ASCDI in the news
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ASCDI in the news

re.Source Partners opens California office to help manage de-commissioned IT equipment
re.Source Partners, a firm dedicated to data security, controlling e-waste and recovering the remaining value of used IT equipment, has opened a new office in Burbank, CA.  Gary F. Smith has been named California Director-Asset Recovery Services.  This office helps California and other west coast enterprises manage decommissioned IT equipment such as PCs, large computer systems, servers, monitors and other high-tech assets such as audio/visual, telecommunications and point-of-sale equipment at the end of their useful lives. Gary Smith brings over 30 years’ experience in IT hardware and software sales and marketing in senior positions.  He was president of Computech Systems in Kirkland, WA, which became the largest Hewlett Packard-based remarketing company in the world.  His entrepreneurial talent was then tapped to start or help build several smaller companies in the software and professional services business.  Smith has broad experience in professional IT asset management and remarketing as well as software and web-based services.
Visit www.re-sourcepartners.com.
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Career advice

Persuade with common bonds
Successful people get things done with and through others.  They get decisions and results with one skill:  the power of persuasion. People are persuaded by others they like and we all prefer to deal with people who seem to be like us.  So, how do you get people to like you and relate to you so they can be persuaded? In his latest article, "Get Quick Easy Agreement - For Any Request," author and sales trainer Russ Granger discusses one of the most powerful ways of gaining agreement - through building relationships.  He explains the seven elements to gaining a connection start by asking questions about some of the following topics: leisure time, how do they spend it; business interests; personal background; sports interests; kids and family; and friends and mutual acquaintances.  When common interests, common feelings and common bonds are shared, friendships are made.  This triggers the power to persuade.
Contact Russ at [email protected].
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HP

HP offers customers world’s broadest portfolio of digital color printing products
HP announced its latest digital printing products and technologies, which are designed to enable graphic arts customers to build their competitive advantage and successfully pursue profitable growth opportunities. With the new solutions and the company’s recent acquisitions of NUR Macroprinters Ltd. and MacDermid ColorSpan Inc., HP now offers print service providers the industry’s largest all-digital color graphic arts portfolio. These moves also support HP’s Print 2.0 strategy to drive growth of digital pages and lower costs of printing for high-volume commercial markets. By 2010, HP estimates that the value of pages printed in the global graphic arts market will be $663 billion. Nearly 80 percent of this growth will be driven by marketing collateral, labels and packaging, publishing and signage, and displays -- all markets that HP is targeting with its graphic arts portfolio.
Visit www.hp.com. ^Back To Top

IBM

IBM cuts CPU prices on Power5 and Power5+ servers
IBM has announced two deals on high-end System p machines that make the cost of adding processors a lot less expensive and presumably competitive with the cost of capacity on the Power6 machines. First, IBM has revived a deal it announced last fall to pump up sales of Power5+ versions of the System p 590 and 595 servers.  This latest discount deal was announced on April 29 and expires on June 20.  Customers buy specific p5 590 and 595 server configurations with a certain number of Power5+ cores activated and then IBM throws in the system boards on which the cores are located for free. The more cores you activate, the more free boards you get.  IBM also announced a discount plan for customers with System p 570, 590, and 595 machines that gives these shops a discount on processor activations inside their existing machines by 60 percent. This deal expires on June 25. To take part in this deal, customers have to activate processor cores in pairs and they must have had Capacity Upgrade on Demand features installed before April 15.
Visit www.ibm.com.
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Moves, adds & changes

Reseller Mainline to acquire competitor Cornerstone
The consolidation crunch in the server reseller space continued last week as Mainline Information Systems of Tallahassee, Florida, acquired fellow reseller Cornerstone Systems of Irvine, California. The combination of the two firms brings together two of IBM's largest server resellers and two companies with particular expertise in mainframes and Power-based servers. Both companies focus exclusively on IBM's servers, operating systems, databases, and middleware or software that is officially pushed by IBM itself, such as Linux or VMware's ESX Server hypervisor for X64 iron. Mainline has also used the capacity on demand features on IBM's mainframe and Power systems to deliver utility-style pricing for systems to its customers, something a lot of resellers have not figured out how to do.  Mainline has long been IBM's biggest reseller of System z mainframes and Cornerstone is another big mainframe player, too. Both Mainline and Cornerstone are premier business partners, which is the highest ranking you can get from IBM aside from the master IBM system resellers, Arrow Electronics and Avnet, who in turn distribute gear to resellers such as Mainline and Cornerstone.
Visit www.mainline.com or www.csihome.com.
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Storage

RELDATA storage solutions are “Citrix Ready”
RELDATA announced its solutions powered by the RELDATA 9240 have been verified for Citrix XenServer. The verification supports RELDATA’s ongoing effort to develop partnerships to support reliable iSCSI SAN and NAS solutions that function across all industry standards.  By combining the Citrix infrastructure and the RELDATA 9240 solution together, customers experience high availability, high reliability, operational simplicity and significant cost savings. RELDATA 9240 complements Citrix XenServer with the following enterprise-class capabilities:

• Unified Storage: iSCSI SAN, NAS, WAN replication, virtualization, non-disruptive data migration

• High IOPS performance and MB/sec throughput

• Seamlessly scalable to multi-petabyte configurations

• Open storage attachment – no vendor lock-in

• Simplified storage management including an integrated management console, Adaptive Storage Wizards and RELbot storage automation

Visit www.RELDATA.com or www.citrixready.com. ^Back To Top

Sun

Sun achieves industry milestone
Sun Microsystems announced a significant milestone in the IT industry: over 10,000 Sun StorageTek SL500 tape libraries have been shipped since 2004, demonstrating Sun's continued leadership in tape storage automation solutions. Sun also announced it has started shipping in mass production the scalable, energy-efficient Sun StorageTek SL3000 midrange modular library – which works with leading operating systems like the Solaris Operating System (OS) and offers double the storage density of similar products on the market. An industry leader in tape automation and storage solutions, Sun's end-to-end archive and data protection portfolio provides customers an efficient and low-cost way to manage explosive data challenges in the datacenter.
Visit www.sun.com.



Sun xVM VirtualBox breaks five million download mark
Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that Sun xVM VirtualBox, a high performance, free and open source desktop virtualization software, has surpassed five million downloads in just 18 months. With xVM VirtualBox software, end users can access their favorite software using any operating system and developers can easily build, test and run cross-platform, multi-tier applications on a single laptop or desktop computer. xVM VirtualBox 1.6 software is the first free hypervisor to support all major host operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris. The software can be downloaded free of charge at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org.
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