Category Archive for "Blog"

Office 365 v’s Microsoft 365

You wouldn't be alone in assuming Office 365 and Microsoft 365 are the same thing.... Microsoft does have a colourful history when it comes to selecting product names. Recent announcements of a 10% price increase on perpetually licensed Microsoft Office and server software has led to speculation of a deliberate strategy pushing business users towards…

Has your IT infrastructure aged beyond its value?

The impacts of continuing to operate IT infrastructure that has passed its warranty period creates financial, performance, manpower, and tax implications that could outweigh the cost of refreshing or replacing these systems. I'm often asked for advice on how to decide when the time is right to refresh IT infrastructure, rather than simply extending maintenance…

SAP Hana and Virtualisation – Is it possible?

In general, genuine virtualisation has not been on the radar of organisations implementing HANA on commodity infrastructure. It’s not that well known perhaps, but the IBM Power platform running Linux has been fully enabled to properly virtualise HANA workloads in both scale up and scale out architectures. In a comprehensive article on LinkedIn, Sundata's IBM Power…

The benefits – and challenge – of lithium ion batteries for UPS

While lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have been used commercially for more than 20 years in various applications, they typically haven’t been adopted as batteries for static data centre UPSs. This was mainly because Li-ion cells that provided UPS vendors with the right balance between price, energy density, power, safety, and reliability for static UPS applications simply…

Spectre and Meltdown: In plain English

In January details emerged of a new security risk. Known as Meltdown and Spectre, the two vulnerabilities, if exploited, would enable hackers to steal data from processors used in computers, mobile devices and cloud computing. Key Points: Spectre and Meltdown are different to the vulnerabilities we often hear about because they are hardware based,…