Team Alliant by Domini Lanzone

Working at Alliant Technologies reminds me of being part of a team. As a nationally ranked volleyball player, my main goal was to work with my teammates as one cohesive unit with one main objective…to win. Alliant has all the components of a great team: a captain to lead the team to victory and a cohesive group of people to support and work towards that common goal of winning new business. Only, with Alliant it’s never practice...it’s always game time. The people who make this team successful are here every day working to support each other and to drive towards the common goal of making Alliant a force to reckon with throughout the IT community.

-Domini Lanzone, Staff Accountant, Alliant Technologies

Imagine Virtually Anything with Alliant, Cisco, VMware & NetApp

Alliant Technologies has been named one of 56 partners in North America qualified to participate in Cisco, NetApp & VMware's Imagine Virtually Anything program!

Cisco, NetApp, and VMware have teamed up to deliver next-generation dynamic data centers today. This includes the industry's first end-to-end secure multi-tenancy solution that helps transform IT silos into shared infrastructure. The Imagine Virtually Anything program allows partners, like Alliant, to develop and demonstrate expertise in selling shared infrastructure solutions.

The enterprise data center is undergoing a transformation. Server virtualization technology is changing the way applications are provisioned and managed and dramatically improving cost efficiency. Extending virtualization across computing, network, and storage layers enables a comprehensive data center transformation that further improves efficiencies.

By using the combined strength of Cisco, NetApp, & VMware, Alliant can help customers realize a virtualized dynamic data center today. Virtual Infrastructure software and unified storage, server, and network technologies are available now and can be deployed to meet your unique business requirements.

Contact an Alliant Account Manager today to find out how you can transform your IT silos into a shared virtualized infrastructure to reduce costs and better manage your changing business needs.

Read more about the Imagine Virtually Anything program by visiting http://www.imaginevirtuallyanything.com/

Alliant's Storage Story by Derek Young

Over the past few years, Alliant has seen our clients looking to minimize cost and complexity within their data centers by consolidating server platforms. The introduction of solutions from companies such as VMware and Citrix has presented significant benefits with the focus of reducing the number of servers deployed in a data center or desktops within client working environments. Our clients were able to reduce overall capital and operational expenditures while also allowing their business to scale quickly, giving them a competitive advantage over their competition.

Embracing this change in how our clients were looking at their data center, Alliant knew that if we were to compete in this space we needed to develop a practice that would not only be able to assist clients with this consolidation effort, but address the challenges presented with systems virtualization. One of these challenges is it drives the need for efficient and additional data storage. As we have seen over the past two years, data will continue to grow without consideration of the state of the economy and clients will still have to invest in storage capacity, unlike other “nice to have” technologies. This drove us to begin our evaluation of storage partners that would allow our clients to continue meeting their goals of lowering overall costs and driving efficiency into the data center.

Many of our competitors in the marketplace have an extensive list of partners that often overlap in many technologies. At Alliant, we focus on a few core partners that augment each other’s technology - which allows us to be true subject matter experts not only around the technology, but as well our partners' solutions. Due to this reason, we put in place a fairly extensive and detailed evaluation process of potential partners. We look at their technology strengths/weaknesses, financial strength, strategic partnerships, and relevance to the marketplace. After looking at all the key players in the storage space, NetApp stood out in all areas and demonstrated the ability to meet our clients goals with a virtualized infrastructure.

NetApp addresses many of the challenges/goals our clients have faced.

- Consolidation/Management: NetApp is the only platform in the marketplace that offers unified platform for all protocols: CIFS/NFS/iSCSI/FC. Clients are now able to remove file servers, NAS boxes, multiple SANs and have a single array to support all their needs, ultimately removing complexity and reducing both CapEx and OpEx costs.

- Virtualization: NetApp has the ability to leverage a customer's entire disk pool with solutions like thin provisioning and add/change/delete storage on demand to meet the changing needs of the business. Disk sizes are increasing and prices are declining, so the longer you can wait to invest in more capacity the more money your organization will save.

- Storage Efficiency: Maximize your investment by gaining upwards of 95% disk savings in your VM environment with data dedupe on your primary storage. Utilize a number of other NetApp features that offer additional savings over the competition based on their patented SnapShot technologies.

- Data Integrity: NetApp offers a number of application aware technologies that help ensure consistent, efficient backups and equally important instant restores. Applications supported include Oracle, SQL, Exchange, SAP, Sharepoint, and HyperV.

- Alliances: NetApp has formed relationships with many application and infrastructure companies. The relationship we feel is truly changing the data center landscape is that of NetApp, VMware and Cisco. Virtualization is now extended across all layers of the data center (systems, network and storage) to create one unified architecture. End results include ease of overall management and the recurring theme of savings in both CapEx and OpEx dollars.

At Alliant, we have the utmost confidence that when a client engages us to assist in a data center move, refresh or new build, we have the right partnerships in place and services developed to ensure mutual success.

-Derek Young, Alliant Account Manager, New England

Employee of the week: Kattie Patterson

Katie Paterson

Meet the Marketing Team: Katie Paterson has been with Alliant for two years. She is responsible for all of Alliant’s internal and external communications and was one of the contributors to the launch of Alliant’s new website. Many of you have met her as the host at Alliant’s successful events including our annual Tech Wreck cruise, customer apprecation events, partner led training seminars, and yes, even the occasional office birthday party.

Katie has degrees from the University of Delaware and Seton Hall University and is just one of the many friendly faces we have here at Alliant Technologies.

NetApp wins California Stewardship Arrow Award

Congratulations to NetApp for winning the California Stewardship Arrow Award. Specifically, NetApp has won the Infinity Award for for Service and Takeback. The California Product Stewardship Council sums up the reasons for NetApp's success:

"NetApp provides customers with innovative data storage, management, protection, and retention solutions. While their products enable customers to do more with less thanks to their storage efficiency technologies, they have created a service and take back program that truly ‘closes the loop’ and minimizes the waste generated from their products through a comprehensive electronic waste recycling program. For more than 5 years, this program has achieved a landfill diversion rate generally over 99% for all of their products."

This is a great story for such an amazing and innovative data storage company.

Liquid Metal: What is it?

Gizmodo recently wrote an article about Apple's new material company called Liquidmetal. In short, Gizmodo author John Herrman writes the following:

"The scientific definition of Liquidmetal goes something like this: Liquidmetal is a member of a class of metal alloys known formally as bulk metallic glasses—because the material shares some properties most closely associated with glass, like impact brittleness, and, instead of a fixed melting point, a gradual loss of integrity at higher temperature. It's a mixture of stuff you've probably heard of: copper, titanium, aluminum and nickel. So yeah, fundamentally, it's just a type of stuff, like a polymer, an aluminum alloy, or a glass."

So what does this really mean to people or firms like you and me? In essence, this new material can result in higher quality products that we as consumers put a lot of wear and tear on including cell phones and laptops, essentially replacing the plastic body that surround most of our electronics that we are all fond of. Why haven't we seen it yet prominently in the market? Cost. 


However, I feel that with economics behind this new material in play, we can see the price to manufacture this material go down and see this new material in future gadgets and devices in the near future, whether we are aware of it or not. 


See the video below for more information:

Cisco Telepresence for dance practice

What are the top uses for video conferencing? Long distance business meetings, project management, sales, you know... the usual. Turns out that there is another application as well, dance practice!

Engadget reports "Young dancers in Shanghai and New York are currently training hard in order to perform in "The Red Thread"" using Cisco Telepresence. The press release however sums up nicely the value of a Cisco Telepresence solution:

"Just as National Dance Institute uses dance to bridge together diverse cultures, so Cisco is using technology to bridge time, geographic and cultural distances. With technologies like Cisco TelePresence, we are elevating creativity and collaboration to the next level, changing the way people communicate and learn," said Anthony Elvey, Pavilion Director, Cisco. "That is precisely the theme of the Cisco Pavilion at World Expo: how technology can enhance your life. One day, people will be using high-definition video to communicate as easily as they do with the telephone today. This is Cisco's vision of the smart connected life."

If you are interested in learning more about Cisco Telepresence, feel free to contact us for more information or to arrange a demo.

Crossed Wires

The concepts around language and communication have always fascinated me. Communication is not merely the transference of sounds through the air or markings on paper. There is so much more to communication than just the sounds or markings. Looking at everything that goes into even a simple, short exchange reveals that communication is an incredibly complex and layered process, with many opportunities for missteps. It amazes me that we get it right as often as we do, but when it goes wrong…

I have to remind myself often that the way I like to communicate and be communicated with frequently differs significantly from the people I work with, and the same is true for each of them. Since I deal with very technical minded people, I have to remember they tend to like precise directions, with everything laid out in detail. Senior management wants only a quick overview, and will ask for details when they need them. Some people speak primarily in factual language, or while I tend to use metaphors and similes as examples.

I frequently have to mediate conflicts that arise from some people’s inability to modify their communication style based on the conscious and unconscious feedback they get from their audience. This is a vital skill, that can be learned and improved with practice, but a lot of people don’t recognize this. They miss signs that their audience is not comfortable with the message: furrowed brows, touching their face or neck folding their arms. I see these as signs my message is not coming across correctly (or at all.) Maybe they don’t understand me, maybe they don’t agree with me, but when I see these signs, I know to change my communication.

Cisco Cius

Our friends over at Mashable wrote an amazing article about our partner's new device, the Cisco Cius.

The Cisco Cius is Cisco's first entry into the tablet space. What sets this device apart from the competition is the software that the Cius will be able to run. 

"The key to this tablet is the suite of Cisco software products that it will run. The list includes Cisco Quad, Show and Share, WebEx, Presence and Cisco TelePresence; it also supports Unified Communications Manager."

More information regarding the device can be found below in Cisco's video data sheet:

 

If you are interested in learning more about this device, how you can participate in customer trials, or when this product will be available to purchase, please do not hesitate to contact Alliant Technologies.

Password Productivity

Gizmodo recently wrote an article which referenced a research paper published by Microsoft which states that billions of dollars every year are lost in productivity. Lots of firms have an IT policy to change your password after a certain time period. If you think about it, it makes sense... if your forced to change your password every month in a company of 1,000 employees or more, how many of those people are gonna be knocking on the IT director's door asking him to reset their password? Not a lot but enough where productivity will drop.

A great solution to overcome this would be to utilize RSA two factor authentication where the password is literally changed automatically by the RSA token device. Tthe user only needs the RSA key fob to remember the password. No more password memorization. Therefore, IT departments would never need an internal policy for the user to change their password, only carry an RSA token. If interested in learning more about RSA, feel free to give us a call.

First!

Dear friends, family, clients, employees, engineers, and the rest of the world wide web,

I am proud to announce the newest feature of our website… something we should have done a decade ago but are more than happy to release today… our blog.

The goal of our blog is simple, we want everyone to know who we are, what we do, what our culture is like, and what are thoughts are when it comes to strategic IT management. IT has been changing at an exponential pace. At Alliant Technologies, we have with much success predicted these trends ahead of the competition and have been able to be one of the leading firms in our space to be “first to market” on most of the IT innovations that have been changing and revolutionizing the IT industry due to innovations from our strategic partners like Cisco, VMware, and NetApp to name a few.

Also, we think of our blog is good way to exchange ideas, show off the fun and creative people who work here, exchange photos and recipes, and talk about the latest Jonas Brothers gossip =)

We honestly and humbly think that our ideas and innovations in the IT space are too good to keep to ourselves. We also want to provide our readers insight as to what it is like to work here at Alliant. Expect posts written from myself to others from our strategic management team, engineers, and maybe something from our HR director’s pet dog as well. Our employees are involved in various activities that we encourage and sponsor from marathons to community service to graduate school.

We look forward to publishing our ideas, thoughts, and happenings as they occur at Alliant. We want to promote a healthy and intellectual discourse on our website when it comes to IT as well as to the daily things in life that affect us all and we hope that you, the reader, can join us in that discourse as well.

I look forward to everyone’s thoughts and comments and hope you look forward not only to the excellent products and services that Alliant Technologies continuously provides but to our open mind as well.

- Bruce Flitcroft
CEO of Alliant Technologies