Mike Vizard

As IT continues to evolve, the need to distribute data is becoming more pressing than ever. Not only are there more applications looking to access the same data, they all want that access to be provided as instantaneously as possible. A huge percentage of that data resides in Oracle databases, which is why IT organizations […]

As Tropical Storm Isaac barrels across the Gulf of Mexico on its way most likely to the same places that were in the direct path of Hurricane Katrina seven years ago, a lot of IT people might not be inclined to take a tropical storm as seriously as a hurricane. In terms of wind, there […]

When hordes of IT administrators descend on the VMworld 2012 conference next week they will be treated to the latest and greatest in all-things virtualization. But as compelling as that may be, most of them are simply struggling with how to cope. The fact is that while virtualization to a degree makes IT more efficient, […]

Regardless of who owns the device, the biggest issue with mobile computing is finding a way to extend corporate IT policies out to the actual mobile computing device. Organizations can wind up having to support thousands of devices because it’s not uncommon for each employee to have a smartphone, tablet and notebook that at different […]

Given the fact that the digital economy essentially revolves around application programming interfaces, it stands to reason that the more APIs there are, the healthier the economy will be. With that in mind, it’s worth noting a move Apigee made today to make its core service for creating and managing APIs available for free for […]

There’s obviously a race on to incorporate as much Flash memory as possible into storage systems. But the folks at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) say adding Flash memory to existing storage platforms doesn’t nearly go far enough. The company today announced that it has built the controller technology it uses to manage the Hitachi Virtual […]

With more storage starting to show up in the form of Flash memory that is directly attached to the server, traditional storage vendors are starting to have an issue with relevancy. In theory, at least, as more I/O requests are handled in memory, storage systems get relegated to being little more than data repositories based […]

Coraid, a provider of storage systems that connect to servers over raw Ethernet, has been trying to shake the stranglehold that six vendors – EMC, NetApp, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems and Dell, have had on storage systems in the data center for several decades. Today Coraid extended that campaign with the launch of EtherCloud, […]

Not all Flash memory systems are created equal. That’s the message from the folks at Marvell, which today at the Flash Memory Summit announced the general availability of a DragonFly adapter for servers starting next month that combines caching software and solid-state drives to dramatically boost application performance. The Marvell DragonFly platform is based on […]

One of the biggest challenges associated with backing up any application is that most organizations are not really sure that the data they need will really be available when it comes time to recover it. The reason for this is that most organizations don’t do a whole lot of testing when it comes to backup […]

Most of the data loss in the data center results from minor outages. The actual full-blown disaster is rare. What happens every day is that somebody loses some data on a client system or a hard drive failure in the data center results in some lost data. The biggest issue with all those little outages […]

While adoption of social networking in the enterprise remains relatively nascent, organizations that have adopted it often find they face some challenges in coping with all the various levels of collaboration that social networking enables. Social networking in the enterprise tends to dramatically increase the signal to noise. People suddenly find themselves included in all […]