Outsourcing and Skill Imports: Foreign High-Skilled Workers on H-1B and L-1 Visas in the United States

This working paper looks in detail at the H-1B and L-1 visa programs for temporary employment in the United States. Based on official data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the US Department of State, H-1B and L-1 visa issuance rapidly increased in the late 1990s, followed by a marked slowdown after 2001. This points to the highly cyclical nature of both visa programs. Indian nationals and immigrants working in computer-related occupations dominate the H1-B and L-1 population in the United States, but these two groups are also found to be the most cyclical segment, with very large declines in inflows after 2001. The total population of H-1B visaholders in 2003 is estimated to range between 387,000 and 746,000, of which 160,000 to 306,000 were Indian nationals. As all data on H-1B/L-1 visaholders are gross numbers and gross jobs data for comparable categories are absent, the extent of the impact of these visa programs on the US labor market cannot be gauged precisely. A broad range of US industries and educational institutions are found to be employing H-1B recipients, with the IT industry being the dominant sector. Evidence of aggressive wage-cost cutting, including paying H-1B recipients only the legally mandated 95 percent of the prevailing US wage, is found among some H-1B employers, although no systematic abuse of the system is present.Outsourcing, offshoring, high-skilled labor, immigration, H1B/L-1 visas

Building and Protecting vSphere Data Centers Using Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

With the evolution of cloud computing technology, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Softlayer, and Rackspace have started providing Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and Platform as a Service offering to their customers. For these companies, providing a high degree of availability is as important as providing an overall great hosting service. Disaster is always being unpredictable, the destruction caused by it is always worse than expected. Sometimes it ends up with the loose of information, data and records. Disaster can also make services inaccessible for very long time if disaster recovery was not planned properly. This paper focuses on protecting a vSphere virtual datacenter using Site Recovery Manager (SRM). A study says 23% of companies close within one year after the disaster struck. This paper also discusses on how SRM can be a cost effective disaster recovery solution compared to all the recovery solutions available. It will also cover Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective. The SRM works on two different replication methodologies that is vSphere replication and Array based replications. These technologies used by Site Recovery Manager to protect Tier-1, 2, and 3 applications. The recent study explains that Traditional DR solutions often fail to meet business requirements because they are too expensive, complex and unreliable. Organizations using Site Recovery Manager ensure highly predictable RTOs at a much lower cost and level of complexity. Lower cost for DR. Site Recovery Manager can reduce the operating overhead by 50% by replacing complex manual run books with simple, automated recovery plans that can be tested without disruption. For organizations with an RPO of 15 minutes or higher, vSphere Replication can eliminate up to $10,000 per TB of protected data with storage-based technologies. The combined solution can save over USD$1,100 per protected virtual machine per year. These calculations were validated by a third-party global research firm. Integration with Virtual SAN reduces the DR footprint through hyper-converged, software-defined storage that runs on any standard x86 platform. Virtual SAN can decrease the total cost of ownership for recovery storage by 50 percent