Yesterday IBM announced the availability of their new IBM Information Archive Appliance. The appliance replaces IBM’s DR550. The new appliance has significantly increased scale and performance because it’s built on IBM’s Global Parallel File System (GPFS), more interfaces (NAS and an API to Tivoli Storage Manager) and accepts information from multiple sources – IBM content management and archiving software and eventually 3rd party software. Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is embedded in the appliance to provide automated tiered disk and tape storage as well as block-level deduplication. TSM’s block-level deduplication will reduce storage capacity requirements and its disk and tape management capabilities will let IT continue to leverage tape for long-term data retention. All these appliance subcomponents are transparent to the IT end user who manages the appliance – he or she just sees one console where they define collections and retention policies for those collections.
It’s a solid (albeit a few years late) announcement from IBM. As a leader in content management and archiving software, it was always puzzling that IBM lacked an attractive archive storage platform to complement these offerings. In addition, archiving is still a priority for both the business and IT. Business leaders remain concerned with archiving data appropriately for regulatory compliance and legal discovery. IT struggles to keep up with storage growth which continues to grow at 30%-40% each year and to control storage costs. IT has always wanted to archive infrequently accessed data from expensive production storage platforms to less expensive archive disk and tape but their hands are tied unless business owners, legal and knowledge management professionals define appropriate retention policies as well as their functional requirements in a solution.
Which leads to a question that I’ve always struggled with myself? What is the role of the IT operations professional in archiving? It’s clear that IT operations professionals are not responsible for defining the actual retention policies but what are IT’s responsibilities and how can IT influence business owners, legal, internal auditors and knowledge management? I’m still fleshing out the list responsibilities but here’s what I have so far:

1. IT can recommend a retention policy for certain data sets based on an analysis of the storage environment. For example, if you’ve examined your environment and you’ve determined that users have not accessed 60% of your files in two years, these file are good candidates for archiving.
2. IT researches, shortlists, and participates in the evaluation of archiving software or service based on the functional requirements that business, legal, audit, and knowledge management professionals define. This could include the evaluation of on-premise solutions, cloud-based solutions or a hybrid of both.
3. IT researches, shortlists, and selects the appropriate storage archive to physically store the data. This could be a generic disk storage system or a purpose-built storage system and it also includes tape and even cloud storage services.
4. IT defines the architectural requirements, scalability requirements, and performance requirements of the archiving software or service. At the end of the day, IT operations will manage the archiving solution end-to-end. IT operations will be responsible for maintenance of the archiving software, the database, operating system and the virtual or physical server that it runs on and of course, IT is responsible for the disk and tape that physically stores the archived data. This is one area where IT operations must really exert itself influence and its own requirements. Too often, performance, scale and system manageability are not taken into the selection of the archiving software or the determination of the total cost of ownership. When a software solution doesn’t scale or perform IT ops answers the calls from the help desk and is on the hook to solve it.
5. IT is partly responsible for maintaining the long-term accessibility of the data in the storage archive. This issue here is the backwards compatibility of tape formats. Tape formats such as LTO are only backwards read compatible with the previous two tape format generations. This means that you’ll need to periodically recall tapes from the deep archive and migrate the data to the latest generation. This address tape media deterioration and tape format obsolescence but it doesn’t address the obsolescence of the application that generated the data. Call the knowledge management team for that one.

This is just a starting list. I’m interested to hear from other IT ops professionals if I’ve missed something or if you disagree with anything on my current list. I’m also interested to hear the struggles you have with archiving.

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A secured homeowner loan is, as its name suggests, a loan secured against your property. Secured loans require no upfront survey, legal or other fees. The loan can be used for many uses, including paying off outstanding loans or credit cards and reducing your monthly repayments. Also, the loan can be used for home improvements, a new car, a wedding, a holiday or to inject cash into your business.
There are various specialist lenders willing to advance finance secured by way of a second charge against the your home over a term of between 5 and 25 years. Generally speaking, the maximum combined loan-to-value (LTV) of the existing mortgage, plus the proposed extra secured loan, should not exceed 90%. In fact, some lenders will restrict the maximum LTV to 80% if for business purposes.
As the finance lender would be second in the queue for security, this involves a slightly higher risk which means that a higher interest rate would be charged, the interest rate depending upon the applicant’s credit history. Although secured homeowner loans might be more costly in terms of the interest charged in some cases, the following advantages may apply.

• A secured loan may usually be raised much faster than finance using a remortgage. Whereas it might typically take three weeks to arrange finance via a secured loan, it usually takes at least six weeks to remortgage.
• The applicant may be tied to a mortgage lender offering a low interest rate for say 3 or 5 years, which might involve early redemption charges if the mortgage is redeemed prematurely. In using a secured loan, the mortgage can remain in place to avoid this charge.
• Whilst the applicant may have a 25 year mortgage, they may not wish to extend his business finance for such a long term, which would be the case if they remortgaged.
• Finance raised via remortgaging cannot be offset against the future profits of a business for tax purposes. However, a separate secured loan can be clearly identified as being for business use and offset against tax accordingly.

When thinking about applying for a secured homeowner loan, it is wide to consult with a professional loan broker who will search the market and source the best secured loan for you from a wide panel of lenders.

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Cheap vehicle insurance for young drivers is one of the main problems for many parents and young drivers. By taking a few simple extra steps a parent and young driver can insure that they are buying Cheap Car Insurance For Young Drivers. Our counselors are waiting for you to visit today to receive your quote for inexpensive car insurance for young drivers.
Getting cheap car insurance for young drivers requires planning and effort for both parents and young people. It is vital that the people understand that cheap vehicle insurance for young people is only available if the young driver has met several requirements. Students must take workshops that are given by most major insurance groups. These classes provide the training necessary for the young drivers to be safe in any event. They instruct students about driving through oil, water, and other hazards on the freeway as well as how to maneuver past hazards in the freeway. In addition, students are trained how to drive in heavy traffic and what hazards to be aware of when motoring at night. These seminars also teach young people how to react when vehicles or motorcycles suddenly pull in front of their auto. This is important when a young person will be traveling in a large urban area or on busy streets.
Some large insurance companies also give cheap auto insurance for students to young people who keep a certain grade point average. As long as the grade point average is sustained, young drivers are awarded a significant reduction in their insurance costs and this reduction will get carried through to adulthood. The grade point average is based on the national average for grades and in some areas will be well below what the actual grade point average of many students are. This makes if much easier for average young drivers to qualify for this rate reduction.
The least complex way to acquire low cost car insurance for young people is to add them to their parent’s standard insurance policy. When the young driver is added to their parent’s in-place insurance policy he~she gets all of the conveniences of the primary insured and can drive in any of the cars on the insurance policy, but they do not have to pay the increased premium that it would cost a student to get the same insurance on their own. Many young people stay on their parents’ insurance policy until they either leave home or graduate from school. Many insurance companies make provisions for students to attain low cost auto insurance for students as long as they live at home or remain in school. This is a advantage for both the young person and their parents who would normally pay for their young driver’s auto insurance when they were away at school.
Cheap Car Insurance For Young Drivers is a necessity that cannot be delayed. All cars on the highway must have insurance to be driven legally. When a young person begins traveling they need to have the protection that insurance offers.

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This Monday I had the privilege of listening to myself play Viola. It was a weird experience for me-not cause I've never heard myself play before-because I had forgotten I let Jacob record me. This particular performance for my friend occurred within the first month of college life at TLU. It was interesting to listen and see myself play. I was surprised to find that it sounded quite nice, especially after my summer break without any practice. :O But it made me feel accomplished.
College life is tough-REEEALLLY TOUGH-but it's manageable. We have a lot of readings and studying to do, all while trying to fit in time for our friends. To say the least, it's unpleasant. But you have to push through. You don't need to warp your brain cramming in information non-stop, we're not machines you know. If you're like me, you've made some changes to adapt to the flow of college and are doing pretty well for the most part. So now I believe it's time for you to take things slow. Gaze out onto the campus-if it's not raining-and admire its beauty. Go for a walk, get some fresh air. Most of all, take time to look at how far we've all come this past month adjusting and pursuing our education. Stop and see the work you've put in since the start of this semester, how it's payed off, and how we're almost halfway there! Remember you've worked hard to be where you are, and we must continue working hard to move forward. Sometimes, like this Monday, you'll catch a glimpse into performances from your past and boast of your success, realizing its a constant slope upward to improvement. We're all doing well, and only 4 more years to go!

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