Glyn Heath, Founder of Centiq Ltd, speaks to IT Advisor.

The benefits of IT monitoring and the early warning of system issues.

monitoring, managing and mitigating risk

Centiq have been awarded the IBM System x specialty.

As one of only 3 in the UK with this Speciality mark, we have joined an elite group of IBM Premier Business Partners who have invested in developing skills to achieve a high level of performance in System x technology and solutions. It's great testament to the Centiq team in the work done through all activities with IBM System x. These marks allow Centiq to display this mark throughout our marketing material.

The IT services industry is seen as a good long-term career opportunity for recent graduates as we begin to move out of a period of economic turmoil.

While youngsters are put off computer science degrees due to high graduate unemployment levels in that field, students from a variety of academic backgrounds are entering the IT services sector to begin careers in sales.

IT services firm Centiq set up a graduate training programme, with the aim of recruiting six graduates to become salespeople.

The company received hundreds of applications, interviewed 46 and put six on a 26-week training programme. The trainees, who were recruited in April, will not be set sales targets until April 2011. Computer Weekly caught up with some of them...

With the change in fine level for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act (1998) rising from the inadequate £5000 to business closing £500,000, company boards need to re-assess the business cases for introduction of privacy technologies. It is my view that in the past many commercial organisations made a blunt Cost vs Risk analysis and made the decision that they would accept the fines rather than implement protection. Those industries where the consequences were far higher such as retail and PCIDSS compliance, companies addressed this small portion of data privacy, (often outsourcing it completely, so they had no visibility of data that risked their position) yet left other equally sensitive data unprotected.

Earlier this week IBM announced its range of next generation x86 based servers lovingly named eX5.  The eX5 features a new range of Intel Xeon processors, which I'll cover in more detail after the official announcement by Intel on 20/3/2010.  As we are all well aware, IBM do not have exclusive rights to Intel Xeon processors, so these same processors will be springing up in all of IBM's competitors servers over the next few months.  The question is, what are IBM planning to do different, if anything.

It seems that IBM hasn't slowed down the development of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) since migrating the internal database to a DB2 database, as TSM v6.2 has just been announced this week. Availability will be electronic from March 19th, with physical media a month later. (Not that many people rely on physical media for software distribution these days.)

There's some interesting new features as well with this release. The most notable feature is block-level deduplication at the client level, so if you've got a client with a lot of similar files then this feature can provide significant benefit. both in terms of storage and network utilisation. Note that this dedupes at the client level, not the server, so if two clients have the same files this feature will not dedupe between those clients. {Edit: I'm told it's actually cross-client, however I'll wait until the official documentation is available before making further comment.) If you want cross-client dedupe then this can be achieved via other means, such as file based disk storage pools or deduped based storage at the back-end.

Centiq approved as Buying Solutions sub-contractor

Centiq, an IT consulting and services provider has been approved as a sub-contractor by Buying Solutions, the national procurement partner for the UK's public services. The accreditation will enable public service organisations, for the first time, direct and quick access to specialist IT skills previously only accessible by the time intensive tendering process.

Partnering with Buying Solutions' approved supplier European Electronique, Centiq has been selected because of its 11 years of experience in the public sector market. As an accredited business partner to technology providers, including IBM and HP, Centiq can offer local government bodies, NHS Trusts and other public service organisations a quicker route to solving IT problems or procurement of new IT systems specific to the public sector.

The EU code of Conduct for Data Centres for 2010 has just been released and can be found at the link below. There are a number of elements that I find particularly interesting however Sections 4 has the greatest professional relevance.  As with most code of conduct documents a lot of what is included is common sense however as the document places a potential value on each item you could surmise that those sections with the highest potential benefit are also those that are currently least deployed.

Today Google have announced that they are now offering a global public DNS service.   My first reaction was "Great, Google know what they are doing with all things internet so this is bound to be a great service".  My second reaction was "Google own my browser, my searches and now my DNS, just how much more data can they get on me!?

Google claim that their DNS service focuses on speed, security and validity.  In exchange Google will now be able to know what web sites you visit, even if you didn't use Google's search engine to get there.