Mike Vizard

As Flash memory became more affordable, the most logical thing to do was improve the performance of existing storage systems by adding solid-state drives (SSDs) to them. But as the price of memory kept falling thanks to demand for its use in consumer electronic products such as the Apple iPhone, it became feasible to build […]

Regardless of how you feel about Big Data, the fact is that there is likely to be a lot more of it outside your organization than in it. The simple reason for this is that end users are going to want to be able to compare data from multiple sources. Moving and aggregating all that […]

As virtualization continues to evolve, it is pretty clear that just about everything in the data center is going virtual. This is giving rise to the concept of virtual data centers in which servers, storage and networking components are all seen as shared resources. Hewlett-Packard this week took a major step towards realizing that vision […]

Enterprise applications can be tricky things. Each user approaches an application differently with the end result being a lot of inconsistency in the way an application is actually used. As a result, organizations spend a lot of time trying to figure out not only what kind of experience the end user is having with a […]

As the number of mobile computing devices being used across the enterprise increases, self-encrypting drives (SEDs) are gaining value. After all, the probability that a mobile computing device will be lost or stolen is quite high. The problem, of course, with anything to do with encryption is managing it. Most IT organizations don’t have systems […]

Most people have come to expect that the quality of the wireless network experience they get at the office is nowhere near what they get at home. The reason for this has nothing to do really with the skills of the internal IT organization, but rather there are more people trying to share that network […]

There’s a time-honored IT tradition that says any time there is a performance issue, throw hardware at it. Rather than go to all the trouble of optimizing the way of a particular application works, it’s usually faster and less expensive to throw additional processing power at the problem. But as server density levels in the […]

There’s a lot of discussion these days about the implications of platform as a service (PaaS) in the cloud, but the fact remains that the usage of PaaS remains confined to a relatively small base of IT organizations. According to Ryan Shriver, agile cloud development analyst at The Virtualization Practice, an IT consulting firm, PaaS […]

As the number of mission-critical applications being deployed by midmarket IT organizations continues to rapidly expand, the cost of downtime associated with those applications is becoming more acute. Midmarket organizations are more dependent on enterprise applications than ever, so when one of them goes down the actual impact to the business can be much harder […]

One of the reasons cloud computing is expected to be popular with small-to-medium (SMB) organizations is that the state of their IT operations is considered suspect given budget limitations and the skill level of the people they can afford to hire. While there is clearly a lot of room for improvement, a new survey of […]

A new global survey of 152 IT executives and 162 non-IT executives that was conducted by Accenture finds that executives would really like to start over when it comes to enterprise IT. While there is usually a gap between aspirations and action, the survey also finds that about half of the executives surveyed are already […]

People who use the FaceTime videoconferencing application on iPhone and iPad devices regularly have already seen a glimpse of the coming communications revolution. The challenge, of course, is that FaceTimeis basically limited to point-to-point videoconferencing over a Wi-Fi connection. Vidyo, however, is giving folks today a good look into the future of videoconferencing with the […]