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What are your options when your existing PCs aren’t compatible with Windows 7?

May 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Want to save time and money on your Windows 7 deployment? Virtualize!

 If you’re a stalwart IT decision maker who stuck by Windows XP for the last decade, you’re finally coming face to face with the reality of a Windows 7 world. And you’re probably asking yourself: so how do I make the move?

For many organizations, the number one problem will be one of hardware. Until now, all you had to do was run a 10-year-old operating system, so power and performance weren’t much a concern. But Windows 7 is a powerful operating system whose requirements don’t align too well with all those old PCs sitting under your employees’ desks. And upgrading 200 or 1,000 or 5,000 PCs along with rolling out a new operating system is a hefty chunk of change that many if not most organizations simply don’t have right now.

 So again, how do you make the move?

 As with the challenges in storage and servers, the smart and money-saving answer for switching your OS may be in virtualization.

In fact, by virtualizing the Windows 7 operating system, you can extend the life of those antique PCs. How? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Professional Services in the New Desktop Era

May 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

As organizations adapt to an evolving desktop environment, Professional Services will play a key role in guiding this transformation. The arrival of next-generation technology is one thing, but navigating through hundreds of options and actually deploying them are the most crucial components of IT success. Our Softchoice Advisor recently team met with John Kauffman, our Director of Professional Services to discuss Professional Services’ role in delivering the new desktop era.

Advisor: John, can you define Professional Services for us? [Read more...]

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The 3 Challenges Of The New Desktop Environment

May 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

There’s a perfect storm out there and it’s causing a radical change to the desktop environment.

The proof is everywhere. Start with the prominent use of Windows XP, a 10-year- old operating system causing a mass migration to Windows 7. Next is a sea of aging client hardware, remnants of down-economy budget crises.

Combine these pressures with an onslaught of new tablet devices, exploding into the enterprise, and you have all the ingredients for a complete transformation in desktop delivery practices. “It’s truly a paradigm shift,” says Scott Harper, Softchoice’s Director of Business Development. “End users want to have full access to a customized desktop experience, for all business applications, on any device, anytime, anywhere.”

In the face of this evolution, IT leaders are dealing with a number of key considerations. We explore what Scott sees as the top three challenges of the new desktop environment. [Read more...]

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The color of your cloud

May 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 The term “cloud” in IT today evokes many responses, feelings and ideas on its purpose, makeup, and overall value to an organization. Some believe “cloud” is exclusive to IT services fully residing in an externally owned and run data center, in which an organization rents resources through an on-demand model. Some people believe cloud to be the creation of IT as a service within the organization with the hopes of creating true utility computing. And some people think cloud is nothing more than hyperbole, clever marketing and vendors trying to hock more of their gear to unsuspecting punters.

I’m here to tell you that in my humble opinion “cloud” is none of this, and all of the above at the same time. Sound contradictory? It is, and isn’t… Confusing? It doesn’t have to be.

To lend credence to my approach at explaining cloud, a bit of a history lesson may be needed (so bear with me). In the heady days when the mainframe ruled the corporate IT landscape, the idea was to provide a centralized computing model that could allocate resources to services as need be. Mainframes provided a stable, highly available and scalable platform that IT could count on to run and support an entire business.  While proprietary, expensive and about as easy to manage as a room of 30 toddler’s is, it provided stability, some flexibility and the needed resources for even the most demanding services that companies required to be competitive.

The industry chugged along, mainframes were the way to go and Unix was king… Then it all changed with the creation of the personal computer [Read more...]

Filed Under: Servers, Storage and Networking Tagged With: ,