By Maxine Cheung
*The Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) and the YorkTechnology Alliance (YTA) have partnered together to serve and represent GreaterToronto Area’s information and communications technology (ICT) industry. For theinitial year, members of ITAC and YTA will have complete access to themembership benefits with the partnering organization, which includes events,programs and other engagement opportunities.
*Cisco Systems Canadahas launched a new program, called Transformational Canadians, which willrecognize 25 Canadians. The recognized individuals will have helped to transformthe lives through their vision and thought leadership. Nominations for theprogram are open to the public and the online submission process has alreadystarted. Nominees must fall into one of these six categories including,business, science and technology, environment, education and healthcare andcommunity. A judging panel, which will be made up of journalists and businessleaders, will select and profile up to three Transformational Canadians eachweek beginning October 5. The profiled individuals will be profiled online, inprint and on television. Nominations can be made up until November26.
Products
*Cisco Systems has beefed up its data centrearchitectural strategy with the introduction of its Unified Network Services andnew professional services offerings. Cisco’s Unified Network Services helpscustomers deliver any network service to any environment and in any form factor.As part of Unified Network Services, Cisco has its Virtual Security Gateway(VSG) solution, a virtual Wide Area Application Service (vWAAS), a new Nexus5548 Switch and more.
*Newegg is now offering Lenovo’s complete lineof IdeaPad laptops on a nation-wide basis. The laptops are available immediatelyand start at $349. The online retailer will stock all seven IdeaPad models,which include units for ultra-portable users and gamingenthusiasts.
*VMware has released the general availabilityversion of its VMware View 4.5 desktop virtualization solution this month Thesolution helps enterprises improve security, lower their total operating costsand also helps make desktop administration and management easier. Some of thebenefits of the solution include offline desktop access, Windows 7 migrationcapabilities, expanded administrative features and enhanced securityfeatures.
*EMC Corp. announced a new network attachedstorage (NAS) benchmark earlier this week for its EMC Celerra storage systems,which is designed for scale-up linear performance up to eight blades. Accordingto EMC, “the published SPECsfs2008 (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation)testing data measures network file system performance. The SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3results show an EMC Celerra VG8 NAS gateway…to leverage…64-bit Intel Xeon 5600processors technology for doubled performance, configured with a single activeblade outperforming and handling a larger workload than the nearest NetAppsystem configured with two active NAS heads.”
*Fluke Networks announced its newest NetworkTime Machine hardware platform this week to provide businesses with networkforensics recording for analysis purposes. The hardware platform enables networkengineers to efficiently get to the root of performance problems acrossapplications. Network Time Machine conducts its analysis at the applicationlayer, which helps to speed up reporting andanalysis.
