Mike Vizard

Six Reasons Businesses Need to Pay Attention to Unstructured Data Developers have flocked to NoSQL databases because they enable their applications to scale more easily. Instead of having to share relational databases in a way that would allow their application to scale, a NoSQL database makes use of an key/value database architecture. Now Orchestrate wants […]

Ten Things You Need to Know About Software-Defined Storage Slowly but surely the compute, storage and networking elements that make up enterprise IT have been converging as part of an effort to both boost performance and lower the cost of IT. Pluribus Networks took that idea one step further today with the announcement of the […]

Three Big Problems Big Data Will Create in 2014 While interest in all things Hadoop is running high, a lot of organizations simply don’t have the skills and resources needed to stand up their own Hadoop cluster. Instead, many are opting to set up Hadoop clusters in the cloud. The challenge is that regardless of […]

Review: The Lenovo ThinkCentre E93z On the heels of an agreement to acquire the x86 server business of IBM, Lenovo is continuing to increase its presence in the commodity portion of the x86 server market. Lenovo has extended its x86 server lineup with a 1uThinkServer RD340 two-processor rack server, a 2u ThinkServer RD440 two-processor rack […]

Eight Critical Forces Shaping Data Center Strategy It’s not easy to pull cable in a lot of environments, especially in older buildings where every hole in the wall requires dealing with hazardous materials such as asbestos. Rather than having to pull out HAZMAT suits to pull cable, ADTRAN this week announced it has developed a […]

Up-and-Coming Open Source Projects for the Enterprise A debate is raging these days over the merits of using commercial silicon versus specialized ASICs inside networking gear. Proponents of commercial silicon argue that the time has come to move away from ASICs to both reduce the cost of networking and prevent customers from finding themselves locked […]

Eight Critical Forces Shaping Data Center Strategy With the rise of software-defined storage, the controllers that are used to manage data are emerging as a new type of platform. Of course, in order to be a platform for managing data, those controllers need applications that allow IT organizations to manage data across multiple distributed storage […]

Five Pitfalls to Avoid with Hadoop Conventional wisdom holds that as a batch-oriented platform, Hadoop is not well suited for running high-performance analytics applications. This week, however, Actian unveiled the Actian Analytics Platform, which enables a massively parallel columnar database to natively process Hadoop data in a way that boosts analytics applications performance by a […]

Tracing the Evolution of Business Intelligence Through the Rise of Embedded Analytics IT organizations tend to embrace appliances when the compute power available on a server becomes constrained. By offloading a particular workload to an appliance, the IT organization gains headroom on their servers for other applications. For that reason, we’ve seen the emergence of […]

Ten Predictions for Cloud Storage in 2014 For at least for some period of time, the future of hybrid computing is indeed hybrid, but actually making that happen presents a set of complex challenges that make building and managing hybrid clouds fairly complex. Looking to reduce that complexity, Cisco today at the Cisco Live! event […]

Ten Factors to Consider When Moving to the Cloud One of the benefits of cloud computing is that a lot of internal IT organizations are starting to appreciate is how much simpler deploying and managing desktop virtualization can become. Recognizing that capability, Citrix released updates to XenDesktop and XenApp that enable IT organizations to use […]

Questions to Ask Before Implementing a Business Intelligence/Analytics System At the IBM Connect 2014 conference today, IBM announced not only an update of its email offering that embeds analytics to help make users more productive, but also that it is bringing all of its collaboration software and services together under one IBM Connect brand. A […]