Here are a few examples (although I have added a “Case Study” Category to help find the others as well) of some of the case studies I have recently written:
Law.com Case Study, “Case Study: E-Mail as a Managed Service”
Last modified on 2009-11-24 20:37:37 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
A recently published case study for the Legal Technology Section of Law.com. It was posted on November 4, 2009 and delineates Florida law firm Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson’s decision to use Azaleos to migrate its Exchange databases and manage its email:
Law firms have a reputation for being document-intensive, and Miami-based Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson is no exception. Over the last several years, this full-service firm has worked diligently at becoming a paperless operation, and more than 95 percent of everything it does now is computer-based, says Eugene Cabreja, IT director at Stearns Weaver.
Until recently, however, Stearns Weaver’s e-mail system was hobbling in their digital transition. The firm was using an outdated Novell GroupWise installation that was buckling under the massive amount of e-mail going back and forth between attorneys, staff and clients. To make matters worse, it didn’t integrate well with the firm’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Given that most of the firm’s 120 lawyers use BlackBerry devices as a primary means of communication, an outage on that end could mean the difference between getting a 200-page M&A agreement to the client with time to spare and missing the deadline altogether.
The firm decided to migrate from GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange 2007, but Cabreja had several concerns about both the migration and the subsequent management of the new Exchange site. First off, neither Cabreja nor his staff was well-versed in Exchange, and even if any of them were, the task of administering Exchange and BES in a proactive fashion would have been an onerous one at best.
Then a fellow IT professional told Cabreja about Seattle-based Azaleos and their Managed Exchange Services. Not only could Azaleos map out the migration from GroupWise to Exchange, it also offered the 24/7 proactive monitoring and management Cabreja wanted and integrated managed services for BES. “Azaleos had exactly what I needed,” Cabreja says.
Complete Article: Case Study: E-Mail as a Managed Service
Processor Article, “Real-Time Data: Adobe Turns To Terracotta To Meet Its Needs”
Last modified on 2009-11-14 06:36:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
A “Case Study” article from the November 6, 2009 issue:
Adobe needs little introduction. The multimedia giant has launched everything from Photoshop to the PDF, and as the years go by, it continues to design products for individuals and enterprises around the globe. One example is the company’s LiveCycle product (www.adobe.com/products/livecycle), a collaboration service that Fang Chang, group product manager for Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service, describes as a platform as a service for both developers and enterprises.
“It’s an SDK (software development kit) backed by hosted services run by Adobe that enable companies and developers to create these multiuser types of social, collaborative applications and rich Internet applications,” explains Chang. LiveCycle incorporates chat, video, Web cams, whiteboards, and other collaborative features that might be used in a virtual room or environment, making it easy for customers to create and add these collaborative applications into their products.
When Adobe engineers began building the LiveCycle SDK, they were seeking to design it so data would be available in real time without having to store it in a database. Raffaele Sena, senior computer scientist in the business productivity business unit at Adobe, says that his group started looking around for caching solutions and found that the Terracotta Distributed Cache solution (www.terracotta.org) was the best fit for LiveCycle.
Complete Article: Real-Time Data: Adobe Turns To Terracotta To Meet Its Needs
Processor Article, “Event Logging & Management Pros: LogRhythm’s Logging Solution Is A Slam Dunk For Phoenix Suns”
Last modified on 2009-09-27 23:02:31 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
A “Case Study” article from the September 11, 2009 issue:
Putting aside the usual height of some of the individual members of the NBA team, the Phoenix Suns organization is a typical SME. Its IT network is made up of about 40 servers for its 350 users, yet the IT department itself consists of only four data center employees, including Vice President of IT Bill Bolt, and another employee who works as a combination administrative assistant and help desk manager.
Bolt’s department is responsible for more than just the basketball team itself. It supports IT for the Suns’ US Airways Center and all the events that take place there, including the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury and live musical events, most recently concerts by Depeche Mode and Green Day.
Bolt says that as the Suns’ IT infrastructure continued to grow, monitoring the logs of each server to ferret out security, program, and mechanical issues became increasingly problematic. “It would take another full-time employee each day just to review the status of stuff, and I was not going to be able to increase our staff,” Bolt says.
Then Bolt learned about LogRhythm’s Log and Event Management System (www.logrhythm.com). LogRhythm’s solution provided the Suns with a proactive means of alerting Bolt and his staff when, say, a server was running out of space in time to prevent an outage or some other calamity from taking place. Bolt checked out a few other competitors, but none of them offered the functionalities Bolt and his team needed.
“I sold [LogRhythm] to our CFO and upper management as being a tool that would act as another person assigned to the department [without] the overhead cost of salary and benefits,” says Bolt. “In addition, LogRhythm allowed us to be more proactive when it came to our servers and management of IT.”
Complete Article: Event Logging & Management Pros: LogRhythm’s Logging Solution Is A Slam Dunk For Phoenix Suns
Processor Article, “Expertise For Hire: Financial Institution Has Experts On Call Through Azaleos’ Managed Exchange Services”
Last modified on 2009-08-31 00:31:03 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
A “Case Study” article from the August 28, 2009 issue:
Greenhill & Co. is a rarity these days: a successful global investment bank with offices in nine of the major financial markets in the world, including New York, Toronto, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and London. The firm specializes in merger and acquisition transactions and has worked on some of the biggest deals of the past few years, including Delta Air Lines’ merger with Northwest Airlines.
But Greenhill (www.greenhill-co.com) fits the profile of many SMEs in that it has full-time staff of only five IT professionals for its more than 250 employees. In other words, the firm has almost twice as many offices as it has full-time staff. John Shaffer, director of information technology at Greenhill, says his department hires consultants who will help out individual offices; nevertheless, he acknowledges his department is pretty lean relative to the firm’s size.
“Our company has grown, but our IT staff hasn’t, and that’s why we look to [other] companies to outsource functionalities or to bring in managed services,” says Shaffer.
According to Shaffer, Greenhill wanted to outsource its Exchange server management without having to outsource the Exchange server itself. “We still want to own our equipment. We do a lot of calendar sharing, and I don’t know if this will work as well when going over slower links” of a purely hosted Exchange service. And because Greenhill’s business dealings are subject to strict compliance regulations, Shaffer was reluctant to lose direct access to the server.
As a result, Greenhill decided to use Azaleos Managed Exchange Services (www.azaleos.com) to manage its Exchange server needs, including a migration from Exchange server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007. “No other company out there does exactly what Azaleos is doing, where I can host the system, and they manage it,” says Shaffer.
Complete Article: Expertise For Hire: Financial Institution Has Experts On Call Through Azaleos’ Managed Exchange Services
Processor Article, “Keeping Track Of Email: Sonasoft Helps Napa County School System Stay On Top Of Email Archival & Backups”
Last modified on 2009-11-14 06:45:00 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
A “Case Study” article from the March 27, 2009 issue:
The Napa County Office of Education, or NCOE, had been looking for an effective solution for archiving email for some time. However, unlike medical and financial industries, the NCOE does not have specific regulations and rules on archiving email.
“There is no agency that sets guidelines for us to follow, so we have to do our best to archive email and follow everyone else’s rules because we don’t know what we’ll find in a court situation,” says Brian Dake, director of information technologies at the NCOE (www.ncoe.k12.ca.us). Although Dake says that later this year the NCOE may get some substantive guidelines about how long emails need to be archived and how they are to be accessed, right now, these issues are up to individual interpretation.
Dake says cases against the NCOE have taken place where plaintiffs were awarded on whether the NCOE had the appropriate emails and then archived and presented them correctly in court. Because of the risk of incurring punitive damages, not to mention e-discovery and court requests, the NCOE needed a concise system that records all incoming and outgoing email, provides easy retrieval for e-discovery purposes, and ultimately limits liability.
Although the NCOE researched other solutions, Dake says his office finally chose two solutions from Sonasoft (www.sonasoft.com): SonaSafe for Email Archiving as its email archiving solution and SonaSafe for Exchange Server as the backup and failover solution for its Microsoft Exchange server.
Complete Article: Keeping Track Of Email: Sonasoft Helps Napa County School System Stay On Top Of Email Archival & Backups
Processor Article, “Content Archiving Made Easy: Mimosa’s NearPoint Helps Miami-Dade Airport’s Email Management Take Flight”
Last modified on 2009-11-14 06:49:18 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
A “Case Study” article from the March 13, 2009 issue:
Miami-Dade Aviation runs Miami-Dade International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Miami-Dade ranks first in the number of international passengers, and Airports Council International ranks Miami-Dade 10th in the world for the amount of cargo loaded and unloaded at its gates.
Email is a primary communications tool for Miami-Dade employees, and to curb the proliferation of data, Miami-Dade’s IT staff instituted stringent mailbox quotas, explains Cesar Lopez, network manager for the information systems division at Miami-Dade Aviation. According to Lopez, his users found themselves struggling to keep their mailboxes below the quota limit, and as a result, many of these employees resorted to creating PST files of their Outlook mailboxes on their local PCs. However, these files were proving to be a huge headache for Lopez and his staff because of the inherent security risks, not to mention the risk of data corruption should any of these files become too large.
Miami-Dade needed a solution that could track, store, and archive user email and put an end to those pesky PST files. Moreover, Lopez and staff wanted a flexible and granular solution that would provide a complete capture of user email archives and would not require installing agents on user computers that could reduce network management, performance, interoperability, and memory considerations.
Lopez says he looked at several vendors for a comprehensive email archiving solution and determined Mimosa’s NearPoint Content Archiving Solution (www.mimosasystems.com) offered his organization an effective means to take charge of its email problems—and at a competitive price point.
Complete Article: Content Archiving Made Easy: Mimosa’s NearPoint Helps Miami-Dade Airport’s Email Management Take Flight
Processor Article, “Building A Supercomputer: OU Uses Infiniband Networks Powered By QLogic To Ease Deployment”
Last modified on 2009-04-20 01:01:06 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
A “Case Study” (formerly “Products At Work”) article from the February 27, 2009 issue:
The University of Oklahoma developed its OSCER (OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research) high-performance Linux computing cluster to benefit the high-end computing needs of about 500 students, faculty, and staff, both at OU and institutions collaborating with the university. Unlike most supercomputers, OSCER is specifically targeted toward education and direct research support at several different colleges within OU, including the departments of Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Geosciences, and Medicine.
Henry Neeman, director at OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (www.ou.edu), says that a key aspect of supercomputing is the need for lightning-fast communication among a large number of servers. A weather forecast of the continental United States, for example, requires splitting up raw data into four or five chunks, each of which gets analyzed on one of the many servers that make up the supercomputing cluster. But then each of these chunks has to communicate with one another to provide the user with a complete picture of the weather patterns.
“If you have a storm that’s passing from eastern Oklahoma into western Arkansas, there needs to be communication on [the] boundary between Oklahoma and Arkansas,” says Neeman. “It is not so much focused on bandwidth [but] on latency. How long does it take for that first bit to show up?”
Given that the messages that make up the complete picture tend to be very small, OSCER needed an interconnection network among its 534 servers that does not only offer low latency and high bandwidth, but high reliability. OU decided on deploying InfiniBand Networks powered by QLogic (www.qlogic.com), an HPC (high-performance computing) solution that includes QLogic 7200 Series DDR (double data rate) InfiniBand adapters, based on the QLogic TrueScale architecture, and QLogic SilverStorm 9000 Series InfiniBand core and edge switches.
QLogic uses the InfiniBand standard to interconnect high-speed servers in a cluster so they can work together in tandem as fast as possible with as little lag as possible, while at the same time shifting processing loads to prevent failover.
Complete Article: Building A Supercomputer: OU Uses Infiniband Networks Powered By QLogic To Ease Deployment