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I’m happy to announce the newest addition to the CMI team, John Wondolowski, CMI’s new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). John is coming to us after spending 8 years at Central Garden and Pet, and his previous background includes stints as IT Director, Consultant and/or CIO at various organizations including CORT Business Services, Inxight Software, Lawrence Livermore Labs, Spectra Physics, Spectarian as well as Xerox’s PARC Research Center.

Doing great work for great clients is a hallmark for CMI exemplified by a recent engagement with Equinix, the world's largest IBX data center & colocation provider. Equinix was undertaking a large project to update the applications and infrastructure for their order to cash business process. Like every company, Equinix’ new architecture needed to be scalable, flexible and high performing to grow with their company, easily add new workloads, and respond on demand to changing capacity requirements. One other objective, make the new system cost effective.

CMI recently conducted a test to better understand the price performance differences between Solid State Drives (SSD) drives in a storage array versus flash based solutions built for purpose.

A quick primer about the technology used:

Solid State Drives – Utilize flash in SLC, MLC and eMLC flavors. They have controllers tied to the flash to handle the day to day read/write activity and are typically built with a form factor of 1.8in (laptop – consumer drives) or 2.5in (laptop – consumer & Enterprise grade drives).

As a trusted technology advisor to many of our customers, CMI prides itself on bringing technology to our clients that will help them improve daily operations and/or save money. That being said, we feel it is our duty to share a trend we are seeing in the industry, Cloud Back Up.

I know what you are thinking, “Sounds Expensive!”. Well guess what, not anymore. EVault is on scene.

The key here really is in the technology, so read carefully.

Convergence: An act of becoming more alike as a relationship progresses
Unification: The forming of a single thing by bringing together separate parts
Synergy: The combined power of a group of things when they are working together that is greater than the total power achieved by each working separately.

IBM’s PureSystem family is celebrating its one-year anniversary and even at its early age is delivering strong business value. Business patterns are forming that show compelling reasons why many organizations are looking to PureSystems as a strategic part of their data center solution moving forward.

We would like to share a few of these use cases for your consideration as you review your requirements and look for the best solution for your business.

CMI is happy to announce a new partnership with EVault, a Seagate Company. EVault offers a polished and cost-effective Cloud-Connected Backup and Recovery Service that many of our customers like and are using today.

The first thing that attracted CMI to EVault is the number of platforms they support, IBM i, Windows (Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint), VMWare, Linux (Red Hat and SUSE), Oracle DB, AIX, HPUX, Solaris as well as a few others.

A few blog posts ago, I opened dialogue with all of you regarding the storage hypervisor. This has suddenly become a hot topic.

Plan is a key word when moving your DC. There are logical steps to be taken to develop a plan that will lower the risks and assure a smooth move. The move plan process can be simplified to an acronym; IDAM – Inventory, Dependency, Affinity, Move.

If I had to boil down the reason clients consider IBM for storage solutions, these videos would be it. If you have not heard our story, please take a moment now.
Click Here for the videos. Enjoy!

Read more about Storage Solutions in our CMI Business Brief White Papers. Click Here for the link.