| Ingram Micro's Solution Centers are staffed
by certified engineers on call to answer your questions. All technologies
mentioned are deployed at Solution Centers in Buffalo, N.Y. and Santa Ana,
Calif. Q: What business benefits
can SMB customers expect from unified communications (UC)?
A: This answer comes from my colleague Michael Mason,
a Cisco Systems engineer at Ingram Micro: By integrating the phone system
with the data network and business applications, UC can boost user productivity
and improve customer service. Cisco Systems, for instance, offers an intelligent,
secure network platform that helps employees access information from wherever
they are and on their device of choice. Presence helps them reach colleagues
without resorting to telephone tag. Collaboration applications bring staff
and customers together while reducing travel costs. Unified messaging
consolidates voice, e-mail and fax in a single in-box. VoIP makes it easy
to add users, transfer calls and set up remote offices and teleworkers.
UC can also lower telecom expenses. Such benefits resonate with companies
from the largest down to the five-person SMB.
Peter Avino, Cisco Systems Engineer and Instructor
Q: What should I look for in a storage solution to complement
virtualized server environments?
A: Virtualized server environments benefit from networked
storage that is scalable, flexible and easy to manage. As an example,
Hewlett-Packard's Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 4400 features a virtualized
storage architecture that can simplify configuration and automate capacity
management and performance tuning. Supporting up to 96 TB of storage,
the EVA4400 can be configured as a SAN and as a disk-to-disk backup device
using FATA drives -- ideal for virtualized environments that put a premium
on storage consolidation.
Akbar Fazli, HP Server and Storage Engineer
Q: What options can you suggest for centralized "application
delivery" to user desktops?
A: With the integration of XenSource's virtualization
technology, Citrix now offers a complete range of solutions for delivering
applications to the desktop. Citrix XenApp continues the company's tradition
of server-based, multiuser application presentation, while Citrix XenDesktop
provides a virtual desktop infrastructure for Windows. These products
can be mixed and matched based on user needs, whether the need is for
application presentation, virtualized desktops with some streamed applications,
or completely virtualized desktops. Add Citrix XenServer for server virtualization,
and you have resource-efficient and cost-effective application delivery.
Andrew Schmidt, Solution Center Engineer
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