Congratulations to Planet Technologies of Germantown, Maryland on winning the West Virginia Statewide IT Services Contract!  We learned about this significant win because we are members of Planet's Facebook Fan Page you can see and join by clicking here.   We should say that we are fans in both an electronic and literal sense when it comes to Planet!  Planet has a tradition of technical and marketing excellence when it comes to helping organizations get the most from their investment in Microsoft.  Planet's website presence, http://www.youalreadyownit.com/ " You Already Own It Dot Com" is chock full of information on how agencies can leverage what they already license from Microsoft!  Planet backs up these great marketing communications efforts with deliver teams that, well delivers.  Again - congrats Planet Technologies! 

The Quest Public Sector Partner Team is happy to announce the return of Quest Smarter U to the DC Area Tuesday, April 20th, and Wednesday, April 21st. 

What Is Smarter U? Smarter U is highly focused partner training delivered by techies, for techies. This upcoming session will equip students with the knowledge to effectively identify, architect, and sell Quest solutions in key infrastructure areas such as Exchange, Active Directory, Cybersecurity, and Hyper-V. 

"Quest Smarter U will accelerate your knowledge and understanding of some of the industry's hottest solution areas so you can better assist your customers in solving real world IT problems!" 

When: Tuesday, April 20th & Wednesday, April 21st

Where: Reston Hyatt @ Town Center

Day 1: Tuesday, April 20, from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. - Microsoft Migration & Management, and Cybersecurity. Plus: Networking Activity

Day 2: Wednesday, April 21, from 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. - Desktop Virtualization AM & Server Virtualization PM

For more information and to register click here. 

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Have a question or comment about Quest Smarter U?  Please feel free to comment on this article!

Excellent blog post from Elan Shudnow , Microsoft MVP and blogger.  Elan provides a very concise and compact post and much food for thought on new options, opportunities, and challenges for high availability and load balancing scenarios for Exchange 2010 RTM. 

Elan states, "In Exchange 2007, if you wanted any type of HA, you needed at least four servers.  2 for CCR Nodes and 2 for HUB/CAS Nodes.  The reason why you cannot have 2 nodes altogether is that CCR Nodes were limited to the Mailbox role only.  For an Exchange Site, you need to always have at least the  HUB/CAS/MBX Role  for that site to be operational.  In Exchange 2010, this was fixed.  You now have something called Database Availability Groups (DAGs).  These DAG members can contain all Exchange roles (HUB/CAS/MBX/UM) but still may not contain the Edge Transport role."

Elan points out a challenge though, he states. "There is a problem though.  There is a Windows limitation that allows you to install Windows Network Load Balancing on a server that also contains Failover Clustering Services. So while we can now have 2 Exchange 2010 Servers, we need a way to load balance the CAS role to provide High Availability for the following CAS Services"

You can read Elan's entire post by clicking here! 

 Gartner recently released its Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM), which assesses 19 vendors on their “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision” in the APM market.  Gartner named Quest a leader in the Magic Quadrant.

The entire report is being made available to Friends of Quest gratis regardless of their affiliation with Gartner by clicking here. 

More information may be obtained on Foglight by clicking here.