A 'Virtual Reality' For Every Sector

By Loren Stow

Virtual Reality users are set to almost double in number from this year to next - to an estimated 171 million world-wide. It’s no wonder because there is hardly a sector, service or product that could not benefit from giving their customers a virtual, augmented or at least extended reality. We took a quick look at a wide selection of sectors to see how VR is making inroads, changing the rules, enriching the experience, and even making what was previously impossible, possible.

Stay ahead of the curve in gaming with Samsung's new gaming monitors

So they’re up to their ears in RAM, they’ve got a graphics card as powerful as the sun, a super-powered processor, and an SSD that’s faster than Usain Bolt on roller skates. So what’s the modern gamer missing? The answer is right in front of your nose. Like the cruellest of bosses, end-users itch to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their mega machines – often without updating the thing that actually displays the fruits of their labours: the humble monitor.

Until relatively recently monitors were a non-entity in the arms race that is PC gaming, not because they weren’t considered, but because they weren’t available. Things have changed since then, and Samsung’s latest offering is indicative of just how important having the right monitor is. The technology giant doesn’t just raise the bar; rather it straps the bar to a rocket and sends it to new celestial heights.

10 steps to increase your StoreOnce sales by up to 35% with NinjaProtected+

By Billy Robinson

Data is the currency of the modern business, and you don’t have to look back as far as Feudal Japan to see what happens to organisations that fall victim to data loss. Despite this though, it’s a fact that customers sometimes struggle to control their backup environment and understand problems like: backups lasting over a week, failures, data retention and that’s why HPE has developed a tool to get backup systems under control: The Ninja Protected+ Assessment.

Windows Server: The Support Available

By Phil Lamplugh

Windows Server 2016 has been out for a while now, so I thought it would be a good time go through all of the support that you can get from Westcoast.

First of all, one of key selling points of Westcoast overall is that we don’t use any sort of voicemail system here. Every time you call during our office hours (and sometimes outside of them), you’re guaranteed to speak to a human straight away.

Why your customers want you to discuss HPE Synergy and composable infrastructure

By Stuart Wareham

Remember when HPE (HP in old money) brought Blades and the virtualised infrastructure to the channel over a decade ago? That was a land mark moment for the evolution of the data centre. To reduce rack space, operating costs and drive efficiencies that an IT manager could not only visualise but also deliver the ROI that the business demands.

HPE Blades are still here, in fact there will be Gen 10 Blades released this summer. What do Blade customers want and expect from their IT infrastructure in 2017? The answer is a composable infrastructure – but do they know that and what does that mean? Isn’t that just another phrase banded about the channel like Hybrid IT, hyper-converged and the cloud? Let’s look at composable infrastructure in more detail.

SimpliVity - Simple but Effective

By Garrick Ward 

So far this year we’ve seen a raft of acquisitions from HPE, as they seek to strengthen their portfolio and deliver industry-leading solutions to improve business outcomes. SimpliVity is undoubtedly one of the most high profile of these additions – allowing HPE to create the most complete Hyperconverged platform on the market today!

What is it that they bring to the party and why should the Channel sit up and take notice?

It’s been said that a picture paints a thousand words, so rather than write a thousand words here’s a picture that should say it all…

Looking to 2020 – IT trends in the Healthcare Sector

By Loren Stow




























The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts global IT spend will exceed £2tn by 2020, and while PC, tablet and smartphone sales show signs of plateauing, the market’s 3.3 percent upward trajectory over the next four years will be sustained by the digital transformation found on third-party cloud and mobility platforms.

Healthcare will remain the fastest growing sector in the run-up to 2020 with a projected 5.7 percent rise in IT spending, followed by the banking, media and professional services sectors at 4.9 percent each. So where are the opportunities in each of these sectors? Where do their technological challenges lie? And, what technology-specific solutions will each sector look for as 2020 looms large on the horizon?

Keep learning with Hewlett Packard Enterprise

By Dave Anthony

This year marks a decade in the existence of the smartphone. This period has revolutionised our relationship to information. Our expectation in our private lives is for whatever information we want, where ever and whenever we want it. This expectation has become a demand, one that hardware and software vendors have responded to, providing ever greater tools for living and enjoyment.

This demand is spreading into all aspects of our lives. Accessibility and flexibility is becoming the norm at work. The anticipation by 2020 is that more people will be connecting wirelessly than by wire in business. Not only does this mean that hardware needs to be of a higher performance and feature level to meet this increased data requirement, but the server, storage and networking infrastructure needs significantly more advanced levels of security to safeguard this new way of working.