As Microsoft prepares to end support for Windows XP, time is winding down for organisations that must move to Windows 7 and have not yet begun preparation for the migration. This inevitable process can take as long as two years, and many companies are encountering hurdles along the way, which only add significant time, cost and complexity to the process.
Quest Software has released new versions of its Workspace ChangeBASE and Workspace Asset Manager solutions that shorten the average migration time by up to one-half, translating to as much as six months, while furthering the company’s vision for managing user-centric workspaces that enable users to be productive on any device, anywhere in the world.
Quest ChangeBASE and Asset Manager work seamlessly together to form a one-of-a-kind combination that provides both short and long-term value, taking on the critical task of identifying and cleaning up applications to ensure a rapid and efficient migration, then managing the on-going application environment with dynamic updates based on application compatibility rule information as well as monthly updates of OS patches.
Quest Workspace ChangeBASE 5.0 easily addresses application compatibility issues so migrations to Windows 7, as well as virtualised desktop and application technologies, gain time-savings and increased organisation agility. The savings are substantial in terms of cost, effort, and time, due to ChangeBASE’s unique automated solution. The following new features take ease of management to the next level:
* Step-by-Step Application Remediation – Get more detailed clarity on what exactly all the issues mean and more importantly, how to fix them. Fixes can be applied on an individual application or in bulk.
* Application readiness dashboards – Simplify tracking of application readiness, resources and progress with online dashboards and reporting features that provide real-time insight on compatibility projects using graphs, charts, calculators, project tracking, and next-step wizards.
* Automated application virtualisation – Speed delivery of the user workspace by automating application virtualisation and reducing packaging times to Microsoft App-V, VMware ThinApp, Citrix XenApp, and Symantec SWV.
Quest Workspace Asset Manager 9.0 adds immediate value to the Windows 7 migration process, and to ongoing application lifecycle management with automated, complete application discovery. The product’s innovative ability to optimise use of software licenses in physical and virtual environments helps organisations decrease costs by keeping and purchasing only those applications the business needs, while mitigating risks associated with license compliance. New features in Asset Manager include :
- Automatic software metering – Save countless hours required to manually define application executables, and provide valuable input to a pre-migration application portfolio assessment with automated software usage tracking and metering for thousands of software packages.
- Increased license management automation – After migration, keep costs controlled with automated tracking and reporting on software usage and upgrade rights, the ability to maintain an upgrade chain and history for licenses, the ability to import contract use rights, and to locate the cheapest upgrade license.
- Enhanced visibility – Maintain better ongoing control over the entire application environment with more than 20 alerts, which add new visibility to software license and compliance status; application usage; and contract, asset scan, and hardware resource status.
- Enhanced integration with Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix EdgeSight means the entire virtual software environment can be managed and supported from simplified, centralised views.
Quest’s Service-Centric Disaster Recovery Solutions
The role of backup and recovery has changed. In addition to ensuring organisations have at least one good copy of their data, IT must now make sure mission-critical applications and databases can be restored in accordance with service level agreements (SLAs). Problematically, traditional data protection software focuses on servers and infrastructure, with no visibility into whether SLAs can be achieved. Building on its 25-year heritage as an industry leader in the management of mission-critical applications and databases, Quest Software is redefining backup and recovery with services-centric data protection solution.
Quest Software unveiled NetVault Extended Architecture, a new platform unifying its data protection technologies, and enabling organisations to align backup and recovery directly to their service continuity needs.
NetVault XA allows administrators to organise, schedule, view, and manage backups based on specific business and technology services. This gives them the ability to set specific recovery time and recovery point objectives for each, regardless of whether the servers, applications, and databases that power those services reside on- or off-premise, or in a physical or virtual environment, or a combination thereof.
In addition, NetVault XA enables IT to move beyond the single-pane-of-glass approach to backup by delivering a customised experience for administrators across multiple roles. Whereas most data protection solutions offer a flat, single-dimensional view intended solely for the generalist backup administrator, NetVault XA gives specialists such as DBAs, application administrators, and VMware administrators access to customised views and workflows that map directly to the specific SLAs associated with each role.
With NetVault XA, administrators have direct visibility into the recoverability of the specific IT services they are responsible for managing, and are able to leverage specialised data protection tools to perform granular, platform-specific backup and recovery tasks – all without sacrificing the convenience and simplicity of single-console management.
NetVault XA also features a host of additional capabilities designed to simplify backup and recovery for administrators, including:
- Security across the enterprise: An intelligent and adaptive policy engine that enforces specific data protection controls and requirements.
- SLA validation: Built-in validation of a given protection plan through alerts that proactively let users know whether or not an SLA is achievable based on the established backup and recovery parameters.
- Unified management of on-premise and cloud assets: The ability to act as a gateway to multi-vendor clouds, thus enabling users to manage both on-premise and cloud assets from a single interface.
- Role-based reporting capabilities: Role-based reporting capabilities that empower users to develop reports that map directly to the specific SLAs they are responsible for maintaining, to better demonstrate the impact and value of backup and recovery to the entire business.
- Anytime, anywhere access: Remote, cloud-based operating capabilities, giving users anytime, anywhere access, including the ability to manage and control backup and recovery operations directly from their iPads.
