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Applying unified communications
Thuy Ha, director of product management at Qwest Communications, discusses a practical framework for unified communications. Ha explains how to build a foundation on ...
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Optimizing mobility
Thuy Ha, director of product management at Qwest Communications, explains how the network has evolved from being voice-based and centralized to being an individual ...
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Business class SaaS
The Software as a Service market is expected to double by 2012. Martin Capurro, senior director of product management at Qwest Communications, examines how ...
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Non-intrusive security
Martin Capurro, senior director of product management at Qwest Communications, discusses how to strike the right balance between productivity and security within the enterprise. ...
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Desktop virtualization
By 2011, there could be more than 660 million virtualized desktops. John Whaley, CTO and Founder of MokaFive, talks about the issues surrounding current ...
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Mobile virtualization
Mike Seashols, Chairman of VirtualLogix, talks about implementing virtualization technologies onto mobile platforms. He says there are many issues that mobile providers have to ...
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Nurturing sales leads
Phil Fernandez, President and CEO of Marketo, says that many companies today are not managing sales leads effectively. He suggests ways to utilize the ...
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Managing Internet growth
The Internet is growing by 1 zettabyte a year, fueled by images, videos, gaming, and peer to peer file sharing. Pieter Poll, CTO of ...
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Online ad strategies
There are more than 300 ad networks that focus on monetizing Web sites, so having a strategy is key. Ren Chin, marketing vice president ...
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What is semantic search?
Semantic search uses the science of meaning in languageinstead of just searching keywords, it checks the context of the words to return more relevant ...
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Next generation of business intelligence
Data warehouses collect gigabytes of data everyday but the information is not always meaningful. Why? Angela Shen-Hsieh, President and CEO of Visual I/O, says ...
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SIP trunking 101
Voice, instant messaging, and video no longer have to be islands of collaboration. Kenneth Kuenzel, founder and CTO of Covergence, shows how SIP trunking ...
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Wireless inside the enterprise
With the rise of PDAs, Blackberries and mobile phones, the demand for wireless service inside large buildings is increasing every day. Leila Nouri, director ...
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Intel® vPro™ technology and cost savings
Sponsored: Randy Nystrom, an IT systems engineer at Intel, shows how vPro saves time and money by diagnosing PC problems remotely. The content for ...
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Intel® vPro™ technology and manageability
Sponsored: Limited technical support hours and powered down PCs can make it difficult to manage large numbers of PCs. Randy Nystrom, an IT systems ...
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Application streaming
Sponsored: Updating applications can be time-consuming for both users and administrators. Christian Black, an IT systems engineer at Intel, explains why application streaming is ...
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OS streaming
Sponsored: Christian Black, an IT systems engineer for Intel, spells out the many benefits of hard-drive virtualization, or operating system streaming, including faster boot ...
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Enterprise 2.0
Vince Casarez, vice president of product management at Oracle, explains how Web 2.0 technologies, such as tags, wikis, and mash-ups, can be applied within ...
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Secure file transfers
John Thielens, vice president of technology at Tumbleweed, talks about the need for managed file transfers that are not only secure, but auditable and ...
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What is LEED?
"Going green" is becoming commonplace in the corporate world. Paul Holland, general partner at Foundation Capital, explains LEED, the metrics used to certify the ...
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What is a mashup?
Developers are getting creative, taking APIs from multiple Websites and merging them to form new, innovative applications. Frozenbear.com merges Google maps and Singles to let you know where the single people are in your neighborhood. Parkingcarma.com helps you track down parking spaces in the Bay Area. ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind says mashups are the fastest growing ecosystem on the Web and that by 2007, there will be 10 new mashups per day.
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Non-intrusive security
Martin Capurro, senior director of product management at Qwest Communications, discusses how to strike the right balance between productivity and security within the enterprise. He explains security must work end-to-end, from the system level to the mobility level, and how each layer works to mitigate risk.
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What is virtualization?
Data centers are commonly filled with large numbers of servers that require a tremendous amount of time and money to maintain. Dan Chu of VMware shows how virtualization can optimize fewer servers to run at higher performance levels.
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First steps to SOA
What does it really mean to introduce SOA into an organization? Ross Mason, CTO and co-founder of MuleSource, explains how an enterprise service bus allows different applications to communicate with each other.
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Desktop vs. workstation: Introduction
Sponsored: Dave Buckley, product line manager of workstations at HP, explains the differences between desktops and workstations, and how these differences influence purchasing decisions. The content for this video was sponsored and provided by HP.
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Users-to-tech support ratio
How many employees should one tech support staff person oversee? CNET's Justine Nguyen explains the golden ratio of users to tech support staff, and what factors contribute to it.
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Applying unified communications
Thuy Ha, director of product management at Qwest Communications, discusses a practical framework for unified communications. Ha explains how to build a foundation on a converged network, then add layers such as mobility, conferencing and collaboration.
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Energy-efficient transistors
Rob Willoner, a technology analyst at Intel, explains how smaller and more energy-efficient transistors are resulting in faster and more powerful CPUs.
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Implementing balanced scorecards
BNET director Jay Gulick drills down on the five principles used to implement the balanced scorecard -- a widely-used tool for managing and measuring a company's strategy.
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What is semantic search?
Semantic search uses the science of meaning in languageinstead of just searching keywords, it checks the context of the words to return more relevant results. Brooke Aker, CEO of Expert System USA, predicts that it will usher in the era of Web 3.0.
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Lightweight architecture
Enterprises running three tiers of servers now have another option, using inexpensive commodity machines. Peter Yared of ActiveGrid shows how "lightweight architecture" reduces costs and increases scalability.
Hi, name is Peter Yared, CEO of ActiveGrid. Today I'm going I'm going to talk to you about lightweight architecture. Lightweight architecture is a new way to run computing applications across large clusters of commodity machines. Today the Fortune 500 runs three tier architecture, so let's look at what three tier architecture is and how it can scale into a lightweight architecture.
So the way three tier architecture works is you have a tier of web browsers, and these are machines just like your machines at home and they communicate to an enterprise. Now, the enterprises runs a cluster of web servers and these web servers are one to two-way commodity machines from places like Dell that generally cost less than $2,000. These web servers then communicate to a tier of application servers.
Application servers are usually very expensive machines from organizations like Sun and IBM and they usually cost over $20,000 apiece. And these application servers then talk to the corporate back ends such as databases. And your databases are usually things like Oracle.
Now, let's take a look at how all of this works. So you have a transaction going through. So you're going to a shopping site, you just get sent to an arbitrary web server. It then sends you along to an application server that's going to process logic and that logic will hold things like your shopping cart.
So this is where we remember what items you've purchased. And the application server, whenever it needs to find things like from the product catalogue, that's at what point it goes and talks to the database. And things like static content, you know, promotional materials and what have you come from the web servers.
So these are the three tiers of a three tier architecture: you have a web server tier that's sort of static content, you have an application server tier that stores things like your shopping cart information, and you have a data tier that stores information like the enterprise's corporate product catalogue and account information.
So there's a transition in the enterprise away from running expensive machines from organizations like Sun and IBM and more towards running commodity machines, so cheap machines like you're seeing here on the web tier. So what people are doing is, instead of running these expensive machines, they're switching to running cheap commodity machines on this tier as well, so no more expensive machines.
And now we're going to try to run our application servers, our J2E on these little machines. And generally, what you have to do is you have to kind of scope down what's running in an application server to really doing things like handling shopping carts, which is what most of them are doing anyway. So a lot of applications that you're running in your application tier are actually very, very suitable for running on small machines.
So this begs the question, why have a tier of commodity web servers mitigate connections to a tier of commodity application servers? At this point you have commodity machines mitigating connections to other commodity machines. And this is what brings us to lightweight architecture. Instead of running two different tiers here, what people are moving to is running one flat tier of commodity machines. So essentially, you add more machines to the web server tier and you start to do things like shopping carts here and you don't have to do them there.
So when your connection comes in you can get sent again to any arbitrary machine. If it needs the shopping cart, it'll just go get it from the neighbor and if it needs something from the corporate back end, it can go straight there, it can process straight through to the actual corporate enterprise back ends. And what's the benefit of this is this is an architecture very similar to what's been battle hardened by Google, Yahoo and Amazon and the next generation of Web 2.0 guys like FaceBook. Flicker or MySpace. These guys only run one large tier of commodity machines that talk to another tier of data back ends.
The benefit of running a two tier architecture instead of a three tier architecture is now you have one tier of cheap commodity machines communicating to your corporate back ends and you get to significantly decrease your cost. You are no longer running any big machines and you are no longer running two tiers. So you only have one tier of machines that you need to administer and provision. Now, beyond that you also get increased scalability because you can just continue-if you have your software configured correctly-you can continue to just add machines to this tier and scale linearly.
These are the benefits of running a lightweight architecture.

































