LETN have announced this week that customers thinking about adopting our Cloud Services offering are now able to experience the technology before they buy.
Whether you are looking to host just an application or a full server / desktop solution for your employees or customers LETN can now demonstrate the experience they will receive and easily test performance of the service over your existing lines.

To arrange your demo access please speak with you account manager who will arrange for up to five user access accounts to be provided for you.

The demonstration can be tested from any internet enabled PC or Mac running an up to date browser* so is ideal for asking remote offices or home workers to test without complicated setup. Its as simple as browsing to a website and logging in with the details your account manager provides.

*Please speak to your account manager to check compatibility. Or call call 01189070070 and ask for Dan Parsons.

LETN’s Sales Manager , Steve Denby said “LETN is committed to providing our clients with cost effective, best of breed solutions and therefore we are delighted to add Mimecast to our current product portfolio. We firmly believe that the inclusion of Mimecast’s Software as a Service (SaaS) solution will allow us to offer our customers greater flexibility and ultimately allow us to provide a solution that is specifically tailored to meet the individual requirements of each client”.

Mimecast Software-as-a-Service includes:

• Email archiving
• Email continuity
• Email security
• Data leak prevention
• E-discovery & compliance
• Email branding & disclaimers

Mimecast provides everything an enterprise needs in a ready-to-use online Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution: removing the growing risks and complexities of business email management with a single platform. Better yet, it comes at a fraction of the cost of alternative strategies, saving companies as much as 60% in ongoing costs.

LETN hosts regular Mimecast WebEx demonstrations that are tailored to provide a concise overview of the service and to address the specific requirements of each customer.

To learn more about Mimecast’s Unified Email Management Service or to discover how Mimecast is helping thousands of companies to successfully manage their expanding and complex email environments contact LETN sales department on 01189 070070 or via email at sales@letn.co.uk.

You don’t need to be a storage expert to manage NetApp systems in Windows environments. Setup and ongoing management are easy using System Manager within the familiar MMC framework. From a central console, Operations Manager delivers comprehensive monitoring and management for NetApp storage with alerts, reports, performance, and configuration tools to keep your NetApp storage infrastructure in line with business requirements for maximum availability and efficiency. Speed provisioning workflows and boost capacity utilization with NetApp Provisioning Manager—policy-based automation to provision your entire NetApp SAN and NAS infrastructure from a single console.

Flexible,
Unsure if you require a Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), IP, NAS, NFS, or CIFS protocol. Which drives are best suited to my environment FC, SAS or SATA?

Why worry, NetApp will support any of these protocols or drive formats disk drives from within a single “unified” storage platform. In addition all NetApp systems from the largest “Enterprise” to the entry level “SMB” system’s, fully support NetApp’s comprehensive range of value add software applications, providing unrivalled flexibility. So if you are considering a storage platform for Virtualisation, Business Continuity, Backup & Recovery, Test & Development or Archival & Compliance, or a combination of any of these, NetApp has a solution.

Reliable,
NetApp first developed their Data On-Tap operating system in 1992. This operating system is still in use today and has seen constant refinement and development to ensure that it is now recognised as one of the most robust and reliable OS platforms available. In addition all NetApp systems support RAID DP. RAID-DP is a Double Parity RAID 6 implementation that prevents data loss should two drives fail in unison within a single RAID group. In addition RAID-DP makes SATA disk an option for your enterprise storage as you can use less-expensive SATA without worrying about data loss, and therefore lower your storage acquisition costs.

NetApp’s unique Snap Shot technology allows you to create up to 255 “Point in Time” copies of your critical business data for instantaneous application/data Backup and more importantly, near instantaneous Restore. The optional Snap Vault application allows for the creation of an unlimited number of Snap Shot’s and these can be replicated to another DR/Business Continuity location via NetApp’s Snap Mirror application.

Affordable,
New and affordable Solution Bundles throughout the range provide lower cost, faster Return on Investment (ROI) and a lower overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than previously possible. These “bundled” solutions are specifically designed to make it easier to purchase a high quality storage system from a Vendor that is Universally recognised as a market leader and who consistently rank’s at the very top of Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” for Storage Solutions.

NetApp’s Deduplication technology provides an easy and FOC method to reduce your existing storage capacity requirements. NetApp Guarantee’s to reduce your current storage capacities within a Virtualised environment by at least 50%. Deduplication is a zero cost option and is included within all NetApp storage solutions.

In addition, the recent introduction of NetApp’s “Easy Storage on Demand” (ESoD) Financing scheme has now made it even easier to purchase a premium NetApp solution. The ESoD Financing scheme also provides additional storage capacity FOC, as an added incentive to enter in to a NetApp flexible Finance Agreement. NetApp will provide FOC, an additional and fully populated storage shelf of identical capacity and configuration to the purchased system to provide a “buffer” for future performance and expansion requirements. The cost of the additional shelf will be added to the Finance Agreement only if or when additional storage capacity is required. At this point, the original FOC shelf is added to the Lease and another fully populated shelf is supplied FOC.

LETN is an award winning Data Storage & Management Solution Provider. We are delighted to report that we have recently received both NetApp’s “New Partner of the Year” award for 2009 and also VMware “Rising Star” Award for 2009 in recognition of our on-going commitment to provide the highest levels of customer advice, support and services. If you are interested in NetApp’s Unified Storage solutions or would like to receive additional information about LETN’s solutions portfolio and services, please do not hesitate to contact the LETN Sales Team using the contact details below.

Sales Team – 01189070070 – Sales@LETN.co.uk

24th November – 60 Cannon Street, London, EC4N 6NP
26th November – Bristol Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG

Award winning Virtualisation specialist LETN Solutions in partnership with VMware and NetApp is delighted to invite you to join us to learn more about VMware’s vSphere 4, the industry’s first cloud operating system.

Taking place in Cannon Street, Central London and Lower Castle Street, Bristol this event will provide an ideal opportunity to gain a better understanding of how VMware vSphere can deliver targeted benefits to small business, mid-size and enterprise business customers alike, Sign up for this event.

Virtualisation is now becoming a critical component to an overall IT strategy, therefore it is important to choose the right vendor. VMware is the leading virtualisation provider, offering the most trusted and reliable platform for building internal cloud infrastructures and federating to external clouds. Building on the power of VMware® Infrastructure, VMware vSphere dramatically reduces capital and operating costs, and increases control over IT infrastructures while preserving the flexibility to choose any OS, application and hardware.

Decrease capital and operational costs through server consolidation and energy efficiency
Enhance IT staff productivity through simplifying management and automating of IT operations
Deliver Always On IT, ensuring business continuity through high application availability, data protection, and disaster recovery
LETN Solutions is a leading supplier of virtulisation solutions and has built an enviable reputation for delivering systems that fully meet with our client’s goals, expectations and aspirations. We have recently achieved VMware’s “Rising Star in EMEA” 2009 and NetApp “Best Reseller” 2008 in recognition of our on-going commitment to providing excellent service and to delivering upon the promise of virtualised IT Infrastructures.

Agenda:

08:30 Registration & Coffee
09:00 Introduction
09:10 Manage, Monitor, Report and Executing Automated DR – VMware
09:50 Backup, Monitor and Report – Veeam
10:10 Break
10:20 Simple, Resilient and Highly Available Storage for Virtual Infrastructures – NetApp
11:10 Storage on Demand – The modern way to manage your data growth! – NetApp
11:30 Ask the experts + Demonstrations of key technologies discussed.

Venues:
24th November – 60 Cannon Street, London, EC4N 6NP
26th November – Bristol Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG

Should you require additional information relating to the above event or if you would like to be contacted by a LETN virtualisation specialist in order to discuss your specific requirements, please email Simon Gadd, at sgadd@letn.co.uk or call the sales team on 01189 070070 and we will be pleased to help.

One of the biggest costs of upgrading or developing your applications is the time it takes to test the changes you are planning. Spare hardware is often needed and building a test environment is both time consuming and out of date by the time you are finished and ready to test.

What you need is a solution that allows you to take copies of your virtual servers and data that take up next to no room on your infrastructure. Imagine then, how fantastic it would be if you could run your updates/upgrades against these real life copies to see what effect they have before you do it in the production environment….
It’s entirely possible and we are helping our customers to save huge amounts of time and money.

In order to benefit from writable low space copies we implement NetApp storage, because of NetApp’s unique SnapShot technology we are able to take up to x255 snapshots at volume level without any performance overhead, using an additional application called FlexClone we are then able to make the SnapShots writable allowing for tests to be run against a point in time copy of your production environment.

The cost savings are realised through:

Speed time to market
Develop and test applications faster by creating instant, space-efficient data replicas that shorten design cycles and improve service levels.

Rapid, efficient provisioning
Achieve dramatic reduction in server provisioning time for both physical and virtual environments. Scale to thousands of virtual desktops with zero footprint impact.

Lower infrastructure and operational costs
Reduce space, power, and cooling costs through highly efficient storage utilization. Manage many data copies with a small team.

Download the product datasheet here"

Contact Dan Parsons on 01189070070 / dparsons@letn.co.uk to book a demonstration of this product and other NetApp features at your offices.

Many great businesses were built on the back of a recovering market, getting your business setup to expand at this time can give you the ability to grab more market share or expand into new areas where there is a gap in the market.

Growth is incredibly fickle though, expansion is expensive and usually requires long term commitment from your business, larger premises, more staff and new technology all require investment.

Or do they?

A short term lease in serviced offices is an excellent way of expanding into a new geography or housing new employees while you are pushing the sales on.

New staff can be employed on short term performance related contracts or temporary staff can help back fill while you establish the pace at which you are going to grow.

And now for the first time you can pay for your IT infrastructure as you use it as well, using LETN’s Purple Cloud Service you can seamlessly expand and contract the resource you need to run your business, no need to own expensive hardware, software licenses or try to support it yourself.

Purple Cloud is a “Business Growth Enabler!”

Click Here to learn more about the service

Virtualisation is now becoming a critical component to an overall IT strategy, therefore it is important to choose the right vendor. VMware is the leading virtualisation provider, offering the most trusted and reliable platform for building internal cloud infrastructures and federating to external clouds. Building on the power of VMware® Infrastructure, VMware vSphere dramatically reduces capital and operating costs, and increases control over IT infrastructures while preserving the flexibility to choose any OS, application and hardware.

• Decrease capital and operational costs through server consolidation and energy efficiency
• Enhance IT staff productivity through simplifying management and automating of IT operations
• Deliver Always On IT, ensuring business continuity through high application availability, data protection, and disaster recovery

LETN Solutions is a leading supplier of virtulisation solutions and has built an enviable reputation for delivering systems that fully meet with our client’s goals, expectations and aspirations. We have recently achieved VMware’s “Rising Star in EMEA” 2009 and NetApp “Best Reseller” 2008 in recognition of our on-going commitment to providing excellent service and to delivering upon the promise of virtualised IT Infrastructures.

Agenda
08:30      Registration & Coffee
09:00      Introduction
09:10      vSphere 4 – Whats New?
09:50      Break
10:00      Veeam – Monitoring and Reporting on your Virtual Infrastructure      
10:20      NetApp – Virtual Storage solutions (deduplication)
11:00      Ask the experts – Demonstrations

Venue
60 Cannon Street, EC4N 6NP

Should you require additional information relating to the above event or if you would like to be contacted by a LETN virtualisation specialist in order to discuss your specific requirements, please email Simon Gadd, at sgadd@letn.co.uk or call the sales team on 01189 070070 and we will be pleased to help.

Kind regards,

Simon Gadd
Business Development Manager

Scheduled dates for the 2009 are: · 4th August · 1st September · 6th October · 3rd November · 1st December

The agenda of each session will be:

09.30 – 10.00 – Registration & coffee

10.00 – 10.05 -Welcome and Introduction

10.05 – 10.30 -The Foundations of NetApp technology and an overview of the demo system

10.30 – 11.10 – How to backup data every few minutes? Reducing the backup Time to minutes? Providing automated Backup techniques. Providing data recovery in seconds.

11.10 – 11.20 -Coffee Break

11.20 – 11.40 – How to deploy Business Continuity Solutions in minutes. How to eliminate physical tape for off site backup.

11.40 – 12.00 – Reducing data capacity by up to 80%, How to de-risk upgrades and patching. How to speed up application development and deployment.

12.00 – 12.15 – Q&A, Close

Please contact Dan Parsons on 01189070070 to reserve your place (dparsons@letn.co.uk)

Please contact Dan Parsons on 01189070070 to reserve your place (dparsons@letn.co.uk)

There are now many organisations and businesses with mature virtual environments. As time passes they require expansion due to business demands the same as any physical environment.

In a physical environment IT Managers have been used to receiving requests for faster servers, more HDD/Data storage and more network performance from Department heads or Application Administrators. These requests are usually business driven, such as new applications, application upgrades or business expansion. The response to these requests (in a physical environment) is to provision a new physical server, operating system and storage (whether from a SAN or directly attached). This means that it is fairly easy to cost the request and charge it against the relevant budget.

The new challenge is how does this work in a virtual environment?

Its very easy to provision a new virtual server, this in itself is a well documented saving in administration but keeping track of every new server, who it belongs to and more importantly who is funding it is very difficult. In fact virtual sprawl is now becoming a serious issue and is putting pressure on Virtual environments that would otherwise have plenty of overhead.

The main problem is that virtual environments are fluid and some of the main benefits of the technology such as VMware’s new “HotAdd” feature mean that administrators can now add vCPU’s and RAM on the fly to underperforming servers.

So we are faced with a scenario where servers are easily created, can have their resource changed dynamically and are not tied to a physical server that is owned by a department. This is fantastic for the business as it means higher infrastructure utilization and all of the other well documented benefits of virtual technology. It does however present an issue for budgeting expansion and breaking down the cost of a virtual environment so the relevant departments are charged accurately.

There are two main issues to consider:
1) The management of server lifecycle (Servers are no longer physical hardware).
2) Cost control of infrastructure expansion and accurate budgeting.

To address the first issue we need to look at how a physical environment is managed, in most cases every server has an owner/department and is then retired once it reaches the end of its life. Servers are now more likely to be retired at the point of operating system upgrade rather than hardware obsolescence and because they are not physically sat in a rack It is easy for them to be forgotten.
So to manage the virtual server estate we need some control, it is important that servers are created with the correct authorisation and that there is clear ownership for the servers entire lifecycle.

Issue two means we need to consider that during the servers lifecycle it is also important to report on its directly assigned resource so that increases in CPU, RAM and storage are measured and charged back accordingly. Also how do we answer questions from the business such as “How much do we budget for the new accounting application?”.

To do both of these things we need to monitor the virtual environment, collect data on the resource being used and report on / analyse this data. In this way we can see the entire server estate, track who owns what and ensure we understand exactly who is using what resource. Perhaps more critically we can over time see where our resource demand is growing fastest and budget accordingly.

In this way it is possible to ensure that all the benefits of virtualisation are realised without any of the pitfalls of uncontrolled infrastructure cost.

The good news is that VMware have just announced “Chargeback” an optional upgrade for Virtual Centre that reports on virtualization costs precisely. Full Details Here

If you have already invested in Infrastructure Management and Monitoring tools such as HP OpenView, DELL OpenManage or Microsoft System Center Operations Manager then you should investigate the Management and Monitoring options available from Veeam which allow you to pull all your information into a single screen for easy analysis. Learn more about Veeam Here

NetApp was chosen as Solutions Partner of the Year based on its partnership with Microsoft and complete solutions that help reduce customers’ costs, maximize storage efficiency, and improve availability in virtual environments. With NetApp, Microsoft customers can reduce the amount of storage they need by at least 50% when they also use NetApp® technologies such as thin provisioning and deduplication. Earlier this year NetApp announced a unique storage efficiency program that guarantees that customers running Hyper-V environments will use 50% less storage with NetApp compared to traditional storage*. The NetApp guarantee can help minimize investment costs and risks while enabling customers to achieve greater storage utilization in their virtual server and desktop environments.

NetApp utilizes a variety of Windows® Server platform technologies to improve storage system management and streamline backup, recovery, and remote replication in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments. In addition, tight integration with the Microsoft System Center family of products and additional application-integrated NetApp products help maximize uptime for a wide variety of application environments, including Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server. Since NetApp storage solutions are tightly integrated with Microsoft’s technologies, customers are backed by NetApp’s global customer support infrastructure, which integrates Microsoft Premier Support.

By combining the ability to take snapshots of a running virtual machine via Hyper-V with NetApp’s unique approach to Snapshot™ copy backups, NetApp also enables automated, consistent, space-efficient backup creation in a matter of seconds. Not only can customers back up their environments more frequently and meet existing or shrinking backup windows, with NetApp they can store more backup copies and recover data twice as fast as with other solutions in virtualized environments. Effective and efficient backup and recovery also complement Microsoft business continuity features and help customers implement more complete disaster recovery schemes while keeping costs under control.

“We are very excited about working with NetApp to deliver innovative end-to-end solutions to our joint customers,” said Kim Akers, general manager, Global Partner Team, at Microsoft. “The combination of our technology with NetApp’s storage solutions gives our customers the tools they need to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and drive their businesses forward.”

“We are pleased to honor NetApp as our Advanced Infrastructure Storage Solutions Partner of the Year,” said Ross Brown, vice president, Solution Partners and ISVs, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft Corp. “By pairing its solutions with Microsoft’s Hyper-V, NetApp is helping enterprise customers leverage the power of virtualized environments to dramatically reduce costs and increase availability so they can get the most out of their IT infrastructure.”

“Being chosen as Microsoft’s Storage Partner of the Year is a great honor for NetApp,” said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp. “While this award establishes NetApp as the leading storage solutions provider for Microsoft virtualization customers, more than anything it underlines the customer success our partnership and close collaboration has delivered.”

For more information about Microsoft’s Partner of the Year Awards, visit http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jun09/06-24POTY09PR.mspx.

For more information about NetApp and Microsoft’s Global Alliance Partnership, visit http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/solution-partners/global-alliance/microsoft-partnership.html.

For more information about NetApp’s 50% guarantee, visit http://www.netapp.com/guarantee, where you can access program details including FAQs, technical resources, best practices, and the new NetApp Storage Efficiency Calculator to evaluate your current environment and learn how NetApp storage-efficiency technologies can lead to higher storage utilization.

Discuss this news in the NetApp Community, where you can exchange thoughts and ideas on a variety of topics with our community members. Collaborate with our company, engage in conversation with NetApp leaders and employees, our customers, and partners. Participate in our passion to go further, faster. Join now at http://www.netapp.com/us/communities.

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover NetApp’s passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at http://www.netapp.com.

To learn more about the history and culture of NetApp, get a copy of How to Castrate a Bull by NetApp founder Dave Hitz at http://www.howtocastrateabull.com.

NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft, SharePoint, Windows, and SQL Server are registered trademarks and Hyper-V is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.

*This guarantee and related Program are limited to the terms set forth in http://www.netapp.com/guarantee applicable only to prospective orders placed after the Program effective date and are dependent upon your compliance with the terms and conditions set forth in this document and any of the instruction sets and specifications set forth in the referenced documents. NetApp’s sole and exclusive liability and your sole and exclusive remedy associated with the terms of this guarantee and related Program is the provision by NetApp of the additional storage capacity as set forth in this guarantee and related Program.

Download our new brochure to discover more….

VMware and our technology partners will also show how organizations can build a managed, automated and secure virtualized infrastructure that incorporates storage and, for the first time network infrastructure. This insight will reveal how to accelerate virtualization programs, overcome barriers to extended deployment and show what decisions can be taken today in order to work towards a cloud infrastructure tomorrow.

Click Here to book your place now – places are limited

Content includes:

Driving further reductions in capital and operating infrastructure costs
Control, automation, and optimization of your data centre infrastructure
Securing a virtualized environment
Virtualization of storage and information management infrastructure
Virtualization of the network infrastructure
If virtualization is important to your IT strategy this event will enable you to gain the most from your virtualization investment today as well as providing vital insight to virtualization planning for tomorrow.

As well as hearing from the organizations that are redefining virtualization and cloud computing, delegates have the opportunity to engage 1:1 with industry experts at the ‘Genius Bar’ to see how their IT could benefit from next generation virtualization

Who should attend
IT professionals and management who define and deliver the following for their organizations: Virtualization, IT infrastructure, Datacentre, Security, Networks, IT management

This event is designed for both current VMware users and organizations looking to start their virtualization program.

Please note these events are for end user organizations only and have a limited number of places, so if virtualization is important to you then please register now to guarantee your place. Please forward this invitation to colleagues if the content is relevant to them.