Many organizations have had to tighten their budgets to make it through the current recession and unexpected shutdowns. The OEMs like Cisco, however, haven’t changed their forced refresh cycle in light of companies’ inability to spend freely on their already expensive data centers. Whether you’re ready to invest again in new equipment for your infrastructure or not, 2020 [...]
Keeping Your Business Up and Running During the Outbreak Even the most comprehensive disaster recovery planning is unlikely to account for a global health crisis like we face together now. The spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) has rocked global markets and impacted daily life and business in a way that was nearly impossible to prepare for. While the health [...]
This New Year’s, make a resolution to reduce overhead, simplify logistics, and optimize your workflow: Consolidate vendors. Relying on a multitude of vendors is counterintuitive to efficiency in processes, communication, OPEX, and site-to-site standardization. Not only might you have separate vendors for various aspects of your operations, you might even have five, ten, or more vendors to support your [...]
Fundamentally, your business relies on the optimization of your IT infrastructure. This means that you need engineering talent to maintain the hardware and provide full IT lifecycle management—and you need high-quality talent across all of your sites. Staffing fully functional IT teams at each of your data centers is unrealistically expensive, and so is flying them all over [...]
It seems like just yesterday that your Cisco Nexus 7000 was a brand-new product, but EOL for the Nexus 7000 was announced back in August of 2013, and EOSL was called the following year. More recently, it was announced that the last day to renew your support contracts was mid-November of this year, and the last day that [...]
Design, procurement, installation, integration, maintenance, and disposition—IT lifecycle management is difficult already. However, between your hardware OEM, the monitoring and servicing provider, your downstream recycling partners, and outsourcing and billing vendors (among many others you have on your payroll) you face a new logistical challenge altogether: managing and paying a litany of vendors. This is where vendor consolidation [...]
Misconception 1: The Secondary Market Is Just About Hardware. We don’t just stop at hardware. Our secondary market involvement has created a space for increasingly adaptable IT solutions. As a third-party vendor, CentricsIT (and other similar companies) had to build an extensive global network of strategic partners to facilitate their secondary market resale and procurement processes. As a [...]
This post was contributed by CentricsIT Account Executive Davis Fisher. Davis is a data center solutions expert who specializes in cost reduction and IT lifecycle optimization. He works from the CentricsIT office in Charlotte, NC (USA). Are you reaching the end of your budget period with leftover funds left to spare? As IT buyers, it makes sense to use [...]
What to Do When You’re Short-Staffed and Your Employees Need a Vacation Gartner has established the ideal end-user-to-IT-employee golden ratio as 70:1; however, the current corporate average is actually closer to 200:1. Meaning that, if you wanted to go by Gartner’s recommendation and fully cover your company’s day-to-day help desk demands, you would need to hire an average [...]
This post was contributed by CentricsIT Account Executive Michael Sulka. Michael is a data center solutions expert who specializes in third-party maintenance and cost optimization throughout the IT lifecycle. He works from the CentricsIT office in Charlotte, NC (USA). What is Cisco SMARTnet Support? When purchasing equipment from Cisco, companies also must also procure SMARTnet support. These contracts are typically [...]
