Welcome to B & M Bulletin, produced specifically for users of IT technical services. In this issue:
• Social media in ICT
• Tech View: Virtualisation across a network – a blessing or a curse?
• 10 most popular social media sites
• B & M SkillSource
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Social Media in ICT
Jerry Smart looks at the growth of social networking sites and wonders whether people in ICT are more savvy about these tools than their non-technical counterparts.
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Are ICT workers better at using social media?
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Technology moves forward apace, with the proliferation and adoption of social media sites in particular spreading like wildfire.
Many IT professionals use LinkedIn for professional networking, but in the wider community Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Blogger and twitter all have greater use.
The challenge for businesses is to assess how important these sites are as a means of communicating with customers (whether they be other businesses or end users) and with internal staff.
BT Group, for example, has a Facebook group for colleagues. Not surprising. But more significantly it has a presence on twitter to monitor tweets about its products and services which it uses to respond to and resolve issues about BT’s customer service.
This is all very well for B2C businesses but what about B2B? Well, in a sense we are all consumers – whether on behalf of ourselves or our employers. Baby boomers are proving slower to adopt these means of communication than their younger colleagues: nearly twice as many people born after 1964 are likely to befriend clients on social network sites and over four times as many people born after 1979 are likely to access social network sites from work [source: LexisNexis]
The way in which we communicate is changing and whatever your company’s strategy for reaching out, the expectations of the next generation will shape how we do business.
Do you use social media sites for business or social purposes? Join the debate on the B & M blog to find out whether those of us in the ICT sector are more likely to use these tools than those in other industries.
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Tech View: Virtualisation across a network
– a blessing or a curse?
B & M Technical Manager Paul Smith considers some of the potential hurdles involved in adding virtualisation to a network
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Virtualisation is great, isn’t it? It can significantly improve your business resilience and help in reducing costs. However, it is important to ensure that the network is ready for virtualisation if you don’t want to turn it from a blessing to a curse.
Firstly, it is vital to consider the supporting structure for virtual servers and SAN storage nodes. A sound philosophy is to create a high-speed network (1Gb or more) that is dedicated to your SANs. Data traffic will be high even under normal circumstances, but in the event of needing real-time recovery of a virtual machine, there will be a temporary need for extremely large bandwidths.
zSeries hardware or Blade Servers and enclosures are a simple way to achieve good speeds, with both offering 10Gb or better - but only within the same enclosure. Discrete optical fibre channel and switches can deliver speeds of 2Gb, although these will demand a significant investment in new infrastructure, typically costing three to five times as much as copper wire. You can achieve 10GBase (10Gb) over copper by using Category 7 cable. This is fine for smaller networks, but it is worth bearing in mind that the maximum cable length for Cat-7 is around 100 metres between nodes, with distances varying according to the hardware being used. So once again it comes down to a trade-off of cost against performance.
One final thing to consider is that while it is not uncommon to have your networking, storage and systems software managed by separate sections or departments, the interaction and dependency for all three resources is very high in a virtualised environment. It is therefore vital that all three sections have a good dialogue and monitoring tools, and that proper attention is paid to systems’ capacities.
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10 most popular social media sites
There are now hundreds of social media sites out there – but how do you know which ones people use. Namechk.com listed these as the top ten most popular sites in January 2010.
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- Facebook
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Digg
- Blogger
- WordPress
- Flickr
- twitter
- Photobucket
- LinkedIn
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B & M SkillSource
expertise for enterprise systems
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B & M SkillSource is a professional service that delivers experienced specialists for short or long term contract work on projects for large-system enterprise platforms. B & M's skilled specialists bring new or additional skills, knowledge and expertise to enterprises for projects which typically include:
- Communications projects such as network planning, product installation and support, network performance and connectivity
- Data management including database administration, database design and storage management
- Capacity management and systems performance
- Operating systems management including change management, product installation and transaction processing
- Systems and network security including planning, design, implementation and administration
We apply stringent best practice standards across all our services, which ensure that they are consistently of the highest quality. For more information, please contact sales@bmeurope.com.
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