Chris Preimesberger

Anybody who believes that environmentally conscious IT in the big world of profit and loss is an amorphous concept because one cannot actually see a carbon footprint is way, way out of touch. Efficient power consumption, carbon footprints and facilities’ operating expenses are becoming more strategically instrumental for enterprises all the time. There are plenty […]

BlackLocus, Austin, Texas BlackLocus helps online retailers price their products. With machine learning algorithms developed at Carnegie Mellon, the BlackLocus SaaS platform tracks both competitor prices from the Web and internal data from its clients to provide real-time intelligence to online retailers. When online retailers are able to offer the right product, at the right […]

We see the term “convergence” about every day here on the world IT business beat. More and more functionality is being crammed into smaller devices — be they rack-mounted, embedded, desktopped or handheld. Servers that once did a single job are being virtualized and ordered to multitask as many things as humans. Terabytes of data […]

More Storage for Less CAPEX The constant search for ways to reduce capital expenditures, or “CAPEX” as its known to business managers, is the No. 1 reason why IT decision-makers are looking at iSCSI is to save costs. A conventional Fibre Channel SAN port for a director commonly costs $1,200 per port and FC switches […]

Oracle Cloud Time Frame Oracle revealed that its new Public Cloud will be open for business “sometime next year,” and it probably will have to be sooner rather than later, considering all the competition already in place. The Oracle Public Cloud will offer companies a centralized way to obtain integrated cloud-supported applications and infrastructure for […]

The competition is toughening for Amazon, GoGrid, IBM and other cloud service providers: Global data center services provider Equinix, which operates in 38 countries, revealed Nov. 7 that it has been selected as a data center partner for customers building and/or deploying private and hybrid clouds using the new Rackspace private cloud platform. Rackspace Cloud: […]

In April 2009, on his fourth full day as the freshly minted chief executive officer of data storage and IT security protection software provider Symantec, Enrique Salem made a memorable entrance at Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla. He stepped up to the podium and declared: “I want you to stop buying storage. Now! “You […]

Mother Nature is putting some cruel pressures on the hard disk drive industry, not to mention the overall IT business and most of Southeast Asia, with record rainstorms and flooding in Thailand-a region that assembles about 70 percent of the world’s HDDs. The small nation’s infrastructure is stymied in all sectors by slowly rising floodwaters […]

Defining Big Traffic Big Traffic is server-to-server traffic traversing WAN links connecting data centers. This is different from most Big Data workloads, which commonly emanate from user-to-machine or machine-to-machine traffic. What Is Causing Big Traffic? The main causes of Big Traffic are due to IT advances instituted in only the last few years: widespread adoption […]

Elastic Application Platforms Emerge This signifies the rise of elastic applications, which represent a fundamentally new architecture to accommodate variable scale. The platform for this class of applications saves money and reduces time-to-market by automatically scaling processor and storage resources up or down, depending on workload. Platform as a Service Crosses the Chasm Cloud computing […]

Legal data management software provider Kroll Ontrack, which first went prime-time with a cloud-based e-discovery service a year ago, came out Nov. 2 with an updated version that gives enterprise legal teams more control over processes that are often very tedious. Kroll’s new Verve e-discovery software as a service (SaaS) enables users to upload data, […]

Data integrator Informatica and fledgling Apache Hadoop developer Hortonworks jointly announced Nov. 2 that Informatica’s HParser is now available free of charge to Hortonworks Data Platform users and available for download from the Hortonworks Website. The data parser is also included as part of Informatica’s freely downloadable Community Edition. Hortonworks is a Hadoop development spin-out […]