Service availability and data management "key challenges for Mideast companies CAIRO: A technology infrastructure conference was held yesterday that targeted CEOs, CIOs and IT company directors and professionals. Its goal was to further inform the attendees about how to best manage a company's technology set-up while also insure long-term stability and cost-effectiveness. Organized by the regional researchers and consultants IDC Middle East & Africa, their Vice President, Jyoti Lalchandani, began by addressing everyone with, "keep it simple and make it smart. He described that their "infrastructure road-show was created to inform and update IT professionals on the latest means of deploying technology to maximize productivity and minimize loss of funds. Lalchandani described a primary goal as helping decision-makers "ensure their organization effectively leverages IT at the lowest possible cost, well into the future. IDC discovered that worldwide only 12-14 percent of a server's capacity is being utilized. "Virtualization of your server is a means of partitioning its functions and using more of its [computing] power, says Lalchandani to The Daily Star Egypt. Conference manager Ronita Bhattacharjee built on this by saying that "there is a lot of work left to do and that [information technology] professionals [need] to speak directly to solution providers and hear about real-world examples of successful implementation. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was in attendance and senior field applications engineer Raed Hijer gave a presentation entitled "performance exceeded the cool way. Hijer stressed on the importance of service availability and the cost of downtime and data management and recovery. "[AMD] is customer-centric and we don't just implement technology for technology's sake; we do so when it makes sense for the consumer, he says. One point that AMD is keen to highlight is the power-efficiency of their processors. Part of the technology their processors use is referred to as DDR2 and Hijer says that this double-data-rate-2 technology was only adopted by their competitors after AMD had started working with it. He was also keen to emphasize the practical functionality of the new quad-core AMD microprocessors (also referred to as central processing units: CPUs). "When we developed our dual-core processors, we had the quad-core in mind, and therefore the transition from one to the other is seamless. You can use the same motherboard when upgrading from dual to quad and both consume the same amount of power. Possibly the most intuitive development for AMD to implement is the memory controller. "This is inside the processor and every AMD processor uses this to 'talk' to the RAM directly. Regardless of how many processors you have running with how ever many cores; just one memory controller is needed to manage your computers RAM directly, says Hijer. Sachin Bhardwaj, marketing manager and spokesperson for eHosting Datafort tells The Daily Star Egypt that all of this fluid functionality is intended to save businesses money. "If your server goes down and you lose your 'mission critical' applications then you will loose money. If your power goes out, you need to have UPS (uninterrupted power supply) in place. It's much the same if the air conditioning in your server room goes down; your server won't work as well and you may even begin to loose business critical data. For any company to guarantee that their business stays up-and-running 24 hours a day, then not only do they need to have an existing infrastructure that is reliable, but also back-up systems that are just as robust. If AMD's philosophy is to be trusted and "customer-centric innovation governs its business practices, then one looks forward to it becoming an even bigger thorn in the Intel Corp. foot, and giving us customer-centric choice too.
