Mike Vizard

Building Software-Defined Control for Your Data Center Borrowing heavily from concepts that were first pioneered in the development of software-defined networks (SDNs), VMware today rolled out a VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6 upgrade that separates the control and data planes with a software-defined storage system. In addition, VMware for the first time is announcing support […]

How to Monetize Data in Five Steps Recognizing that data governance concerns are holding back deployments of Hadoop in production environments, Hortonworks announced this week that it is partnering with Aetna, Merck, Target and SAS to launch the Data Governance Initiative (DGI). Andrew Ahn, director of product management for governance at Hortonworks, says DGI will […]

Five Critical Tenets of Identity and Access Management In a move that could simultaneously eliminate data privacy concerns along with the headaches associated with actually authenticating users, IBM this week unfurled its Identity Mixer service, which makes use of a new engine to encrypt identities. Dr. Jan Camenisch, cryptographer and co-inventor of Identity Mixer at […]

How to Launch a Successful API One of the major challenges with building software is that it’s often a hit or miss proposition. There is generally a set of requirements that everybody has agreed to, but when the final project is delivered, not everybody is particularly happy with the outcome. The result is that weeks, […]

Looking Ahead at the 2015 Business Intelligence Landscape As part of an ongoing effort to dramatically expand the base of users that can access business intelligence (BI) software, Microsoft announced this week that it is wrapping a freemium business model around the Microsoft Power BI service. John Doyle, director of product marketing for Microsoft Power […]

Migrating Oracle Enterprise Apps to the Cloud: Seven Dos and Don’ts With more organizations than ever now looking at service and support to both minimize costs and boost revenues, the size and nature of the IT investments being made in this area are changing dramatically. Hoping to tap into that segment, Oracle today unfurled updates […]

A Guide to the Different Varieties of Flash Technology With the battle for supremacy in the Flash array space becoming more strident with each passing day, NetApp today upped its game in this category with the introduction of the NetApp EF560 all-Flash array and an EF560 hybrid array that combines Flash and magnetic storage. Both […]

Earthquakes and the Modern Data Center One of the challenges with cloud computing is that storing data in external storage systems is not as smooth a process as it should be. In an ideal world, cloud storage would appear to be a natural extension of the local storage system. With that goal in mind, Quantum […]

Security Trends 2015: Developments in Exploits and Evasion With more IT organizations coming to the conclusion that it’s virtually impossible to keep malware from infecting their systems, the focus of the IT security battle is shifting to containing the damage that malware might inflict. With that goal in mind, Dell SecureWorks, a unit of Dell […]

Five Ways Automation Speeds Up Big Data Deployments There’s no doubt that managing databases and associated middleware has become more complicated over the years. Given the fact that the number of people with the skills needed to manage that class of IT infrastructure has not risen appreciably, there’s naturally going to be a requirement for […]

You Can’t Be My Cloud Vendor Until… Six Things You Need to Know Acquia, a provider of a content management system (CMS) based on the open source Drupal project that is delivered as a service, has added a Cloud Shield virtual private network (VPN) designed to isolate access to applications running on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) […]

Seven Must-Have Features for Great Mobile Apps Looking to make it a lot simpler to update mobile applications, SAP has updated a SAP Mobile Secure service that automates much of the deployment of mobile applications built using the SAP Fiori user interface frame that SAP created to modernize its applications. While the new capabilities of […]