“This new part to our relationship with the worlds number one virtualisation vendor will allow our Education team to provide the best support for Education customers in the UK in terms of pricing, licensing programs and product bundles. VMware remain a very important part of our overall Education Solution stack and we are pleased to be part of the VMware Academic Specialisation”. – Steve Denby – Sales Director – LETN Solutions – 21/07/2011

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—May 31, 2011—As enterprises transition to flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructures—the foundation for cloud computing—they are increasingly turning to virtualization to gain greater value and improve efficiencies. They are also seeking ways to reliably meet recovery point objectives within compressed timeframes. To address these evolving requirements, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) is strengthening its industry-leading portfolio of Integrated Data Protection solutions with its new NetApp® SnapProtect® management software. SnapProtect software combines efficient, high-speed NetApp SnapshotTM copies and replication with tape in a single backup solution to help organizations improve the speed, efficiency, and simplicity of their backup and recovery operations.
With today’s announcement, NetApp has expanded its collaboration with CommVault (NASDAQ: CVLT) to include a global OEM agreement under which its industry-leading CommVault® Simpana® software provides a core component of the new NetApp SnapProtect offering. Today’s announcement further underscores NetApp’s commitment to OEM business models as an integral component of the company’s strategy to expand its market reach.

Resources

Top Reasons to Implement Snap Protect Software

Snap Protect Data Sheet

White Paper: Accelerate Backupand Recovery in Virtual Server Environments

News Facts

• In transitioning to virtualized, shared IT environments, enterprises are turning to snapshot copies to achieve greater efficiencies, back up vast data volumes within short timetables to meet demanding service levels, and recover business operations quickly.
• To maximize the efficiencies of snapshot copies, many backup strategies employed by enterprises today require a separate management process or detailed scripting, which introduces complexity and the potential for data loss. Using a single management framework, NetApp SnapProtect software eliminates the need to manage snapshot operations and backup in parallel, allowing enterprises to gain the speed and efficiency of snapshot copies with the flexibility of an industry-leading backup application.
• NetApp is focused on leveraging its vast ecosystem of industry-leading technology partners to deliver innovative solutions that help enterprises transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure and that enable IT to be an accelerator of the business.
• Backup and recovery technology is a key element of integrated data protection—one of NetApp’s eight key purchasing criteria for enabling a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure. The NetApp Integrated Data Protection product portfolio is widely recognized in the industry for reducing costs and minimizing overall storage capacity requirements with a single unified architecture that delivers high availability, backup, compliance, and disaster recovery services.
• In addition, NetApp is expanding integration with CommVault Simpana software to manage both NetApp Snapshot copies and replication in their existing Simpana environment. This integration delivers an innovative approach to data protection that helps customers streamline management of terabytes to petabytes of data.
• SnapProtect software is one of several solutions that are part of NetApp’s strategy to accelerate and simplify backup and recovery through the integration of NetApp Snapshot copies and replication with third-party backup management provided by innovative partners.

NetApp SnapProtect Solution Details

Fast and flexible. SnapProtect software combines high-speed NetApp Snapshot copies and disk-to-disk replication with traditional tape backup processes in a single solution. This solution accelerates NetApp data protection and enables users to customize a strategy based on cost, compliance, and recovery objectives.
Efficient. SnapProtect software leverages NetApp’s innovative storage efficiency technologies, which are widely recognized in the industry and can reduce storage usage on primary and secondary disk by up to 90% to optimize IT efficiency.
Simple. Snapshot copy creation, replication, and movement to tape are all managed from a unified console, enabling customers to respond faster to issues, streamline operations, and simplify management. A unified catalog tracks backups across disk and tape, accelerating search and restore operations.
Virtualization and application aware. SnapProtect software tightly integrates with virtualization, database, collaboration, and messaging applications to enable faster backup and granular, application-specific restores.
Integration for faster, more efficient operations. Through integration with the latest version of CommVault Simpana 9 software, NetApp Snapshot copies and SnapVault® replication can be provisioned and managed within a customer’s existing environment. Today’s announcement expands the integration to include virtually seamless Snapshot copy to SnapVault backup to tape policy support, SnapMirror® replication support, enhanced hypervisor and database support, and automated secondary storage provisioning.
Extensible. Every NetApp solution has access to the broader set of high-availability, disaster recovery, compliance, and archive capabilities found in the NetApp Integrated Data Protection portfolio. This enables customers to greatly reduce cost and complexity across all their data protection needs.
Supporting Quotes

Dave Russell, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “The combination of growing data volumes and evolving IT infrastructures introduce added levels of complexity and present new challenges for IT professionals under pressure to meet stringent backup and recovery service levels. Enterprises need a backup strategy that enables them to reliably meet shorter backup windows and recovery point objectives.”
Chris Cummings, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing at NetApp
“NetApp is widely recognized as the leader in efficient, integrated data protection, and that’s one of many reasons we’re winning in shared IT infrastructures. We are at the forefront of a major shift in thinking around improving data protection to deliver outstanding efficiencies and enable enterprises to re-invest significant resources from ongoing operations to innovating for the future. With the introduction of our new SnapProtect solution, NetApp is building on its leadership in replication to address these new customer requirements.”
David West, senior vice president, Marketing and Business Development at CommVault
“IT organizations are re-architecting their backup infrastructures to support today’s modern data center, contend with Big Data, improve SLA’s and right-size the exorbitant spend associated with antiquated approaches. Overcoming these challenges requires a radically different approach – one that tightly integrates data management software with array based snapshots and replication. Today’s announcement delivers on our promise to build innovative, high performance and cost effective solutions to solve companies’ most pressing data management challenges.”

Resources

Top Reasons to Implement Snap Protect Software

Snap Protect Data Sheet

White Paper: Accelerate Backupand Recovery in Virtual Server Environments

For a demo of RES Software and more information on how it maximizes the value of Citrix FlexCast, contact enquiries@letn.co.uk / 01189070070 (Option 1)

XenDesktop with FlexCast technology gives organizations the ability to deliver multiple flavors of virtual desktops depending on end-user requirements. Each user receives a secure and optimized virtual desktop to address their specific business role and needs. Delivering service to users in an enterprise using a combination of virtual desktop technologies often requires the addition of workspace management and automation solutions to ensure that the user experience is uninterrupted and that each user has access to their personal settings and data, no matter how they are receiving their applications. RES Dynamic Desktop Studio enhances this experience in XenDesktop environments.

“XenDesktop with FlexCast technology is enabling our customers to realize the full benefits of virtual desktops, ensuring each user has the specific delivery model necessary to provide the desktop functionality they need to do their jobs,” said Mick Hollison, vice president of marketing, Desktop Division at Citrix. “The combination of RES Dynamic Desktop Studio with XenDesktop allows each desktop to be centrally managed from the datacenter and securely delivered to users anywhere they are located and on any device with a consistent, high performance experience.”

RES Software and FlexCast technology in XenDesktop provides a complete solution to maintain a unified and secure user experience efficiently and effectively, regardless of delivery model or endpoint device. RES Software Dynamic Desktop Studio is a centralized point through which IT can automate all of the tasks associated with managing and securing the user state, desktop, applications and data across the array of FlexCast delivery models, resulting in significantly reduced cost and complexity in managing the end user’s workspace in this new hybrid desktop environment.

“Technologies like FlexCast are making the delivery of multiple kinds of virtual desktops an effective option for organizations,” said Bob Janssen, CTO of RES Software. “RES supports the Citrix FlexCast model by providing a single console solution for managing and automating all aspects of a user’s experience across the variety of end-user devices and Citrix application delivery products.”

RES Software has also announced this week that it has been elevated to Citrix Ready® Leadership partner as a result of the positive impact its technology has on IT’s ability to manage the user experience across Citrix desktop virtualization solutions.

For a demo of RES Software and more information on how it maximizes the value of Citrix FlexCast, contact enquiries@letn.co.uk / 01189070070 (Option 1)

For more information on RES Software and its dynamic desktop solutions, please visit:
• RES Software Solutions on the Web
• RES Software on our Blog
• RES Software on Twitter

LONDON.—May 9, 2011—NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced that it has completed the purchase of the Engenio external storage systems business from LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) in an all-cash deal for $480 million. With the completed transaction, NetApp gains an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) business that generated revenues of $705 million in 2010 and further enables NetApp to diversify its channels to market and expand its market reach.

“NetApp is excited to deliver product and technology innovations to support our OEM business partners and help them effectively meet customer demand for managing and storing critical data,” said Tom Georgens, president and CEO, NetApp. “NetApp has a strong reputation as a partner-oriented company, and the OEM business is integral to our strategy to continue to generate industry-leading growth.”
Rick Scurfield, vice president and general manager of NetApp’s OEM business, will oversee and manage the OEM partnerships and business globally. Juan De Zulueta, who has over 15 years of channel leadership experience and is currently a vice president in EMEA’s partner organisation, will become vice president of OEM business operations in EMEA. Mike Reilly will be director of OEM Field Sales for the Americas, and Bunji Kawanishi will be director of OEM Field Sales for APAC.
As part of the transaction, NetApp also gains access to a talented team that is skilled at managing a mature, proven OEM business model, further enhancing continuity during the transition. Additionally, the OEMs will benefit from NetApp’s award-winning service and support organisations.

Supporting Quotes

Douglas Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM Storage
“Building on this announcement and our established relationship, IBM and NetApp remain committed to supporting and enhancing clients’ IBM DS3000, DS4000, and DS5000 environments. New capabilities announced by IBM today, such as leadership 10G iSCSI support, demonstrate our commitment to continue enhancing these current OEM-based offerings.”

Tony Carrozza, SVP Worldwide Sales, SGI
“We are excited with the opportunity to work closely with NetApp as an OEM storage partner. NetApp is an industry-leading storage provider and as a result brings a level of innovation and expertise to the table that will help us differentiate our storage solutions in the market.”

Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata Corporation
“NetApp has proven that it is a leader in its field, and Teradata’s customers will benefit from the new and expanded relationship. Working closely with NetApp, we will continue to deliver products that exceed our customers’ high performance requirements.”

To learn more about the new products and solutions NetApp introduced as a result of its completed purchase of the Engenio external storage systems business from LSI Corporation, read the separate press release NetApp issued today.

Additional Resources

Follow NetApp on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NetApp
Get the latest on NetApp culture: www.facebook.com/NetAppCulture
Join NetApp on Facebook: www.facebook.com/NetApp
View NetApp videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/NetAppTV
Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=111681

The SMS PASSCODE demo lab enables you to quickly try the solution on your own mobile phone. To try it live, click here to register in 3 simple steps:
• Create a unique account with the users own mobile phone in less than 2 minutes
• Conduct a complete two-factor authentication login using the user mobile phone

SMS PASSCODE is an award winning recognized technology leader in a new generation of two-factor authentication solutions via SMS and secure messages. SMS PASSCODE offers a set of unique characteristics:

• More secure login process: The SMS PASSCODE solution is unique in the sense that the SMS real time service enables that the solution can incorporate a more secure login process prompting the user to first pass a user name and password challenge before a code that is valid only for that login attempt is generated real-time and send via SMS to the users phone. This protects against the modern threats like the Zeus malware that can compromise traditional tokens. There are other SMS based solutions but we are not aware of others that deploy this challenge based login that uses a session-specific code for increased security.

• Plug-and-play installation: The solution plugs directly into all the leading login systems including VPN systems, Web systems like Microsoft and Citrix as well as VMware’s Windows Deskop systems.

• Fault tolerant and scalable: It is designed from the ground up as loosely coupled components that can be distributed making it both fault tolerant and infinitely scalable. Components can be added and removed on the fly for 24/7 operation and redundancy is across all components including multiple SMS transmission services for carrier redundancy or global scale

• TCO is half that of a token solution: Over a 4 year period, the total cost of ownership is typically 40-50% of a legacy token solution as you do not need to distribute physical hardware nor repurchase tokens after a period of time.

SMS PASSCODE has garnered international recognition for its product merits including being named to the prestigious Red Herring Global 100 most interesting privately held companies, a Secure Computing Magazine’s Top 5 Innovator and a Citrix Ready Solution of the Year finalist to name a few.

Try-it-live in the demo lab The SMS PASSCODE demo lab enables you to quickly try the solution on your own mobile phone. To try it live, click here to register in 3 simple steps: • Create a unique account with the users own mobile phone in less than 2 minutes • Conduct a complete two-factor authentication login using the user mobile phone

LETN are offering a limited number of places at our Invitation Only “On Premise” & “Hybrid” Cloud Technology Breakfast Briefing.

The purpose of the event is to provide an informative briefing of the current leading technology in the Cloud Industry and how it can be integrated together to build highly cost efficient on-premise or hybrid infrastructure solution for any size of organisation. The event is going to be small and open to questions at the end for an informal workshop where ideas for in house projects can be discussed with our expert speakers.

Whats New About This Event?

We will be talking about how you use Context driven policies to deliver applications and a truly seamless remote desktop experience to your users. You will learn how you can manage an entire virtual desktop or Thin Client estate with minimal support & man power, we’ll also be describing how to make changes to desktop images and deploy on the fly in minutes. We’ll also be discussing how you can mix varying delivery methods and manage them all with the same tools. So you can mix Terminal Servers, Citrix Technology and VMware View alongside each other but map the users profile and settings over whichever solution they might be using at the time, allowing you to choose the right product for each task. A true Cloud solution requires a transparent and intuitive user experience and we have the answer to this.

Who Should Attend?

We have sent invitations out already for this event which is invitation only aimed at Senior Management or CXO level executives. If you would like to register your interest in this event or future ones please complete the form below and one of our account managers will get in touch with you.

Agenda:

08:30 Registration & Coffee
09:00 Introduction
09:10 Unified Computing & Networking – Cisco
09:30 Delivering IT as a Service – NetApp
09:50 Break
10:05 vSphere 4 Powering the Cloud – VMware
10:25 Managing The User Experience – RES Software
10:45 Ask the experts & Workshop
11:45 Close

Venue:

Eight Club – EC3 Bank

Eight Bank EC3 is a private club located in the heart of the City of London. Situated opposite the Royal Exchange just off Cornhill in the historic Change Alley, the club offers members and their guests a wonderful venue to relax, meet friends, work and socialise.

Protect The Data That Drives Your Business.

Free Data Loss Prevention Strategy Overview.

Preventing The Data Breach – FREE Whitepaper.

What’s New in Symantec Data Loss Prevention 10.5

Symantec Data Loss Prevention 10.5 introduces new capabilities that will help organizations drive data governance initiatives, enforce social media policies, secure private clouds, comprehensively manage endpoints, and deploy Data Loss Prevention globally.

Take Control of Unstructured Data

Symantec Data Loss Prevention Data Insight is a new technology and product that helps solve the unstructured data protection problem by providing visibility into file usage patterns and access permissions for network storage.

Secure Private Clouds

New endpoint event coverage for workstations running virtualized applications and desktops, including Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop

Prevent Data Loss From Social Media

Expanded web event coverage for Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Meebo

Self-Remediate Data Loss Incidents

New User Cancel feature allows employees to cancel out of endpoint actions – including copy to USB – that they were not aware violated data security policies.

Lockdown Critical Data

New Endpoint Lockdown feature triggers Symantec Endpoint Protection to lock down a workstation when Symantec Data Loss Prevention detects a data security policy violation for further investigation

Protect Endpoints Running Windows 7

Expanded endpoint event coverage for workstations running Windows 7 64-bit operating systems

Protect The Data That Drives Your Business.

Free Data Loss Prevention Strategy Overview.

Preventing The Data Breach – FREE Whitepaper.

Three_Steps_to_Migrating_to_Exchange_2010_Oct10.pdf

Mimecast+Exchange+Migration_Computing+whitepaper.pdf

The Issue Today:

Isn’t it a little crazy that business leaders up and down the land are following the governments austerity lead and running through their budgets with a large knife, while at the same time wagging their finger at the poor IT department and warning that business continuity for critical systems has never been more important?

In reality the money is not likely to be available today to protect all the business systems, Business Continuity is not DR and is typically a great deal more expensive to implement and manage. The trick is to focus on what keeps your business ticking and this is 99% of the time your Email Servers. Assuming that you have a good and tested DR solution in place for your critical applications all ready (…and you really should – if you don’t we can help – call us on 01189070070) then you ought to be able to recover within 24-48 Hrs to a point where normal business processes can resume.

What no business can afford in today’s hectic world is to lose email communication. Its the life blood of modern business enabling literally Billions of mobile devices around the world to become the average employee’s window into their working day.

So this creates two big headaches, how do we deliver an Microsoft Exchange upgrade non-disruptively when the time comes & how do we ensure that Exchange Email services never fail?

The Cost Effective Solution:

On top of the above challenges we can’t forget that we also need to do all this on a tight budget…
The key to this solution is the reapportioning of budget you are all ready spending in order to squeeze more value out of it. Obviously to do this you need to know what you are spending first.
The place to start is to gather up all the annual costs relating to your email Anti Virus, Security and Spam Filtering software or hardware appliances, work out how much they cost you in annual renewals and depreciation.

Next take a good look at your email server and work out “roughly” how much data in there is junk or needs to be archived, the average in our experience is between 60% and 80%, from here you need to look at how much this costing you to run on primary storage and again “roughly” and how much money you could claw back if you archived all this data.
The final piece of information is centred on how much faster your backups will complete with 80% less email data and consequently how many tapes a year you now don’t need to buy?

Once you have a rough annual cost for all of the above you can offset it against a quote for Mimecast’s Unified Email Management Service which includes an Archiving and Filtering Service. This service sits between your email servers and and the Internet capturing all your email as it passes through. this means your users can delete email they don’t need safe in the knowledge its securely archived, they can recover it very easily using a simple plug-in Mimecast have written for Outlook or via a Web Browser Tool.

It is even possible to export all your old email and have this “ingested” by Mimecast into your archive, allowing you to claw back that valuable storage and backup resource. As an added bonus you can also control what information is leaving your business via email using Data Leak Prevention features. The whole email store can easily be searched for compliance and e-discovery purposes.

The real value though is that Mimecast also offers Email Continuity and it is this simple function that will deliver the answer to our two issues.

If your email server fails the Mimecast Plug-In will notice and ask for permission to take over. If the user clicks yes then the Plug-In will connect to Mimecast and securely download the users email. Alternatively if the user has been sent home because the downed server issue is linked to building wide problem then they can log into the web client and read/respond to new email just as easily.
So, your users are protected from server and building outages and there has been no large capital investment in clustering your mail server or the complex management required to look after such a setup. You simply rerouted your email through a third party service provider and installed an Outlook Plug-In.

At the point where you need to plan and execute your Exchange upgrade you now also have a simple and bullet proof way of ensuring your users can get to their email while you cut over. You can cut over to the Mimecast service for mail delivery to Outlook, carry out your Exchange upgrade or rip and replace Exchange 200* for Exchange 2010 all while your users have access to their email.

What to do next?

Well, the most obvious question is how much is Mimecast going to cost for your business, and we can help with that. Simply call or email one of our sales team on 01189070070/sales@letn.co.uk and they will be happy to help.

Alternatively if you would prefer to do some more reading on the subject we have below two free documents that go into a lot more detail, please drop us a line if you would like to speak to an IT Manager who has already implemented this service.

Three_Steps_to_Migrating_to_Exchange_2010_Oct10.pdf

Mimecast+Exchange+Migration_Computing+whitepaper.pdf

About Mimecast

Mimecast is a leading provider of essential cloud services for Microsoft Exchange. Mimecast delivers enterprise email management services that include security, continuity and archiving. This suite of services provides total end-to-end control of business email, while minimising risk and reducing both cost and complexity. Mimecast Services integrate with an organization’s existing IT, whilst offering complete control to the IT administrator and takes just hours to set up. Every day Mimecast takes care of millions of emails and documents for thousands of companies around the world, which is why 60% of the top 100 UK law firms have switched to Mimecast.

LETN’s EVO.Education infrastructure offers a modern Learn Anywhere environment to School’s, College’s and Universities.

Our Lunch and Learn event is a fantastic opportunity to listen to three of the Leading Technology vendors in the industry talk about how their products are changing the way students access their learning environment and deliver better value for money for your IT Budgets.

Virtual Desktop Technology and Wireless Blanket Networking are just two of the technologies we’ll be discussing but these alone are delivering Learn Anywhere services to students who are able to freely move around a Campus without losing their connection.

We will be discussing and demonstrating how you can:

• Create thousands of Template Virtual Desktops in Minutes
• Access Virtual Desktops from any device
• Control access and available applications based on who, where and when they want to work.
• Manage thousands of students IT access with only a couple of support staff.
• Build a Wireless Blanket to allow seamless wire free network connectivity around your Campus.

Agenda

13:00 – Lunch

13:45 – Introduction to the EVO.Education Concept – John Walters – Education Business Dev. Manager, LETN

14:00 – Cloud Services and the Future of IT Infrastructure – Steve Denby – Sales Manager, LETN

14:25 – Demonstration of Workspace Mangement and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

14:40 – Coffee Break

14:50 – Student Workspace Management – Delivered by RES Software

15:20 – Access Anywhere Virtual Desktop’s – Delivered by Citrix

15:50 – Wireless Blanket Technology Demonstration – Delivered by Extricom

16:20 – Ask the Experts Q&A

Join us on the 18th November at our Breakfast Briefing, we are delivering a no nonsense showcase of four cutting edge technologies which are changing the face of IT Infrastructure forever. Technology is advancing at a pace never seen before and our Briefing delivers a short and concise coverage on the key advances in areas such as:

• Storage Virtualisation & Efficiency
• Virtualisation
• Virtual Desktops
• Workspace Management

Our presentations will be delivered by guest speakers from each of the Vendors involved, this is a rare opportunity to see several Tier One Vendor Product specialists together as a panel ready to answer your questions. If you are facing an infrastructure refresh in the next 18 months this is an opportunity not to be missed.

At LETN we believe in combining Leading Vendor technologies to solve the business infrastructure challenges of tomorrow, every technology we will be talking about on the day can be integrated with the other technologies covered. LETN have done the hard work proving and testing these products so you don’t have to.

Agenda

8:30 – Breakfast & Coffee

9:00 – Introduction to EVO.Infrastructure

9:20 – Efficient Virtual Storage – Delivered by NetApp

9:50 – Coffee

10:05 – Virtual Server Infrastructure – Presented by VMware

10:35 – Virtual Desktop Technology – Presented by Citrix

11:05 – Managing user workspace – Presented by RES

11:35 – Wireless Blanket Demonstration – Presented by Extricom

12:00 – The EVO.Infrastructure engagement process + Ask the experts Q&A

Evo.Education enables transformational ICT for 21st Century Learning Environments

Reading, Berkshire UK – September 5th 2010
– LETN Solutions, the multi-award winning provider of infrastructure solutions and services, today unveiled its next generation ICT solution for schools and colleges, named EVO.Education, in line with its highly acclaimed “Evolve” strategy. With EVO.Education, schools can adopt a next generation learning platform for the 21st century even if budgets are restricted. By fully integrating best of breed technologies across the entire school to provide “wall-to-wall” ICT capability, investment can be made to work to maximum advantage and best use is made of existing ICT to control cost. EVO.Education enables a truly interactive “learn anywhere” experience by seamlessly integrating:

• Real Time Desktop delivery
• Zero profile Workspace management
• Applications Delivery and management
• Server and storage consolidation and management
• Best of breed wireless networking

Download our “Learn Anywhere” White Paper to learn more about Virtual Desktops in an Educational Environment.

“LETN’s EVO.Education “Learn Anywhere” desktop strategy for schools is unique in its ability to deliver integrated leading edge technologies and builds on existing investment to mitigate risks and control costs, while still equipping children and end users to be more productive from anywhere. By using our virtual infrastructure technology and services experience we can help IT teams and their executive meet the challenges to enable continuous learning and other important education activities for students, teachers, faculty, and administrators, and to operate more efficiently and manage resources more effectively.”

About LETN Solutions
LETN Solutions has been providing infrastructure solutions, Managed Support, Professional Services and Hosting Services since 2005. The company was formed to specifically address the needs of mid-size organisations that required intelligent design, implementation and support for immerging technologies. Today LETN offer advanced infrastructure solutions based around Private and Public Cloud solutions for Mid Market and Enterprise level organisations. We have designed and continue to support infrastructure for Primary Care Trusts, Hospitals, Borough Councils & Housing Associations and many other major organisations and we are delighted to be able to leverage our experience to benefit education.

The Right People to Help You
A focused education team comprising consultants and technologists are available to assist in all aspects in considering ICT for the future.
Our company headquarters are in Reading in Berkshire, with Data Centres in Reading and Bristol. For more information, visit www.letn.co.uk/evoeducation or if ‘doing more for less’ is important to your school call us now on: 01189070070

LETN have designed many new infrastructure solutions for our clients that incorporate Disaster Recovery protection at a cost and speed of recovery that has not previously been possible, watch the below video to see how this works and download the white paper for more in depth detail.

Talk to us on 01189070070 to find out how using our Cloud Services in conjunction with the solution in the video can deliver the highest level of DR protection at a very competitive cost.

VMware Site Recovery Manager on NetApp Whitepaper

Site Recovery Manager on NetApp Demonstration Video

Key Business Benefits

• One Button Fail Over for your business servers to your DR site in under 30 minutes
• Don’t have a DR site? not a problem because you can Fail over to our Cloud Platform using our DR service.
• Leverage more value from your virtual environment
• Lower the cost of protecting your infrastructure with simple administration
• Introduce up to the minute DR protection for key business applications like SQL, Oracle, SAP & Exchange
• Enable board level control over the decision to failover between sites .
• Carry out regular non disruptive DR tests using Site Recovery Managers “Test” feature that requires zero downtime.

The Business Objective:

To protect the key business applications and information from being unavailable during a Disaster. To enable smooth failover of servers/data between Primary and DR sites with minimal technical envolvement to actual make the servers available via their new network.

Nice To Haves:

To be able to tailor the individual level of protection for different sections of infrastructure based on its criticality.
To empower a senior executive with the ability to decide when to failover and instigate this with just a few mouse clicks.
Protecting keys systems is ok, but if my building has burned down it would be good to also have the option of bringing the remaining less critical systems online within a few days.

Solution:

The question asked of many IT Departments in the current climate is:

“how quickly would we be up and running if the worst happened?”

An interesting question, but first of all you need to define what “the worst” means (or the word “Disaster” ) so that you can establish everyone is talking about the same situation. The goal however is usually the same which is to have a “ready to go” up to date copy of your critical systems at another site.

Secondly the question in reply is:

“how much will it cost us to be without our IT infrastructure?”

This cost is ultimately the way risk versus budget is calculated and consequently is how Disaster Recovery is costed.

The great news about disaster recovery is that, what was a nightmare question is now solved with a simple solution when using a blend of technology available from several Tier One vendors.

The base concept is that “it is great to virtualize!!” , but you have heard that already I’m sure?

One of the last features of virtualization ever mentioned is that the Virtual Server images are stored as flat files. These flat files behave like any other collection of files, they can for example be copied from one place to another and then restarted. It is this fantastic but underrated feature that makes Disaster Recovery so easy to conquer once you have virtualized your critical business infrastructure.

Using VM ware to run your infrastructure means that you typically need some shared storage, choosing the right vendor for this storage is critical because it is here that all your data and virtual server images will be stored. So for local business continuity reasons alone you need it to be reliable, flexible and easily managed. NetApp offer storage appliances that cover all of the aforementioned but also offer an important extra, the NetApp FAS appliances offer deduplication at block level which when combined with their market leading Snap Mirror site to site replication technology means that we can build an incredibly efficient site to site storage replication solution that is as light as possible on the amount of bandwidth it requires.

Ok so we’ve got replicated storage covered with NetApp Snap Mirror, but the next component is the part that makes the whole solution very efficient. VM ware Site Recovery Manager has a storage connector that links with Snap Mirror so that your Virtual Centre Management Server is storage aware. In the event that you need to fail over your Virtual Centre knows where all your replicated servers are and is able to execute a planned fail over making all the required addressing and local setting changes automatically. It is in fact possible to fail over with out having any technical resource to hand meaning your CEO/MD can make the decision and execute it.

Products Links

VM ware ESX
NetApp FAS Storage Appliances
NetApp Snap Mirror
VM ware Site Recovery Manager
NetApp SnapManager product suite

Efficiency Thru Utilization and Automation

- vSphere is the most efficient virtualization platform for cloud computing infrastructures. vSphere 4.1 transforms a traditional static, siloed IT infrastructure into a dynamic, highly elastic, on-demand cloud computing infrastructure.

Agility with Control

– vSphere 4.1 provides the optimum combination of agility with enterprise-class control. vSphere delivers zero-touch infrastructure, with built-in availability, scalability, security, and performance guarantees.

Freedom of Choice

- vSphere 4.1 is based on standards that enable choice and flexibility when it comes to the delivery of application and infrastructure services.
vSphere 4.1 supports of over 500 ISV solutions and 80 operating systems plus the latest x86 processors on the market.

New Features announced:

• Expanded Capability – x32 hosts per Cluster, 320 VM’s per Host, 3,000 VM’s per Cluster, x500 Hosts per vCenter, 10,000 VM’s per vCenter
• Storage I/O Control – Set storage quality of service priorities per virtual machine
• Storage Performance Reporting – Deliver of key storage performance statistics in vCenter
• Network I/O Control – Set network quality of service priorities per flow type (iSCSI, NFS, etc.)
• Memory Compression – A new hierarchy for VMware’s memory overcommit technology
• DRS Host Affinity – Set granular policies that define only certain virtual machine Movements

VMware vSphere 4.1 Brochure

Delivering a Cloud Computing Strategy – IPAD on Citrix demonstration + a chance to win an IPAD on the day.

We will be showcasing an IPAD using a Citrix Client to access our Cloud Platform and everyone who attends will have the opportunity to win the IPAD in a raffle at the end of the briefing.

Come to the Breakfast Briefing that De-Mystifies the technology behind Cloud Services

Learn how leading technology from some very familiar vendors is delivering all the benefits promised by Cloud Services, there is a lot of media noise about “Cloud” and this event is aimed at cutting through this by showcasing the actual products you can use to build an in-house Cloud or to integrate with an outsourced Private Cloud.

Cloud computing revolutionizes computing

Many businesses today are looking for a way to significantly reduce ongoing IT capital and operating expenditures yet maintain a world-class IT infrastructure. The question is: How do you do it? How can you cut down on IT capital expenditures and ongoing IT operating costs, yet maintain a competitive IT infrastructure? With traditional IT infrastructure, you can’t. You’re stuck. You need all the hardware and software, and floor space and cooling and staff and labour-intensive system maintenance. That’s what traditional distributed computing infrastructure requires.

Agenda

08:30 Registration & Coffee
09:00 Introduction
09:10 Getting the right Cloud User Experience – Citrix
09:50 Delivering IT as a Service – NetApp
10:10 Break
10:30 vSphere 4 Powering the Cloud – VMware
11:10 LETN Cloud Services – LETN
11:40 Ask the experts + demonstrations of key technologies discussed.

Introducing Cloud Computing

Wouldn’t it be nice if IT infrastructure were like the infrastructure to deliver water or electricity? Just turn on the service, as much or as little as you want, when you want it. You pay nothing when you’re not using it. The service is reliable, high quality and inexpensive.

Cloud computing is the model for delivering IT infrastructure as simply as water from the tap or electricity from the socket. Cloud computing makes every element of IT infrastructure available as an on-demand service—operating systems, applications, storage, servers, appliances and workflow management. You don’t have to make capital expenditures or maintain an IT infrastructure department. You simply turn on the tap and it is delivered. You pay only for what you use.

Cloud computing revolutionizes computing in the same way that industrialization revolutionized goods production. It creates large, extremely efficient service providers that are able to produce IT infrastructure services in high volume at low cost and renders small operations uncompetitive.

Cost savings, flexibility and scalability abound
The primary benefit to businesses will be significant cost savings. “An OnDemand business app in the Cloud would cost a customer a third of an OnPremise client-server app over a five-year cycle,” according to Merrill Lynch*. You make no capital purchase other than a computer and Internet connection, and only need to pay for the services used. With no infrastructure to support, you can significantly reduce IT headcount. You can use the money saved to develop new products and revenue streams or just reduce your bottom line.

There is also no vendor lock in. You are not saddled with hardware or software that ties you down for years as you amortize the capital expense. You are not stuck with a subpar product or an unresponsive vendor. You can change vendors when you wish, as often as you wish.

Finally, you can immediately and massively scale up or down for spikes in computing demand, for growth or for decline. You don’t need to overprovision to prepare for high demand cycles or to engage expensive long-term resources that exceed your short-term needs in anticipation of future growth.