Chris Preimesberger

In its quarterly Patch Tuesday update on July 19, Oracle released a total of 78 security patches that encompass nearly every type of product in its portfolio. Strangely enough, about a half-dozen of the patches cure vulnerabilities that Oracle itself created with its own faulty security products, a database security researcher who produces a security […]

Enterprise virtualization software provider VMware (NYSE:VMW) posted an impressive quarterly earnings report July 19, nearly tripling its profits over the same quarter a year ago. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s net income for the second quarter of 2011 was $220 million, compared with $75 million in 2010. VMware’s revenue in its fiscal Q2 climbed to […]

Oracle on July 19 cranked out a new version — its second of this calendar year — of its popular open-source virtual desktop software package, VirtualBox, to keep up with a growing sector of VDI competitors.And there are certainly more competitors to face in the market than there were only a few years ago. Those […]

Is cloud storage, which appears to be a bargain off the top, overly expensive when compared to buying your own drive and keeping everything on your desk? It certainly looks that way. For example, you can now buy portable disk drives holding 2TB of storage (2,000GB!) for under $100 — in fact, there are some […]

In a perfect world, recovering a company’s data and getting it back into production after a major disaster would be fast and automatic. Got some news for you: Even “good enough” is rare in this world, never mind “perfect.” First of all, industry analysts from Gartner and IDC say that 30 to 40 percent of […]

Seagate started shipping its new Pulsar solid-state drives-2.5-inch SSDs the company claims are the fastest it has ever manufactured-July 18 to its channel partners. Seagate said that the 400GB Pulsar XT.2 uses SLC (single-level cell) flash with a native 6Gb/s SAS (serial-attached SCSI) interface. The XT.2 is optimized for mixed workloads typical of enterprise environments, […]

Whats Driving Solid-State Storage Demand? Enterprise hard disk drives are often bottlenecks for business applications. Enterprises need consistent performance and reliability from the storage products they buy and quality of service from their storage vendors. There is always a need for higher speed in high-volume storage applications. Values That SSDs Bring SSDs accelerate application performance, […]

Dan Hesse is one of the few instantly recognizable CEOs in the world. And it isn’t because Sprint, the company he heads, is one of the largest, most recognizable companies in the world because, frankly, it isn’t. Yet on the “I know who that guy is” scale, Hesse ranks up there with Apple’s Steve Jobs, […]

Valuable “big data” open-source software from an unexpected place is our topic for today. LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which has been using its home-developed, large-scale computing system in production for 10 years, recently announced that it is sharing its wealth with the open-source community. It’s now offering an alternative to Hadoop, which gets most of the […]

IBM on July 20 will announce the first new version of its XIV storage system to be released since 2008, the year Big Blue bought the Israel-based company. IBM XIV Storage System Gen3, which uses a patented grid architecture to process high-transaction-type workloads, features several hardware improvements, a revamped user interface, multi-system monitoring, and improved […]

On-demand IT provider rPath added a key contribution to the open-source cloud-computing community July 13 when it launched its new OpenStack Compute Appliance. The freely downloadable appliance in either ISO or VMware format was developed to make it easier for IT organizations to deploy and upgrade OpenStack software. The rPath appliance enables users to automatically […]

Interesting bit of storage industry investment news on July 14, Bastille Day. Not that there’s any connection with the French holiday, but year-old Nimble Storage revealed that it has won a $25 million Series D venture capital boost from Artis Capital Management. Normally, this wouldn’t be page one news in most publications. But it is […]