Mike Vizard

One of the challenges with IT automation is that in the event something goes wrong, the impact can be catastrophic. A configuration error, for example, on one machine may create an inconvenience. But an error that is propagated instantly across hundreds of servers can take a business down. This week, Puppet Labs moved to give […]

One of the biggest problems with cloud computing is that when it comes to deciding where to host an application, it’s generally a matter of faith. Debunking Five Misconceptions About Cloud-Based Services While a lot of assurances are made about performance, it’s usually not until the application is running that an IT organization knows what […]

For organizations that find Hadoop performance to be frustratingly slow, MapR Technologies has an answer. This week at the Hadoop Summit 2013 conference, MapR announced a partnership with Fusion-io under which its distribution of Hadoop will run on solid-state drives (SSD) from Fusion-io. According to Jack Norris, chief marketing officer for MapR, SSD cards from […]

Cisco today moved to significantly reduce the complexity of managing servers and networks in the data center with the launch of a new Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) that unifies the management of Layer 2 switches and Layer 3 routing in the data center. Unveiled at the Cisco Live! 2013 conference, DFA is at the center […]

While Hadoop provides an excellent framework for storing massive amounts of data, deriving any business value from all that information is quite another matter altogether. At the Hadoop Summit North America 2013 conference today, Splunk unveiled a beta version of Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop, an implementation of the analytics framework for Big Data that […]

Cisco is making the case that the convergence of mobile and cloud computing, coupled with video and a variety of new forms of Big Data being generated by the “Internet of Things,” means the time has come to invest in new networking infrastructure upgrades. At a Cisco Live! event this week, Cisco unveiled a raft […]

There’s no doubt that security at the endpoint has become a much bigger problem these days; it’s just that not everybody is quite sure what should be done about it. Some organizations want to lock down endpoints, while others try to circle their IT wagons at the network perimeter. Locking down endpoints, however, often proves […]

One of the great paradoxes of Big Data is that while the frameworks such as Hadoop for storing it are inexpensive, the people needed to set Big Data analytics applications are both prohibitively expensive and hard to find. Eight Ways to Put Hadoop to Work in Any IT Department Data scientists frequently command salaries in […]

Nasuni already provides a way for IT organizations to manage multiple cloud storage providers via a single gateway appliance. The company is taking the next logical step today with the release of a new management framework that makes it simpler to manage multiple Nasuni storage gateways across multiple data centers. According to Nasuni CEO Andres […]

Part of the problem with social networking in the enterprise is that experience is fractured. There are social networking applications for the enterprise, but most of them are not all that well integrated with the web conferencing systems that business people increasingly rely on to communicate within the company and with the outside world. Tibco […]

One of the more unfortunate aspects of application lifecycle management (ALM) is that most offerings want to lock developers into a particular set of tools, which is something that most IT organizations know developers are going to resist. With that fundamental conflict in mind, CollabNet this week unveiled an open instance of its ALM platform […]

Machines eventually fail, but rarely does it just suddenly happen. In reality, there are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of events hidden in machine data that signal when a machine is going to fail. The challenge has been finding a way to capture all those events in a cost-effective way that would allow organizations to analyze […]