Arraya Insights

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End users love simplicity. What else could explain the enduring popularity of easy to remember passwords such as “123456,” “letmein” and, of course, the notorious “password?” Unfortunately, in this instance, simplicity and security don’t go hand-in-hand. While those passwords may be easy to remember, they don’t offer much in the way of actually keeping the bad guys out.

Securing your company’s apps and data is a big enough job on its own. When employees are leaving the front door to your network or cloud environment open with weak passwords, it makes a tough job even tougher.

The good news is simple and secure don’t have to live in different neighborhoods. Not if you leverage an enterprise security option which can unite them.

Contented users and a secure environment. What could be better?

Blend simple and effective

Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) can help get you there. This tool adds another layer of authentication through phone calls, text messages, or mobile app notifications to supplement passwords and ensure the person logging into an account is who they claim to be. Employees may already be using a similar process to secure their bank accounts, their retirement funds or even their own personal cloud accounts for things like iTunes. So incorporating it into their work lives likely shouldn’t cause any major waves.

While it still doesn’t make it a good idea to use “password” as a password, it makes for a safer environment. The high level features and benefits of MFA include:

  • Impressive scope. MFA can be deployed on site or in the cloud to reduce risk and ensure the regulatory compliance of your Azure, Office 365 and other SaaS apps. How many other apps? Try almost 2,500. Federated apps include Salesforce, Dropbox and ServiceNow. Even your corporate Twitter and LinkedIn accounts can be locked down more tightly through MFA.
  • Flexible pricing model. MFA runs on a consumption-based pricing model, much like what you’d see with websites, VMs, etc. You can either pay per user or per authentication, whichever model makes the most sense for your company in terms of finances and expected usage.
  • Scalability. How many accounts and applications need that extra layer of security is up to you. For example, you could decide it’s only worth it to further harden admin accounts because of their level of access. Or, you could determine that all of your accounts can access enough sensitive data to justify a company-wide MFA rollout. It all depends on the level of security your leadership team feels is appropriate.
  • Monitoring & alerts in real time. Machine-based learning capabilities mean MFA is able to identify inconsistent log-in patterns and alert IT to them right away. Say an employee logs in to his or her account from a mobile device in Pennsylvania and then 15 minutes later someone tries to access that account from California. IT will be alerted about the possible threat.

Want a deeper technical dive of Azure MFA? Check back soon for a closer look at the technologies that power MFA, put together by our industry-leading team of Microsoft experts. In the meantime, to learn more about our Microsoft capabilities or to schedule an appointment with an Arraya Account Executive, visit www.ArrayaSolutions.com.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter, @ArrayaSolutions, for all of our latest company news and industry insights.

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Business PartershipEveryone in sales talks about building relationships and transforming customers into partners, but getting to that point is an intense process. A substantial commitment of time and energy, as well as a high-level of mutual trust, are all table stakes for a true partnership.

At Arraya, we don’t shy away from building those kinds of relationships, no matter how high the cost. In fact, doing so is in the vision we’ve laid out for ourselves as a company. Our goal is to be more than a solutions-seller. We want customers to see Arraya as a trusted advisor and collaborator.

I wanted to find out what building relationships with customers means to the members of my sales team and how they’re living the Arraya vision. To get some diverse insight on this topic I reached out to three of my Account Executives with a range of sales experience, spanning from one year to more than 30.

Ultimately, my goal with this post is to show how seriously we take it when we call customers our partners. I also hope to give new customers a better idea of what to expect when they walk into a meeting with an Arraya Account Executive.

What’s the difference between having a relationship with customers and selling to them?

Personally, I believe that when you have a relationship with customers, they want your opinion. They’re more likely to be very candid and open with you in what they discuss than they would be if they saw you as simply selling to them. When you’re selling, conversations stay very transactional. They rarely go beyond “Quote me this” or “Can you get me this at this price?”

I threw this question out to Paul, one of my Account Executives, and here’s what he thought: “Partnerships in business are built on trust. They’re not much different than marriage, really. It’s all about working together to plan for today, six months from now, two or three years from now and beyond.”

Another member of my team, Joe, pointed out: “If you just sell to them what value have you shown besides being a procurement avenue? But if the customer asks for advice and knows you will always do what is in their best interest, then you have something special.”

What’s your mindset going in to a meeting with a new customer or prospect?

Any time I walk into a meeting with new customers or prospects, I don’t go in thinking “I’m going to sell something today!” Instead, my hope is I’ll build rapport while learning about them and their environment. I also want to take the time to educate them on who Arraya is and what we’re all about.

“It doesn’t really matter if it’s a new customer or one I’ve worked with before, my focus is always on learning about the customer’s current goals,” said Eric, another of my Arraya Account Executives. “You can’t take a product-focus. You just have to be ready to ask questions and then listen.”

Paul said: “I believe people buy from people. That’s what it comes down to, so I want to find out about the person on the other side of the deal. I want to learn about who he or she is, what they’re like, where they’re from, etc. You can’t get anywhere without a personal connection. Not every customer will let you work at this level, but if they do, your relationship will be that much better.”

If you want to lay the groundwork for a partnership, what must happen right away? What must happen regularly?

A lot of decisions are made in that first five to ten minutes. People size you up and decide if they think you’re credible and that you’re able to help them. It’s important to put your best foot forward and make a positive first impression. After that, it’s all about doing what you say, being detail-oriented and bringing new ideas to the table – as long as they’re based on what you know about the customer.

Joe offered a similar approach: “Be proactive instead of reactive,” he said. “It’s important to find out what else customers are doing and why. The reason for that is I may be able to connect the dots for them and propose one solution that could solve their problems. That saves them from potentially going out and getting several tools to do the same job one could do.”

“Responsiveness is key throughout,” said Eric. “You can’t stop listening to a customer just because you’ve worked with them for a while. Being responsive leads to mutual wins and when you get a few of those, consistently and over time, that’s when you become a different type of person in the customer’s eyes.”

To learn more about the Arraya team and how we do business, check out our new website at www.arrayasolutions.com or reach out to us for more information.

 

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Cloud ComputingSomeone recently asked me “What is the cloud?” and “Where does everything go?” The answer to that second question is: The data goes to massive data centers which can be spread across the globe. The first question is more complex.

The cloud is a great example of an ambiguous term. It’s used to describe a multitude of services, strategies and solutions. Traditional ASP models are now cloud-enabled (IaaS) and any service/application that is accessed through the internet is now a cloud service.

In order to understand the cloud, it’s necessary to dig deeper into what it can do. Companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and VMware all have cloud services/solutions. Each puts its own spin on the technology and has its own advantages. Below are just a few of the services those companies can provide:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Run your virtual machines in a hosted environment with lots of extra services and greater availability and simplicity. Here you manage from the OS up.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Applications and their data are all you need to worry about. There’s no need to spend time on an OS and its related patches and security. If all you need is a database, then this is the service for you.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS)/ASP – This gives you an application and lets the provider handle the rest. Development, patching and support all fall on the developer. For example: Office365 and SalesForce.com.
  • On Premises – I know what you’re thinking: “Wait! Hardware? In my data center?” Well, why not? I argue the cloud can be private and local to a company’s own physical data center. The services and ease of business are really the driving forces behind the cloud. These are still possible with an on premises solution.

There are many other hybrid models that are a mix of the above terms and some other unique solutions. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), backups and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) are some others that make their way into this mix.

Changing the landscape of IT

I’ve worked with computers, applications and systems for over 30 years now. I installed one of the first SANs in the Greater Philadelphia area and one of the first fiber tape drives. I’ve been through WEB 2.0 (wasn’t that just making things pretty?), WSDL and virtualization (which we had on IBM mainframes forever). Let’s not forget the whole monolithic and distributed systems arguments. Technology always improves, things become faster and data always grows. The innovations I’ve witnessed have made life easier for those of us in IT.

The thing is, the cloud really is the first major shift in the importance of IT and how services are delivered. It’s changed how CIOs and their IT departments go about their business. The days when IT was the central control for the intake of technology services are gone. So are the days of IT deciding when things are upgraded and when new systems are brought online. The cloud has given us a fantastic way to leverage IT services for any business unit with just the swipe of a credit card.

What does Arraya think of all of this? The ambiguity surrounding the cloud means there’s no single answer that fits every organization and so a quick answer is ambiguous. It’s really a matter of understanding your unique business challenges and exploring cloud options where they make the most sense. At Arraya we cover everything from physical data centers to IaaS and more. We take pride in working with customers and their business units to find the right solution to meet their needs. Time to value is a key driver with any cloud solution so working efficiently and quickly is a key part of what we do. Beyond deploying hybrid cloud solutions, Arraya also offers another level of value: our managed services. We wrap all of our solutions with our continued support and expertise in a nice package, ensuring the cloud is assessable and manageable for any organization.

At Arraya we believe the cloud is redefining the business world and every IT department needs to be flexible and deliver the same, if not a higher, level of service as any cloud provider. IT must give the business a competitive edge in the marketplace. Utilizing the cloud in a hybrid or fully-leveraged model and partnering with a company like Arraya will empower IT to do this. It’s our job to help customers figure out which model works best.

If you want to learn more about the latest cloud solutions from industry-leading providers and how those tools are changing the face of IT, register today for the 2015 Arraya Tech Summit. This free, day-long event will be held on June 4th at the Sheraton Valley Forge in King of Prussia. It will feature educational breakout sessions dedicated to the topics that matter most to IT pros – including (but not limited to) the cloud. These sessions will be presented by Arraya’s renowned team of experts, ensuring in-depth technical discussions that feature real, practical lessons and takeaways that attendees can apply to their own jobs.

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In case you weren’t one of the lucky few (14,000+ people from 99 countries) to attend EMC World 2015 in Las Vegas, NV, earlier this month, what follows is a brief highlight of the exciting news and announcements you may have missed!

Blocks, and Racks and Appliances, Oh My!

The first major announcement came via VCE (now a division of EMC): The VxRack, a new hyper-converged rack-scale system that offers data center scale capabilities with the simplicity of an appliance. In terms of scale, think massive: 4-1000 nodes, up to 38 PB of capacity and 240 million IOPS!

VxRack (Rack) will fit nicely as an option between VCE’s VBlock (Block) converged infrastructure and EMC’s VSPEX Blue (Appliance) hyper-converged infrastructure systems. The first variation to be made available will be the VxRack System 1032. It will consist of Cisco networking, Quanta servers, EMC’s ScaleIO software defined storage (SDS) and your choice of hypervisor (VMWare, KVM, Hyper-V) or even bare metal. Use cases will range from enterprise mixed workloads, everything-as-a-service (XaaS) for enterprises or service providers and web-scale applications.

Click HERE for more information.

XtremIO 4.0, aka The Beast

Next up was the announcement of the release of XtremIO 4.0, referred to as The Beast! If you haven’t heard, XtremIO is EMC’s All Flash Array (AFA) and 4.0 is the most significant release since the product went GA in November of 2013.

  • New x-brick – With this release comes the availability of the 40 TB x-brick (previous options included 5, 10 and 20 TB) and the ability to scale to 8 x-bricks in a cluster for 320 TB of raw capacity and 1.2 M mixed IOPS at <1 ms latency!! (With even average deduplication and compression rates, that’s over 1 PB of usable storage.)
  • Availability – XtremIO x-bricks now support two simultaneous SSD failures thereby increasing the overall resiliency.
  • Scale – Customers now have the ability scale out seamlessly and without downtime by adding additional x-bricks to XtremIO clusters. (Scale from 1-to-2, 2-to-4, 4-to-6 and 6-to-8 bricks.)
  • Replication – Also introduced was the native integration with EMC RecoverPoint’s data protection product, enabling asynchronous replication between primary and secondary XtremIO clusters or even the EMC VNX as a target.
  • Snapshots – Snapshot enhancements now allow for consistency groups, scheduling, Microsoft VSS integration and 256 copies for volume or group.

Click HERE to learn more about XtremIO.

VNX and VNXe

While there were no hints of a new iteration of the VNX (EMC’s Mid-tier storage offering) at EMC World, there were two interesting updates to the product family.

  • Virtual VNX – At EMC World 2014, Project Liberty was announced. This project’s goal was to provide a virtual edition of the VNX storage array. This year, the result of that project, the vVNX Community Edition, debuted. This virtual edition of the VNX software is now available for download and use. Use cases will include the ability to create test instances of VNX with storage hardware, replication testing for DR and the ability to test and demonstrate emerging VNX capabilities (VMware vVols support will be first introduced to the vVNX in a Q3 Public Beta).
  • VNXe All Flash Offering – The VNXe3200 (EMC’s entry-level unified storage array) was announced last year at EMC World. This year, it was announced that an all-flash offering of the VNXe3200 is now available.
  • A 3TB all-flash configuration with up to 75,000 IOPS at a very affordable price-point is orderable now, with 2 TB and 7 TB options coming soon. Customers will then have the capability to upgrade from an all-flash to a hybrid configuration with the addition of SAS and/or NL-SAS drives when needed.

Continue HERE for more VNX and VNXe information.

VMAX3 Enhancements

Several enhancements were announced around the VMAX3 product, EMC’s enterprise class data services platform. They include:

  • FAST.X – FAST technology provides the ability to move data across different drive types within the array to deliver service levels as defined by the service level objectives (SLOs). FAST.X technology now extends the tiering capabilities of SLOs to move workloads to external storage (XtremIO, CloudStorage, other third party arrays, etc.) based on workload requirements.
  • Active-Active Replication – Another feature for the VMAX3 to be released later this year is SRDF/Metro. SRDF/Metro will allow active-active replication and continuous availability for hosts connected to a pair of VMAX3 arrays separated by synchronous distances. This will provide stretched cluster support for VMWare and Hyper-V.
  • ViPR Controller – The ViPR Controller embedded in the VMAX3 Hypervisor Container was previewed. This will allow VMAX3 customers to automate the delivery of different classes of storage services through the ViPR Controller self-service catalog.

Continue HERE for more information around VMAX3.

Data Protection Enhancements

There were several updates for the Data Protection products in EMC’s portfolio. Here are the highlights:

  • New Data Domain Products – A 4TB entry-point version of the Data Domain 2200 model is available now for customers seeking enterprise-grade data protection at an entry-level price. An entirely new model was also introduced, the Data Domain 9500. This model scales to 1.7 PB of usable capacity (up to 86 PB of logical capacity factoring in deduplication) and has a throughput of 58 TB/hr!
  • CloudBoost – Based off the recent acquisition of Maginatics, CloudBoost allows for the extended retention of Avamar and Networker backups to cloud-based storage.
  • Spanning – Also a recent EMC acquisition, Spanning allows for the backups for born-in cloud applications including Google Apps, Salesforce, Office 365 Mail and Calendars.
  • DPSearch – Available now in the Data Protection Suite of software is DPSearch, which provides unified index, search and recovery capabilities for searching backups from both Avamar and Networker.
  • DD OS 5.6 – New Data Domain Software (DD OS 5.6) increases the performance of the Data Domain product line by up to 16%.
  • Project Falcon –Project Falcon is a preview of a virtual edition of Data Domain, enabling tremendous flexibility in deploying protection storage for many use cases. Expect to hear more about this in the near future.

Click HERE for more information about EMC’s Data Protection products.

DSSD

Last year at EMC World, EMC announced the acquisition of DSSD. This year, attendees were shown a demo of the DSSD product that is now in very limited directed availability.

You can think of DSSD as an all-flash array that operates like server memory. DSSD (based on NAND technology) is rack-scale flash storage for ultra-high performance workloads that require ultra-low latency measured in microseconds vs. milliseconds. Use cases will include in-memory databases (SAP Hana, GemFire, etc) and real-time data analytics.

Expect to hear more about this exciting product in the near future.

ScaleIO

EMC announced a free, no restrictions download for non-production use of its software-defined storage product offering ScaleIO. ScaleIO is a software-only solution that allows for the use of existing server storage as block-based storage granting organizations scalable performance and capacity. ScaleIO, as mentioned earlier, is a key element of the VCE VxRack 1032 System.

We can also expect in the future 2.0 release of ScaleIO the ability to integrate with EMC’s RecoverPoint for extending superior data protection capabilities to the software-defined storage.

Click HERE to find out more about ScaleIO.

ViPR

Last but not least, EMC announced that the ViPR Controller will be made available as open source software and will be available for download at github.com. This open source project is termed CoprHD. ViPR is a software-defined storage offering from EMC that allows for the abstraction of storage from EMC and non-EMC storage arrays into virtual storage pools and allows for self-service provisioning capabilities.

It’s important to note that EMC will continue to offer a commercial version of the ViPR Controller for sale with professional services and support contracts.

You can learn more about ViPR by clicking HERE.

That concludes the highlights of EMC World 2015. If you are interested in learning more, visit us at www.ArrayaSolutions.com to set up an appointment, or follow us on Twitter, @ArrayaSolutions, to keep up with all of the latest company and industry updates.

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There’s a new vulnerability with a scary name in town and it’s causing some in IT to question the security of their virtual machines (VMs). This new bug, which has been dubbed “Venom” (short for “Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation”), could allow attackers to roam freely among all of the VMs running on a server.

Specifically, Venom affects the virtual floppy disk controller of the free, open source hypervisor known as Quick Emulator (QEMU). The prevailing idea why the Venom vulnerability went unnoticed until recently is that it was lurking in such a low-traffic area of the hypervisor.

In theory, a Venom-based attack would go like this: Hackers would first need access to a VM with a system’s root privileges. By sending malicious code to the floppy disk controller, hackers could crash the hypervisor. This would allow them to escape their own VM and gain complete access to the other VMs managed by that hypervisor.

The list of potentially-impacted virtualization platforms include: Xen, KVM and Oracle’s VirtualBox. The good news is that VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and others aren’t affected. Even without those giants in the mix, CrowdStrike’s Jason Geffner (the researcher who first discovered Venom) theorized that millions of VMs are still potentially in attackers’ crosshairs.

As is becoming tradition whenever a new vulnerability grabs everyone’s attention, Venom is being stacked up against Heartbleed, which terrorized OpenSSL security last spring. That bug allowed attackers to tap in to private communications or impersonate users and services to steal sensitive data. How does Venom compare? Well, it’s already being dubbed “bigger than Heartbleed” by some, so that should give you a pretty good idea. The issue with Venom is that it affects systems with a high level of administrative access. This could allow attackers to do significantly more damage.

Patches and advisories have begun rolling out from providers whose products may be affected. If you’re running any of those machines in your own data center and you aren’t set-up for auto-patching, you’ll want to manually apply those updates ASAP to avoid any issues.

Keeping your systems safe

This story serves as a good reminder about the importance of keeping up with patches and updates. Now, no IT team is going to sleep on patching against the biggest and baddest vulnerability in town, but other, less headline-grabbing, updates can sometimes get put on the back burner. If those updates start to pile up, it can leave a system susceptible to an attack.

That’s where having a partner like Arraya can help. Arraya’s Managed Services team can handle anything from routine maintenance and patching to higher-value projects. It’s a way of extending the capabilities and vision of your team without increasing its size.

To find out more about Arraya’s Managed Services, as well as the latest networking/voice, ESM, storage and enterprise solutions, sign up for the 2015 Arraya Tech Summit. This free, day-long event will feature presentations from Arraya’s industry-leading team of experts on the subjects today’s IT pros care about the most. At Arraya we know what we love and we love what we do. We invite you to share our passion at the Tech Summit, which will be held on June 4 at the Sheraton Valley Forge in King of Prussia.

For all of the latest Tech Summit and Arraya updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter @ArrayaSolutions.

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Microsoft’s Ignite Conference, which took place May 4-8 in Chicago, had a whopping 23,000 attendees. Over the course of the week, there were over 130 Hands-on Labs and close to 1,000 different sessions. Needless to say, there was a ton of content to review, so many of the sessions have now been published to Microsoft’s Channel 9 Ignite website. Regardless of the technical content, the message from Microsoft was clear – there are massive changes underway and coming up. This is no longer your father’s Microsoft.

Microsoft has a clear vision for collaboration, but also team management, recognizing that teams no longer follow organizational structures. Coming fresh out of Microsoft’s Build conference, Ignite also continued the DevOps and Cloud conversation, showing how they are aligning Azure and Windows Server to give IT and DevOps the tools needed to leverage scalability and efficiencies.

Here are some of the more exciting sessions we attended at Ignite.

Breaking Down Organizational Silos and the New Dynamic Team
One of the most surprising things that we saw at Ignite was the emphasis on Office Delve and Graph. Office Delve has really come a long way since it was announced and, at Ignite, the vision became clear. Delve isn’t another content repository or place to check in addition to your file shares and SharePoint. Microsoft wants Delve to be your one-stop shop for collaboration. The intention here is to get users away from searching file shares and SharePoint for content and have it intelligently appear. When you add in the new Office APIs, other, non-Microsoft data sources can be pulled into Delve.

Microsoft also announced a new tool called Groups Insight. Microsoft’s play here is to go beyond collaboration to actual team connections. In today’s modern workplace, teams aren’t always defined by organizational structure and will come together dynamically. Groups Insight is a great way to see how you are connected to others through your documents and interactions. This technology is backed by the Office Graph, which leverages machine learning to give you a better content and collaboration experience.

Relevant Session: Break Down Organizational Silos and Gain New Insights with Office Graph and Office Delve

Upcoming Improvements to OneDrive for Business
There were lots of apologies about OneDrive for Business on Tuesday. From this session to the follow up – I Sync, Therefore I Am, Microsoft openly admitted that OneDrive for Business has some serious problems, especially with the sync client. The OneDrive team considers this to be their #1 priority and is encouraging everyone to give feedback on the OneDrive UserVoice site.

There is hope on the horizon though and it ties into one of the big themes of the conference. With cloud-based solutions, especially SaaS, Microsoft can release updates at a much quicker pace than they could previously. While DLP, eDiscovery and a 10GB file limit are coming to OneDrive soon, customers can expect to see a next generation Sync client by year’s end and a unified web EX between OneDrive Business and Personal. While the Sync client was the most exciting news for customers, other enhancements such as mobile offline file viewing, the ability to set expiration dates and revoking share access via a kill switch will also be coming.

Microsoft is leaving OneDrive for Business on the SharePoint platform, but has realized that the Personal version is what everyone wants and they are driving towards the direction.

Relevant Session 1: A File’s Future with OneDrive for Business Relevant Session 2: I Sync, Therefore I Am: A Deep Dive on OneDrive Sync Capabilities and Roadmap

The Next Version of Windows Server Embraces DevOps
Not everything exciting was collaboration-based though. Some of the most exciting news came out of the data center stack. Case in point, after 10 years, Microsoft has announced Nano Server. Unlike Server Core, it is completely headless (no GUI) and is truly the base OS only without any “side-by-side” packages. The footprint is only around 400MB, resulting in a smaller core process set and ultimately, a smaller attack footprint.

Nano Server addresses four main customer concerns – the amount of reboots needed, server images are too large, lowering OS VM consumption and the security around additional unneeded components. This new type of Windows Server is optimized for the cloud and cloud-born applications. The real point here is to start getting Windows into the DevOps tool chain, resulting in IT efficiencies and driving business value quickly. Both Nano Server and Server Core are meant to be the targets for DevOps.

Relevant Session: Nano Server: The Future of Windows Server Starts Now

Even More Automation is Coming with Operations Management Suite (OMS)
Microsoft is taking System Center and System Advisor to the next level, bringing both on-premises and cloud-based products under one management suite for log analytics, change tracking and management. The implications for IT are huge. This is not a Microsoft-only play, Microsoft has built this toolset from the ground up to support the typical Microsoft stack, but also AWS, VMware, Linux, and OpenStack.

OMS will aggregate your logs and allow you to not only check the logs, but perform advanced analytics so that you can act on them. Better yet, you can build automation around these analytics in response to various results. You can take all this data and turn it into modifiable or read-only dashboards for your fellow IT staffers or executives.

There’s a free trial with 500MB of daily log uploads that will keep seven days of data that you can use as long as you’d like!

Relevant Session: Microsoft Operations Management Suite

Other Items to Consider:

  • Windows 10 is coming out this year! Have you tried it? Sign up on Windows Insider and give your feedback! One note though, don’t load it up on your Surface 3 (Surface Pro 3 is OK). There were some great tips for deployment.
  • Microsoft Continuum (technically announced at Build), will allow developers to develop applications once and auto-scale across PC/laptop, tablet and mobile screens. Imagine hooking up your phone through an HDMI cable and having a full PowerPoint application!
  • Microsoft has opened up the Office APIs to allow developers to connect to 3rd party applications. For example, if you want to add Do functionality to your Outlook meetings, go for it!
  • Before Ignite, it was announced that the Azure Site Recovery would support VMware VMs and physical servers. There was an excellent demo showing this technology and, as we’ve previously mentioned, DR is a great entry point into Azure.
  • Who thought Active Directory could get any better with Windows Server vNext? With time limited groups memberships and a “Just in Time” forest, Microsoft has made some interesting leaps forward. AD FS upgrades will become easier with Windows Server 2016. Also, your login pages for AD FS can be customized to your unique brand.

If you would like to hear more, Arraya’s Microsoft Practice team can run through some of the topics that were announced at Ignite and help you get going! Visit www.ArrayaSolutions.com today to schedule a meeting with an Arraya Account Executive. Also, be sure to follow Arraya on Twitter, @ArrayaSolutions, for all of the latest company and industry updates.

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Company upgrades website to better illustrate its vision and expertise

Arraya Solutions announced today the launch of its completely redesigned website: www.ArrayaSolutions.com. The new site provides visitors with a more modern, user-friendly experience as they explore Arraya’s updated collection of technology and business solutions and gain greater insight into the company’s core values and mission.

The website has a cleaner look, along with a brighter and more vibrant color scheme, giving it a more welcoming and personal feel. The inspiration behind this was a desire to better represent Arraya’s corporate vision. Arraya has never seen itself as merely a solutions provider, but rather as a partner who develops lasting relationships by working with customers not for them to solve IT challenges.

“Arraya’s identity isn’t based solely on our technical knowledge,” said CEO Daniel Lifshutz. “That’s a big part of it, but our true identity is blending unmatched technical knowledge with a personal and customized approach to service delivery. It was critical for our company website to reflect that element.”

This tonal shift is also evident in the site’s content. Interwoven throughout the site’s pages is the story of Arraya. Each page goes beyond breaking down a technical offering to also include the unique way in which the Arraya team works with customers to deliver and support it.

Refining the appearance and the content of the site were significant objectives, but improving the user experience was also a focal point. To make navigation easier and more intuitive, Arraya’s wide range of offerings were divided into two groups: Solutions and Services. Customers can use those headings as a jumping off point to find more information on the specific topic or topics they are interested in.

Additional features of the new site include:

  • A broader library of digital collateral, including videos, customer case studies and white papers on hot button industry topics
  • A more in-depth About Arraya section highlighting Arraya’s story, leadership team, partnerships, awards and charitable affiliations
  • An expanded look at the company’s relationships with its industry-leading partners
  • A refreshed home for Arraya’s company blog

“A great deal of work went in to designing this site and we are very pleased with the results. Now that it’s live, we can’t wait for customers to start discovering what it has to offer,” Lifshutz added.

To stay on top of the latest Arraya and tech industry news, be sure to follow us on Twitter @ArrayaSolutions.

More Information:
Read the full press release here

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Good communication is the lifeblood of any successful business. This is especially true of a company like Arraya, which is always on the move. Communication gets trickier when employees are out of the office, traveling to customer facilities to work on projects or visiting with new prospects.

We believe one of Arraya’s great strengths is our team. In order to deliver the high level of service we pride ourselves on, we need every member of our team pulling together with the customer in mind. To accomplish that, we’ve used a number of ways beyond traditional department meetings and conference calls to ensure employees – no matter how often they are or aren’t in the office – can stay in the loop and have a voice in what’s taking place. [Read more…] about What It Takes to Keep Arraya Connected

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The ServiceNow Knowledge15 Conference, which took place April 18-24 in Las Vegas, was packed with 9,000 people this year, 50% more than attended Knowledge14. There were 200 breakout sessions and 85% of the content was delivered by ServiceNow customers. The theme of this year’s conference was “Everything as a Service,” meaning it’s not just IT that benefits from automated workflows, consolidation of tools and actionable reporting on the work being done. It’s HR, Facilities, Purchasing, Finance, Marketing, Legal and so on. In fact, 25% of this year’s Knowledge content was non-IT focused. Over 11 million people are using ServiceNow for ITSM and Service Management in other areas of the enterprise. 

Here’s a look at some of what was covered during the conference: [Read more…] about ServiceNow Knowledge15 Conference Recap

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Do you have a heap of unused Microsoft Azure hours starting to pile up and collect dust? If so, you’re not alone. Often, when the time comes to renew a contract, Microsoft hits customers with a bunch of free Azure hours. Many customers end up drawing a blank on ways to utilize those freebies and so they turn to a partner like Arraya for help.

When it comes right down to it, it doesn’t matter where the extra hours are coming from. Failing to leverage them is essentially leaving money on the table. There are plenty of ways to spend those Azure hours, it’s just a matter of knowing where to look. [Read more…] about What to Do with Your Unused Azure Hours?