Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) has added support for Fusion-io directCache through a VCS agent. Fusion’s directCache software transforms their ioMemory storage into a block-based storage cache by intelligently placing the most frequently accessed data in flash memory for increased performance. The VCS agent can check the status of directCache and enable/disable directCache for use by any application. The Fusion-io VCS agent supports the monitor, online and offline entry points. The agent supports VCS 5.1 and VCS 6.0 versions on RHEL 5 & RHEL6. For more information on the agent, please visit SORT @ https://sort.symantec.com/agents (select 'Partner agent' under Agent type) or http://support.fusionio.com.

SUNY’s Upstate Medical University is both a medical center and education institution. With a goal to improve its community through education, patient care, and research, the medical center’s 8,900 employees rely on an electronic medical record (EMR) system that helps manage and streamline patient records. With an EMR system in place, a solution that helps maintain an extremely high level of availability is imperative. To facilitate this, SUNY Upstate Medical University turned to Symantec. In the 16 months since deploying the high availability solution from Symantec, SUNY reports 99.9994% availability. Additional results include performing automated failover in less than one minute, reducing time to detect failure of a host system by up to 95 percent, and reducing time to apply operating system patches by up to 92 percent. To read more about how Symantec’s high availability solutions are helping SUNY Upstate Medical University, check out this customer...

The modern organization is highly dependent on information technology, simultaneously and quite unintentionally, information technology has introduced new exposures which have deceptively seeped into every layer of the financial organization.  The likelihood that an organization will experience a catastrophic loss from an IT-service interruption caused by an IT issue is far greater than an interruption coming from some disaster or ‘black swan’ event.  Still, the key to survival is allocating the appropriate amount of resources to the “right” risks; while that may include planning contingencies for a worse-case scenario, to be rational about risk more guidance regarding the investment tradeoffs that mitigate risk.

The “Big Question” is how to optimize scarce resources today, to achieve the greatest reduction in future losses.  The Big Question two components: (1) which risks are the serious ones and...