Today’s IT infrastructures, systems and applications—as well as the business operations they support — are more complex than ever. The fallout from this growing complexity can be damaging to an enterprise: more system downtime, higher costs, inferior customer service. The amount of configuration information available in the entire IT environment of the enterprise is staggering. The continued stability of IT infrastructure requires managing the ever growing collection of configuration information and content.

Admitting the importance of effective knowledge management for today’s IT organizations contributed to the addition of Knowledge Management as a new process in ITIL V3. Indeed, many aspects of Knowledge Management were covered by various processes in ITIL V2 - for example, Problem Management was (and in ITIL V3 still is) responsible for managing the Known Error Database.  ITIL V3, however, defines Knowledge Management as the one central process responsible for providing knowledge to all other IT Service Management processes.

Overcome them to reduce outage and downtime risks and realize virtualization efficiencies
 
The savings from moving to virtualization may be considerably less than expected if you don’t address some major hurdles. And making things worst: poorly managed virtual environment can risk the performance and availability of your business application, and that’s something you really can’t tolerate – can you?

Small and medium-sized businesses that are using virtualization are more likely to see their IT department as a well-oiled machine than those that aren't, according to a new survey.

OK, so the survey, which was conducted by Bredin Business Information, was sponsored by VMware, which isn't exactly known to downplay the benefits of virtualization. But the results are striking. And VMware will likely use them to help combat the still lingering perception at some SMBs that virtualization is primarily for big organizations.

VMware made the new version of its virtualization platform available yesterday, as the virtualization powerhouse muscles into cloud computing. vSphere 4, which VMware is pitching as the "first cloud operating system," was officially announced last month, but the company has been making noise about the product (a replacement for VM Infrastructure) since last year.

Prices run from $166 to $3,495 per processor for vSphere, which VMware says transforms a data center into an "internal private cloud." And the company is offering a free, 60-day download.