Arthur Cole

The Five Dos and Don’ts of Virtualization The virtual data center is one of those things that sounded like a great idea at first, only to lose much of its appeal upon reflection. But while few organizations are pursuing a fully abstracted, end-to-end data environment, it appears that many data processes will benefit tremendously by […]

Key Principles to Web-Scaling a Network Data centers are getting very expensive to build and maintain. At the same time, though, data latency is hampering the advanced analytics and sensor-driven workflows that are the hallmarks of Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is adding up to be a perfect storm for the […]

Key Principles to Web-Scaling a Network Say one thing about the commoditization of data center infrastructure, it offers organizations unprecedented leeway in crafting the kinds of data environments that can be optimized for their individual needs. This has led the vendor and cloud communities to shift away from generic IT solutions to platforms designed for […]

The declarations came fast and furious this week following news of price increases for some key cloud services: The race to the bottom is finished, the era of cheap cloud computing is over. But a closer look at what is really happening produces a more muddled picture, which unfortunately will make it even more difficult […]

Ten Interesting Facts About Tape Backup It is easy to look at challenges to the enterprise data environment and view them as infrastructure problems or architectural problems or system problems. In reality, it is all a data problem – as in too much data coming in too quickly and in too much of a disjointed […]

Cloud Contracts: Six Items CIOs Need to Know Before Signing Cloud infrastructure is just like any virtual infrastructure except it has a greater capacity for distribution across a wide area. But from an operational standpoint, the same management and control issues are present, and in fact, there is an added dimension in that the environment […]

Seven Steps for Developing a Successful Disaster Recovery Strategy For all the wonderful things that abstract, distributed data architectures can do, they still can’t operate when the lights go out or when some malfunction or another pulls the data center offline. This is where disaster recovery (DR) comes in, of course, and as the digital […]

Cognitive Clouds: Gaining a Competitive Advantage The cloud is assuming a greater share of the enterprise workload, but this trend is not unfolding in a steady fashion. Instead, a lot of fits and starts are at play as the enterprise attempts to craft a cloud environment that fulfills its needs rather than alter its objectives […]

Moving to the Public Cloud: Six Steps for Success To many, the data center is still the heart of the enterprise, responsible for pushing vital digital nutrients to an increasingly diverse organism. To others, it is more like an anchor, weighing down what would otherwise be a nimble craft as it trawls the data sea […]

Six Steps to Achieve Enterprise Energy Intelligence Liquid cooling is gaining, well, steam (sorry) in the data center as compute densities creep up and organizations look for ways to keep temperatures within tolerance without busting the budget on less-efficient air-handling infrastructure. But there are a number of approaches to liquid cooling, ranging from running simple […]

Five Ways to Prepare for the Enterprise Cloud The lifecycle of any given technological innovation follows a fairly standard path: proposal, development, deployment and then either success or failure based on cost, efficacy, execution or a number of other factors. With the cloud, however, we seem to be diverging from this pattern, or at the […]

Six Mistakes that Lead to Poor Enterprise Software Adoption IBM is one of the more interesting companies to watch in the computing industry right now. I know this may seem odd to some considering all the noise surrounding Apple, Amazon, Cisco and the like, but in a very quiet, methodical way, IBM is setting itself […]