The Report Archive

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Admiral Metals Doubles SQL Throughput with V-locity I/O Reduction Software

When queries during peak load would cause the servers to lag, Admiral Metals needed a solution to increase application performance. Admiral Metals has built its reputation on delivering competitively priced, highest-grade metals with superb machineability. They deliver top-notch metal tubes, rods and bars, sheet metal, and other shapes, all with precision accuracy, on budget and on time, often overnight. Admiral Metals relies on the efficiency of their SQL servers. However, they were experiencing bogged down SQL and ShoreTel servers during peak load times and were needing weekly reboots to refresh these servers. “We virtualized our servers but weren’t getting the performance we wanted during peak load times. We suspected the “I/O blender” effect was giving us some problems, so we wanted to evaluate V-locity I/O reduction software before throwing more expensive server and storage hardware at the problem,” said Matt Skelley, Network Admin & Systems Engineer, Admiral Metals. “After deploying V-locity onto the virtual servers running SQL and ShoreTel, we saw such dramatic reduction in I/O that throughput nearly doubled on both systems. Any lag we used to experience during peak load has disappeared. In addition to performance gains, we no longer have to reboot servers once a week,” says Matt. “One of the things we love most about V-locity is that it is automatic. It deploys easily, runs transparently in the background with near-zero overhead, and all functionality is set-and-forget. I also like the weekly status reports I get on each server, so I can monitor workload growth on each system,” says Matt. Read more about V-locity's features and benefits by downloading this case study.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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In this Lockdown Environment, Can You Make It with Existing Hardware?

It’s an unprecedented time for system administrators. Users have been sent home, but still must accomplish work in a timely fashion. They must have access to company data and be able to manipulate it and save it. Their client devices must still be supported and must interact efficiently with company servers. Because of these unique workplace restrictions, VDI technology is receiving unprecedented attention. It has benefits such as greater user productivity, improved data security, streamlined IT management, central image management, and low maintenance endpoints. But it also has issues such as complexity of deployment and management, and (most pertinent) cost of hardware. Any measures which can reduce these costs are, to say the least, greatly desirable. With VDI—as with any VM scenario—performance is paramount. A hampering of performance carries a parallel of slowed employee production. With an economy in pause mode, lower production is not an option for any company wishing to survive. The bottom line is that in these tough times, everyone needs to make the most of what they’ve got. With V-locity’s patented technology, VDI density is greatly improved. Servers are limited to the number of virtual desktops they can support at any one time. V-locity doubles that number, and we have reports from some users of five times as many virtual desktops being support with V-locity than without.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Stockport College Deploys V-locity and Improves Application Performance by 190% without Adding Hardware

Payroll Reports That Used to Take 1 1/2 Hours to Run, Now Take 10 Minutes Latency and bandwidth issues on legacy systems caused student enrollment times at Stockport College to peak at an unacceptable 15 minutes. During the college’s most intensive enrollment period, the system crashed and the finance director got involved, issuing an edict to find a solution—immediately. While trying to maintain legacy systems that include EMC CLARiiON, Celerra, and HP Proliant devices, the IT team was facing regular helpdesk calls. The calls all pertained to increasingly slow application launch times and the amount of time it was taking to process standard queries, run reports, or operate Management Information Systems (MIS) applications. Steve Bettoni, Technical Support and IT Procurement Officer, who provides second- and third-line support, was on the receiving end of those frequent support calls. "I would receive regular calls about applications not working and front-end systems crashing. We were being asked to troubleshoot on a regular basis and, even though we made several fixes, we just couldn't find the problem—we thought it was old hardware." Following a major system crash on enrollment day, the IT team was taking heat from the Finance Director. "It was a very stressful time. If we don’t operate at peak efficiency during an intensive period of two weeks, we lose money; students will just go and enroll elsewhere. We did look at putting flash cards in the server, but after testing V-locity on the MIS servers, it showed massive improvements almost immediately." After initial testing, the team presented results to upper management and immediately received approval to roll out V-locity across 110 virtual servers. In a matter of days, helpdesk calls dropped significantly and enrollment processing times were reduced from 15 to five minutes—a 200% improvement.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Do Your Servers Have an I/O Performance Problem?

The Condusiv I/O Assessment tool is designed to provide you the ability to see how well your storage is performing. IT pros know all too well the pain and frustration due to performance problems such as users getting disconnected and complaining, SQL reports or queries taking forever or timing out, annoyingly slow applications causing users to wait, lose productivity and complain, backups failing to complete in the allotted window or even having to constantly reboot the servers to restore performance for a bit. Troubleshooting these issues can cost you many late nights, lost weekends and even missing important events. These issues are commonly traced back to storage I/O efficiencies. No matter the underlying storage, the Windows file system will tend to break up writes into separate storage I/Os and send each I/O packet down to the storage layer separately causing I/O characteristics that are much smaller, more fractured, more random than they need to be. In a virtual environment, the I/O blender effect comes in to play mixing and randomizing I/O streams coming from the different virtual machines on that hypervisor, causing I/O contention. This means systems process workloads about 50% slower than they should on the typical Windows server because far more I/O is needed to process any given workload. This has been found to be to be the cause of a host of Windows performance problems. So how do you know if your servers haven fallen prey to this condition? You can stop guessing and find out for sure. It’s easy, run the FREE Condusiv® I/O Assessment Tool. Read on to find out more about the Condusiv® I/O Assessment Tool.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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The Promise and Reality of Cloud Security

Cloud security has been part of the cybersecurity conversation for years but has been on the sidelines for most enterprises. The shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic and digital transformation projects have moved cloud infrastructure front-and-center as enterprises address the associated security risks. This report – a compilation of cutting-edge Black Hat research, in-depth Omdia analysis, and comprehensive Dark Reading reporting – explores how cloud security is rapidly evolving.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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The Future of Cloud --A New Phase of Hybrid Cloud Usage

Every year, InformationWeek surveys IT decision makers about their use of cloud computing services. This year, for the first time ever, every single person who opted into the survey said that their organization uses cloud computing. Organizations are no longer debating whether they should be using the cloud or whether they should be using the public cloud. Now, they are working to shift as much work as they can to the cloud as quickly as possible. In this year’s survey, four key trends emerged.  Get all of the in-depth research, stats and key findings!

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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The role of digital personalization

Food retailing has come a long way since supermarkets first offered discounts to any shopper who provided a phone number at the checkout counter. Today, grocers are using sophisticated analytics and techniques like machine learning to predict the products customers will want to buy and build promotions tailored to individual shoppers. Retailers are also looking to tap technology to help customers use personal health information to make shopping decisions. Meanwhile, a host of online-only grocers determined to grab market share from traditional supermarket operators by focusing on customization has also recently sprung up. These companies are building proprietary technology aimed at outsmarting their competitors to realize their ambitions in e-commerce. In a reflection of the sector’s rapid rise, e-grocer Hungryroot recently attracted new executives with seniorlevel experience at Grubhub and Kayak, a travel booking website. In this trendline, we look at how retailers are looking beyond loyalty programs to personalize shoppers’ e-commerce experience, and how Walmart has been able to use artificial intelligence to sharply increase the likelihood that online customers will accept the substitutions they’re offered when items are out of stock. In addition, we explore a tool from Shipt that allows online consumers to select a preferred shopper to handle their orders. Personalization is a complex new frontier for the grocery industry, but fast-evolving technology is giving retailers access to a host of intriguing opportunities to redefine how they connect with tech-savvy customers — and hold onto their business.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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IPTV Continues Evolving to Enhance Operational Efficiencies Across the Broadcast Sector

VITEC research has shown that the fastest growing category of content flowing through enterprise networks in general is video traffic. As a result, broadcasters are coming to the realization that RF networks will simply stop being feasible over the long run. Growing numbers of stations are abandoning RF in favor of IPTV that can run on enterprise networks. While most of the major news brands serving tier-1 media markets in the broadcast sector have made the switch from RF technologies to IPTV in order to address the challenges of managing video traffic. A significant opportunity remains for broadcasters in smaller media markets to make a similar transition and reap the rewards of technical benefits and cost reductions associated with the integration of IPTV solutions. We sat down with Mark D’Addio, senior vice president of sales at VITEC to learn more about the current state of video infrastructure in the broadcast sector and what the future may hold.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Enterprise Digital Capabilities: The Building Blocks to Success in Digital Ecosystems and Platforms

The new competitive battleground lies in ecosystems and the digital platforms on which they run. Similarly, non-competitive enterprises such as governments, agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and authorities encourage increased participation in their service offerings through their platforms. Ecosystem and platform thinking requires a shift in understanding the mechanisms of competition, customer engagement, and the role of digital technologies and capabilities in enabling transactions and engagement. We must shift our thinking from industries, processes, technologies, and product-driven strategies to digital platforms, data, and capabilities. Capabilities are a blend of skills, knowledge, resources, and capacity – they dictate what an enterprise can do. Organizations cannot participate or compete effectively in ecosystems without appropriate capabilities.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Technological Deflation Will Change The World

Technology decreases in price at an exponential rate. This report examines the effects of technological deflation and how it will change the way enterprises and individuals think and operate.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Cross-Functional Teams Make More Sense Than Ever

DevOps succeeds when the team concentrates on a specific value-adding goal and not on the objectives of the team members’ departments. Agility is dependent on cross-functional teams, because a variety of skills and perspectives are needed to speed up communication, execute, or pivot quickly. Value stream management cuts across departments and siloes. Systems generally embed cross-functional processes. These methods, tools, and structures have been shown to improve implementation times, focus on customer requirements, and decrease costs.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Why IT Contracts Need Special Attention From Lawyers and Technologists

With the exception of end-user devices, IT is intangible. Combinations of bits travel over global networks in clouds, streams, and webs at the speed of light. Contracting for hardware supply is relatively simple, but contracting for the intangibles has its complexities and nuances. This report looks at IT contracts, why they are different, what should be in an IT contract, and how to manage them.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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CoreLogic Survey Shows Property Sector Struggles to Secure Returns on Big Data and Data Science Investments

While property-related companies understand the need for big data and analytics to inform strategic business decisions -- and are investing in them -- many are wrestling with how to secure significant returns on those investments. The high level of volatility in today’s property market has placed a premium on access to the most current information as investors, developers, underwriters, lenders and other stakeholders make critical long-term business decisions. According to John Rogers, chief innovation officer with CoreLogic, a leading global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider, property-related companies are leveraging big data analytics and modeling solutions to gain insights required in this competitive marketplace. Rogers discusses the findings from recent survey commissioned by CoreLogic which show that many property-related companies are struggling to effectively leverage investments in these emerging technologies and realize significant returns.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Working with ISVs and SaaS Providers to Achieve Innovation in the Financial Sector

After avoiding all things cloud due to regulatory and compliance concerns, a growing community of fintech leaders have joined independent software vendors and software-as-a-service cloud providers to offer financial institutions highly tailored services. New technological developments, the rise of new competitive disruptors and changing customer expectations have elevated the importance of accelerating the pace with which institutions bring new value-added services to market. A growing number of executives are taking a hard look at how fintech services, ISVs and SaaS resources can support this “need-for-speed” in a risk-adjusted manner. These were among the conclusions of a recent CIO.com moderated roundtable co-hosted by Eyal Levin and Judy Grussing of IBM.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium

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Financial Services to Harness Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Elevate Quality of Data-Driven Decisions -- KPMG LLP

As financial institutions wrestle with an exploding amount of data from a growing number of sources in a variety of formats, it has become increasingly difficult to ensure that decisions are made based on high-quality information.This has led to a hard look at the role artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can play in monitoring key elements of the data as it moves through an enterprise data lifecycle management pipeline. The financial services sector is among the most mature users of enterprise systems in the economy. Established institutions often preside over generations of computing platforms that have evolved over the years to accommodate on-premises data centers, private-cloud and public-cloud infrastructures, according to executives at KPMG. Timely access to the best information has put the issue of data quality at the center of business transformation initiatives that are critical to the continued and sustained success of established institutions over the months and years to come.

Apr 15, 2026 8 min read Premium