Wednesday, May 8, 2013
RKON CTO Marc Malizia’s article “Virtualization + Cloud Equals Perfect Storm For Disaster Recovery Services” appeared on CloudTweaks, a leading cloud community for cloud news, analysis, infographics and more. Click here to read the full article.
Not very long ago disaster recovery was a luxury afforded by only the very large companies due to the prohibitive cost and effort required. Frequently even these large companies were unable to justify the investment and went without a disaster recovery plan. Today, virtualization and cloud enables companies of all sizes to implement a scalable, highly efficient disaster recovery plan without a huge investment.
Costly and Resource-Intensive Disaster Recovery of Yesterday
At one time, investment in disaster recovery came in one of two forms: build a replica or subset of the production-computing environment at a secondary site or contract with a disaster recovery provider. These disaster recovery providers maintained data centers equipped with compatible computing platforms upon which a company could restore their environments when a disaster was declared. The latter was often the more feasible solution since the service provider was able to leverage their hardware investment over a pool of customers thereby lowering their per unit cost and passing some of the savings along to their customers. Though, I have heard many companies complain over their $50,000-$400,000 monthly costs to maintain their contract for a secondary site disaster recovery location. These exorbitant fees did not even cover the customer’s annual testing costs to simulate a disaster and test their recovery process that often included IT staff members rolling through airports with cases of backup tapes…
Click here to read the full whitepaper.
Date of Event: Thursday, September 6, 2012
Join us for a day at the races on Thursday, September 6. Hear leaders in the industry discuss their latest challenges and initiatives in virtualization, security, and networking. Check out the latest technology from leading manufacturers. Have a chance of winning one of the many amazing prizes in our legendary raffle! And enjoy food and drink in the afternoon as we watch the horses thunder down the stretch.
Agenda
8:00 – 8:30am – Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:30 – 8:45am – Early Bird Raffle *Must be present to win*
8:45 – 11:30am – Presentatiions including case studies, demos, and interviews
11:30 – 12:30pm – BYOD Panel Discussion and Debate
12:30 – 2:30pm – Lunch Buffet / Visit Vendor Tables / Watch the Horses
3:00 pm – Raffle
*Must be present to win*
4:00pm – Event concludes
Speakers
Last year we had speakers from Comcast, Aon, Ace Hardware, Career Education, and Pregis, among others. This year’s speaker list is still being finalized, but we anticipate another great line-up of IT directors and CIOs from enterprise-class organizations across different verticals.
Sponsors
Venue
Arlington Park Race Track
Governor’s Stateroom
2200 West Euclid Avenue
Arlington Heights, IL 60006
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
The recent NATO summit in Chicago brought to mind two key technology questions;
- Are you prepared to recover in the event of a disaster and how quickly can your business be up and running?
- How much productivity is lost if your employees cannot get into your office?
Recovery in the event of a disaster
The NATO summit went off with only a few minor disturbances. Congratulations to the City of Chicago, the Chicago police department and the police from various other departments who came in to support the CPD. Congrats should also be given to the protestors who for the most part, behaved in a civilized fashion.
Chicago businesses avoided the damage that a riot might have caused. If your place of business were to find itself in such a scenario, do you have a plan to mitigate the damage? Is your data stored off site? If the power or Internet access you rely on were suddenly interrupted, are you prepared?
More productive working remotely
The Loop yesterday was a ghost town as regular business commuters stayed home. Today on the train, I overheard two lawyers and two insurance agents talking about their 5 day vacation.
If the law firms and insurance agencies had a virtual environment prepared, these employees could have worked from home saving their businesses from the unexpected time off. Meanwhile, competitors who have a working virtual environment (we have helped several law firms and insurance agencies launch virtual networks) enjoyed a real competitive advantage because their employees continued working remotely.
Sure, NATO summits don’t happen very often. Chicago won’t have another any time soon. However, there are other circumstances that can prevent employees from accessing your physical location such as severe weather (snow, tornado, hurricanes depending upon where you are) or unexpected news events that might result in protesting, rioting or even celebration (local sports team victories come to mind). Such events can interfere with your standard operation limiting access and therefore productivity.
The benefits of having a DR plan and a virtualized environment go beyond such extreme examples as I have suggested. But when something like the NATO summit happens in your neighborhood as it just did in mine, it brings such scenarios front and center.
Are you prepared? If your employees could continue working through an interruption of normal workday flow, what would that mean? Would it give you a leg up on the competition?
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Video of RKON’s own Cameron Christo discussing Citrix’s acquisition of Kavisa, Citrix Xen Desktop and Xen App with Citrix during Summit 2011. See the interview on the Citrix website
Date of Event: Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Join HP and RKON for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in Education Workshop on Wednesday October 12, from 8:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. at Maggiano’s in Oak Brook, IL.
Solving Technology Challenges in Education K-12 with VDI: Workshop & Panel Discussion
Many educators are looking at VDI as a potential solution to the changing landscape in education. Join us for an in depth discussion on how VDI potentially can solve or help the following challenges:
- Delivering high quality education while dealing with recent budget cuts
- Increasing educator productivity by simplifying technology management
- Simplifying education lab refreshes while reducing costs
- How to leverage funding sources such as E-rate to fund VDI
Bring your technology challenges, pains, ideas, and questions to ask our expert panel and for us to whiteboard out in a collaborative session.
Register
Agenda
8:30a.m.—Registration
9:00 – 9:30 a.m.—Panel Discussion with VDI specialists, teachers, School IT and Finance directors, and other industry leaders.
9:30 – 10:00 a.m.—White Board Workshop/Solutions Overview
10:00 -12:30 p.m.—Lunch / Technology Demos / Q&A Session
Target Attendees
IT Directors, Finance and Operations, Educators, and others involved in K-12 IT.
Giveaway
All attendees will be entered into a raffle for an HP TouchPad!
Date of Event: Wednesday, October 19, 2011
On Wednesday, October 19, 2011, RKON will speak on the topic “Desktop Virtualization Security: Understanding the Benefits and the Risks ” at CampIT’s Desktop Virtualization conference. The conference will cover strategies to help the business and IT benefit from virtualization strategies through effective management, security, and recovery techniques. RKON is co-sponsoring the event with partner WhipTail Tech. If you are interested in attending with one of RKON’s complimentary passes , contact your sales rep or email solutions@rkon.com today. To learn more about the conference, click here.
Date of Event: Thursday, July 21, 2011
Join RKON and Citrix for “From Wow to How,” with all new content that dives into the how of virtual desktop delivery, networking, and the Cloud. Afterwards, join us for a private event featuring the movie “Captain America: The First Avenger,” the day before its official release!
Click here to register
Thursday, July 21
8:00 AM – 1:00 PM CDT
Agenda:
8:00 – 9:00am—Registration & Networking
9:00 – 9:15am—Welcome
9:15 – 10:00am—From Wow to How 2: Virtual Desktops, Networking & the Cloud
10:00 – 10:45am—Q&A with virtual computing experts & peers
10:45 – 11:00am—Break & Boxed Lunch Pickup
11:00 – 1:00am—Captain America: The First Avenger
Location:
AMC Loews Theatres – Streets of Woodfield 20
601 N Martingale Rd | Ste 105
Schaumburg IL 60173-5909
Date of Event: Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The three-day BriForum conference takes place July 19-21 at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago. BriForum includes technical breakout sessions and experts speakers covering the hot topics: desktop virtualization, VDI, application virtualization, and Remote Desktop Services. Learn More.