News

Topic: Virtualization

The Case for Using Data Virtualization for Big Data Analytics

Data virtualization is a data integration approach allowing an application to retrieve and manipulate data without needing to know how the data is stored or formatted...

IBM's System/360 at 50: More than hardware and software

Can we attribute this long run of success to the design of the hardware, the complex layers of software built to support that hardware — or is it something else?

How to become a cloud computing leader

But businesses are also crying out for people who can take leadership roles in moving operations into the cloud world. Photo: Joe McKendrickWhen it comes to leadership, it's the "soft skills" that matter, as cloud often requires the ability to look at the big picture, marshal organizational resources and funds, and sell new ways of doing things to skeptical line of business managers. This means more communication, more reliance on the data center, and a lot more demands from the IT department.

Is application virtualization the answer for Windows 2003 Server users?

Not too long ago Greg O'Connor, CEO of AppZero, contacted me to explain that Microsoft and AppZero were working together to help companies still running windows applications on Windows Server 2003 to run their applications on a newer version of the operating system. O'Connor offered the following statistics that were gathered from a number of sources to help me understand the industry pain that AppZero hopes to address: 75% of the machines in the Fortune 5000 are Windows Server machines 55% of the Window Servers in production are WS2003, totaling 12-13 million machines July 14, 2015 is Microsoft's planned date to end support for Windows Server 2003 Less than 25% of the Fortune 5000 IT survey have a plan for WS2003 end of support. He would point out that AppZero's application virtualization tools are a very good way to easily move on.

Why Integrating Big Data Analytics with ERP Is the Future of Retail

There is a paradigm shift in the work force over the past couple of decades. As more and more jobs get automated, there is an increase in the amount of data being collected on the enterprise servers. This deluge in the number of data points to process and interpret has mandated the need to build more sophisticated technology systems.

Competition heats up SMR drives

In September Seagate announced sales of a million SMR drives - I didn't know they'd sold any - and is planning a 5TB SMR drive for next year. The big issue: SMR drives are very sensitive to vibration - only 2 can run concurrently in a 30 drive shelf - which is probably why there's no marketing aimed at consumer or enterprise prospects. The Storage Bits take I've been agitating for specialized archive disks for years and it looks like we're getting close.