Mike Vizard

There are two fundamental approaches to acquiring a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) environment. One is to buy a pre-integrated system. The other is to layer software on top of existing IT infrastructure. Given the relative costs involved, it’s not that surprising to see how popular that latter approach is becoming using, for example, software from VMware. […]

Just like applications themselves, the tools organizations rely on to manage IT environments are starting to devolve into a set of microservices based on containers that can be more rapidly deployed and simpler to invoke. Aiming to be on the leading edge of that transition, A10 Networks today unveiled an instance of an A10 Harmony […]

While Flash storage in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs) has been a boon to application performance, the form factor itself is an artificial construct designed to appear to a server as a simply faster hard drive. But with the arrival of NVMe interfaces on servers, it’s now possible to plug Flash modules into a […]

As part of an effort to gear up for a larger number of application workloads per server, Cisco today unveiled 32 Gb Fibre channel support on servers that also now support both legacy SCSI and emerging NVMe interfaces. Adarsh Viswanathan, senior manager for data center product management at Cisco, says Flash storage capable of filling […]

Cloud security is obviously a top of mind issue for most IT organizations considering employing a public cloud. The challenge they face, however, is that cloud security is one of those many IT things that is a lot easier to say versus achieve. Aiming to make it simpler to consistently implement security across multiple clouds, […]

Intel, working with Swarm64, a provider of a storage engine, announced today that it can significantly accelerate the performance of open source databases using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Announced at a M|17 conference for users of open source MariaDB databases, Swarm64 CEO Karsten Rönner says the Swarm64 scalable data accelerator (SDA) is a storage […]

Now that the Domain Name Servers (DNS) on which internet applications depend to respond to end-user requests for data have been shown to be vulnerable to brute-force attacks, many organizations are looking to embed some additional resiliency into their IT operations. One way to go about accomplishing that goal is to make it simpler to […]

This week marked the formal launch of DXC Technology, a $25 billion IT services provider brought forth by combining CSC with the IT services arm of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. While there’s no shortage of options when it comes to IT services providers, DXC Technology CTO Dan Hushon says there’s no doubt that DXC Technology is arriving […]

Most calls to an IT help desk fall into three categories. There are the braindead requests associated with, for example, recovering and changing passwords. Then there are the truly complex problems no human IT administrator can easily resolve on their own. Finally, there are the bulk of requests that fall in between those two extremes. […]

Making its first foray into the emerging realm of cognitive computing, Progress has acquired DataRPM to gain access to a predictive analytics engine that is primarily used to maintain physical equipment connected to the internet. Mark Troester, vice president of strategy at Progress, says the company plans to leverage DataRPM to increase its own presence […]

Most organizations recognize that some approach to master data management (MDM) is required to impose order on what would otherwise be a chaotic approach to data collection. The challenge many of them have encountered over the years is that MDM platforms tend to be rigid. Any time there is a change to the business, updating […]

For all the hype surrounding the NoSQL movement, SQL remains the lingua franca for queries across both relational and other types of emerging databases. In fact, one of the fastest growing use cases for SQL is on top of Hadoop clusters. This week, Hortonworks underscored that point at a Dataworks Summit/Hadoop Summit Munich conference via […]