us build a successful cloud model for our customers, how we learned that customers prefer simplicity in their cloud service, and how keeping track of every single detail of the cloud for the past year has paid off.

Today, I’m nearing the end of the series with the last two lessons that the past year has taught us: the business model conversation and the importance of transformative ease-of-use. Continue Reading…

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