Cloud Computing

I own a small structural engineering consulting firm. We do a lot of CAD work and structural analysis. My CAD software is old (AutoCad 2000) but it’s working fine for us now (running Windows XP Pro 32 bit). We also use the RISA suite of structural analysis software and keep that up to date. I am also an amateur videographer, using the Adobe Creative Suite CS4 (includes After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Flash, etc.). I’d like to build a new PC, very similar to this. It’s a 64-bit system with an Intel i7 processor. I’m also looking at using a 64-bit Vista ...

I work with a very large enterprise company that has a very distributed environment (international with many small remote locations). In today’s world, the use of the Internet is crucial to day to day business operations. Even with firewalls and anti-virus software, users still get infected with virus’s and malware. Most notable is the drive by downloads and related vectors of infection. The most common example would be the rouge, fake anti-virus programs. As we look forward to windows 7 in the enterprise along with the enhancements that cloud computing bring to the anti-virus software, is there a better way to ...

I work in a school district in Michigan where the government is constantly cutting school budgets at every available opportunity. My district has four sites. We have all Windows 2008 R2 servers and have just purchased Windows 7 for all our workstations. I still want to provide good equipment and software for the students to learn on the best available technology, but doing so is difficult with a limited budget. We have recently started utilizing desktop virtualization technologies like N-Computing and find the pricing structures difficult to follow. I have one computer that runs seven workstations, and I have to have ...

I am the storage manager and virtualization specialist in a large military installation running a few data centers with SLAs. One of my SLAs requires me to guarantee standby virtual machines that can be fired up in a matter of minutes. Before a VM can be booted, it needs to be provisioned. Provisioning a VM implies a VHD file copy and that can take hours. With Windows Server 2008 R2 and its Clustered Shared Volumes, the recommended best practice is to locate multiple VHDs (and VMs) per CSV. Mirroring/cloning capable hardware operates at the volume/LUN level and not file level, so ...

One of my clients was using Microsoft terminal server and a VPN to provide remote access into a database application.  The VPN client software was difficult to use/install, and there were reliability issues related to the VPN service they subscribed to.  Complicating the issue was that the database application wasn’t really optimized for Layer 2 access over a relatively slow WAN link, so the remote office workers experienced latency when entering data into the database, and when generating reports. I need a solution that provides remote office workers a simple, reliable, secure way of connecting to server-based applications running in the ...