Chris Preimesberger

Big Data Is Getting Bigger A Gartner poll surveying attendees at its U.S. Data Center Conference reported that respondents identified “dealing with growing data/storage requirements” as their largest data center challenge. Given the deluge of critical corporate data, a well-thought-out backup and data protection strategy is vital today, as it will optimize storage costs, lead […]

Reduce Cooling Power Consumption In a typical data center, only about half the power available is actually used by the IT equipment, with the rest going mostly to cooling. Much of that power can be reclaimed by eliminating cooling inefficiencies, upgrading the cooling system to allow for variable cooling or making greater use of outside […]

Hewlett-Packard, fresh off a tough day May 23 in which it announced a whopping 27,000 job cuts over the next two years, continues to revisit its overall mission, evaluate all its businesses, and stabilize its leadership. Can’t argue with those best executive-type practices. Looking closer at the job cut details, it looks very much like […]

Chances are there might not be another lawsuit involving open-source licensing and application programming interfaces for a long while. They’re just too darn difficult to argue, explain and win. Juries of regular people, by and large, do not understand the software development process and its licensing business, nor should they be expected to do so. […]

Hewlett-Packard on May 23 had perhaps its newsiest day since Aug. 18, 2011, when it announced it would cut its webOS division and Personal Systems Group and buy Autonomy for $10 billion. The news this time was no less important, as the slumping IT products and services provider announced better-than-expected quarterly earnings but also said […]

EMC, filling an important hole in its cloud service catalog, revealed May 22 that is has acquired privately held cloud-based file management provider Syncplicity for an undisclosed sum. EMC made the announcement at EMC World in Las Vegas without releasing details about the transaction. Syncplicity, whose CEO is former Oracle and SolarWinds executive Karen White, […]

Virtualization kingpin VMware made a move to the cutting-edge section of the virtual desktop market May 22 by announcing the acquisition of Campbell, Calif.-based Wanova. Details of the transaction were not released by VMware. Privately held Wanova provides a turnkey desktop cloud package called Mirage that is akin to a virtual desktop implementation on steroids. […]

Companies like EMC that have huge annual user/partner conferences are challenged each year to upstage what they did the year before. Well, what EMC revealed May 21 onstage at the Venetian in Las Vegas will be particularly difficult to top next year. This is because the world’s largest data storage, security and virtualization hardware and […]

At about 8 a.m. on May 18, 2012, several hundred employees at Facebook’s new Menlo Park, Calif., campus, the one that housed much of Sun Microsystems for more than a decade, gathered in the complex’s central courtyard and watched on a big-screen TV the opening of the first day of trading of “FB” on the […]

Two long-established and respected IT companies appear to be, as they say in boxing, “on the ropes.” Not the first time we’ve read something like this, and certainly not the last. Hewlett-Packard, established in 1939, and Yahoo, born in 1994, are both at nadirs in their histories, looking at having to lay off large numbers […]

Fact No. 1: Costs Less Overall Linear Tape-Open-5 (LTO-5), a tape format used mostly for large workloads, costs up to 15 times less than Serial ATA (SATA) disks for long-term storage of large volumes of data. Total cost of ownership for physical tape systems is approximately two to five times less than Virtual Tape Libraries […]

Iomega, which for years specialized only in desktop storage devices for consumers (remember the Jaz drive?), has been branching out big time into the enterprise market since its acquisition by EMC four years ago. The company on May 17 augmented its midrange and SMB offerings with a new StorCenter array that is the first of […]