Upcoming Meeting Notice

The Association of Service and Computer Dealers International (ASCDI) is a 30 year old, worldwide non-profit organization made up of companies who provide technology solutions, technical support or value added services to the business community.

Members and non-members are invited to learn how to grow your business, find new business opportunities, hear from industry representatives and enjoy some fabulous networking events at our conferences:

EUROPEAN CONFERENCE: June 17 - 19, 2009
Prague, Czech Republic

FALL CONFERENCE: October 7 - 9, 2009
New York City

Click here for more information on ALL ASCDI MEETINGS, to view the agendas, lodging details, attendee lists and to REGISTER AT THE EARLY BIRD RATE.

Awards
Book review
Case study
Conferences
IBM
Intermec
Linux
Storage

Awards

CrossView’s cross-channel commerce solution recognized as ‘Best in Show’
CrossView, an IBM Business Partner, was named the winner of the IBM IMPACT 2009 “Best in Show Award.” The award recognizes the IBM business partner that provides solutions that solve traditional problems in smarter, more efficient ways. IBM evaluated each organization’s solution and the value they delivered to clients. “CrossView was selected because of their ability to solve business challenges and deliver repeatable solutions that offer higher productivity and business improvements,” said Sandy Carter Vice President IBM SOA, BPM, and WebSphere Marketing. During a recent survey, 91 percent of CEO respondents agreed that they need to restructure the way their organizations work. CrossView solutions give companies the ability to share information and collaborate. CrossView’s Cross-Channel Commerce solution gives clients the ability to deploy once and leverage across all channels including: web, call center, kiosks, mobile and printed catalogs.
Visit www.ibm.com or www.crossview.com.
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Book review

MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies,
Second Edition

This book appears to contain everything you could possibly want to know about Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) operations, signaling, and management--excepting perhaps the individual bits in packet and label headers. There is so much here that it's a good place for the guru wannabe to start a major study of MPLS. The book's thoroughness is aimed at the reader who works for a hardware vendor, carrier, or IP service provider because—at least so far—MPLS technology remains largely within the networks of service providers.

If a large enterprise chose to build a private MPLS network, this book offers detailed guidance. There is a complete explanation of virtual routing and forwarding tables, configuration settings for routing protocols like BGP, and how IP addresses can be assigned. Some knowledge of routing protocols (BGP and IGPs) is assumed.

Authors:  Ina Minei and Julian Lucek
Paperback: 528 pages
Publisher:  John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (2008)
ISBN:  978-0-470-98644-8
List Price: $80.00
Digital Guru Price: $72.00

Reviewed by William Flanagan, president of Flanagan Consulting in Northern Virginia, where he works in architecture, design and procurement documentation for converged networks. He may be reached at [email protected].
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Case study

SDSC selects Brocade for simplified, end-to-end storage network management benefits
Brocade announced continued market momentum for the Brocade 815 and 825 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) as demonstrated by continued customer adoption. San Diego Super Computer Center (SDSC), one of the nation’s leading academic high-performance computing centers, is the main data repository for the TeraGrid, the largest open scientific discovery infrastructure linking compute resources among 11 partner sites in the U.S.  SDSC currently hosts a 4.4-teraflop IA 64 Linux cluster, 36 petabytes of archival tape storage, 3 petabytes of online disk storage, 1 petabyte of General Parallel File System mounted across the TeraGrid, and is connected to the other national TeraGrid partners by a 20-Gbps cross-country backbone.  SDSC manages a SAN infrastructure that is 100 percent Brocade along with a mix of storage resources from HDS, Sun, IBM and Data Direct. Simplifying SAN management is a top priority. This was a key factor in their decision to deploy a mix of Brocade 815/825 HBAs. SDSC can take advantage of either Brocade Host Connectivity Manager (HCM) native GUI or Command Line Interface (CLI) tools to configure and monitor its HBAs as part of its unified, end-to-end management strategy. They now also have the foundation to leverage N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities to implement end-to-end services across next-generation data centers.
Visit www.brocade.com.
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Conferences

Tech Data hosts Spring TechSelect Partner Conference
Tech Data’s community of IT resellers supporting small and medium businesses (SMBs) nationwide recently kicked off its Spring TechSelect Partner Conference. Nearly 275 resellers, vendor partners and Tech Data sales, marketing and services representatives attended the conference. Attendees discussed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and its anticipated impact on IT spending; emerging technologies for SMBs; and an array of business-management best practices. The conference featured expert-led workshops and peer-to-peer discussions on a broad range of topics. Content for the conference is determined by the membership and further explores trends, practices and channel issues discussed in previous conferences. Tech Data Corporation is one of the world's largest distributors of technology products from leading IT hardware and software producers. Tech Data serves more than 125,000 IT solution providers in over 100 countries.
Visit www.techdata.com.



Deltek Insight 2009 concludes after resounding success
Deltek, Inc. concluded its annual Insight Conference in Orlando, FL and announced plans to hold next year’s conference at the Gaylord National Hotel & Convention Center located in National Harbor, MD near Washington, DC. Insight 2009 featured approximately 3,000 business leaders and partner attendees representing thousands of unique organizations. Representatives from small, project-based firms to large, multi-national organizations came together at Insight to share ideas, learn best practices, network and attend educational sessions on Deltek's portfolio of project-based software solutions. In addition, executives from government contractors and architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) companies descended on Orlando to take part in Deltek’s signature event “The Stimulus & Beyond: Navigating the Brave New World.” At Insight 2009, Deltek announced the release of Vision 6.0 and the general availability of Vision Performance Management. Both solutions work together to turn data into knowledge for professional services firms that want to better monitor and manage their business.
Visit www.deltek.com.
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IBM

Juniper Networks and IBM pursue shared vision of IT transformation
Juniper Networks, Inc. announced that Juniper and IBM are continuing to broaden their relationship. Since 2007, the two companies have been working together on joint technology solutions, standards development, network management and managed security services. Specifically in the data center, IBM has included Juniper Networks switching, routing and security products into their data center network portfolio with IBM playing an invaluable role of systems integrator. Most recently, the two companies jointly collaborated on a global technology demonstration highlighting how enterprises can seamlessly extend their private data center clouds. The demonstration between Silicon Valley and Shanghai showed a use case where customers could take advantage of remote servers in a secure public cloud to ensure high priority applications are given preference over the lower priority ones when computing resources become constrained. IBM and Juniper are installing these advanced networking capabilities into IBM’s nine worldwide Cloud Labs for customer engagements. Once installed in the nine worldwide Cloud Labs, IBM and Juniper will be able to seamlessly move client computing workloads between private and publicly managed cloud environments, enabling customers to reliably deliver on service level agreements.
Visit www.ibm.com or www.juniper.net.
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Intermec

Intermec and Infratab partner to improve distribution of perishable goods
Intermec and Infratab announced the integration of Intermec rugged mobile computers and add-on passive UHF RFID readers with Infratab’s Freshtime semi passive RFID tags. The solution provides customers with the capability to monitor temperature, shelf life, and freshness of perishable goods – such as vaccines, food, chemicals and flowers – for track and trace and insurance purposes throughout the cold chain, as well as intelligent in-the-field decisions based on the product’s current quality. The solution enables distribution managers and mobile workers to receive real-time alerts concerning the quality of perishable goods and identifies when goods have expired or been abused. By providing better visibility into the supply chain, Intermec and Infratab help customers mitigate waste and insurance claims by accurately reading the temperature of shipments at all times, simplifying data collection.
Visit www.intermec.com.
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Linux

Positron releases Asterisk based embedded PBX PCI adapter
Positron Telecommunication Systems Inc. announced that it has released the V-114 PCI adapter, the first commercially available embedded PBX PCI adapter based on the open source Linux Project, Asterisk. The V-114 offers a standalone solution that integrates Linux, Asterisk and Telephony ports all on a single PCI adapter that installs simply and easily into any operating system as an Ethernet adapter. The Positron solution provides complete PBX functionality on a PCI card, allowing customers to expand their Cisco Call Manager and other PBX solutions by cost effectively adding phone extensions, advanced features such as voicemail conversion to e-mail, video integration and enabling mobile phones to connect long distance calls through the PBX at the rate of an inbound local call. In addition, the combined offering provides a unique and cost effective solution that interoperates with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
Visit www.positrontelecom.com.
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Storage

Systems Alliance expands storage solutions practice
Systems Alliance, Inc., a regional systems integrator providing high-value IT and business consulting services, announced it has hired Maurice (Mo) Cook, formerly a consulting systems engineer with Sun Microsystems’ National Communications and Broadcast Storage team, as a senior technical architect. With extensive experience designing and delivering data storage solutions for Fortune 500 corporations and federal agencies, Cook will be instrumental in expanding Systems Alliance’s Storage Solutions consulting practice. Prior to joining Systems Alliance, Cook was an award-winning technical sales professional with StorageTek / Sun Microsystems for nearly nine years. Before Sun, Cook delivered storage management software solutions as a senior professional services consultant with Legato Systems. Earlier in his career, he spent nearly 12 years working as a systems administrator and communications technician with AT&T.
Visit www.systemsalliance.com.
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