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Editor, journalist, analyst, presenter and blogger. As well as blogging and writing news & features here on ZDNet, I work as a cloud analyst with STL Partners, and write for a number of other news and feature sites. I also provide research and analysis services, video and audio production, white papers, event photography, voiceovers, event moderation, you name it... Back story An IT journalist for 25+ years, I worked for Ziff-Davis UK for almost 10 years on PC Magazine, reaching editor-in-chief. Before that, I worked for a number of other business & technology publications and was published in national and international titles.
Disk drives have come a long way from the massive rotating plates of the 1950s and 1960s, when 200MB was a huge volume, to today when disk drives containing 2TB and up are considered commonplace.But this massive improvement has a little-considered dark side.
Dell is broadening its portfolio as part of its bid to join Cisco, HP, and IBM et al as a major supplier of a top-to-bottom (or end-to-end as Cisco calls it) supplier to the datacentre, with the acquisition of Force10 Networks, a datacentre switch vendor.After Dell's acquisition of Perot Data Systems in 2009, which brought consultancy services, this move upmarket started in February 2010 with the acquisition of Kace, a small manufacturer of systems management boxes.
Is the cloud happening or not? This is one of the questions the industry would like to have answered -- some vendors have a better handle on it than others, depending on what they're selling.
Everyone's piling into cloud. The latest is Citrix which has just announced that it's bought Cloud.
From being the poor relation to deployment in pretty much every institution, public and private, open source software (OSS) in the shape of Linux and others has taken over a huge proportion of the world's servers.It was quite a mountain to climb.
If you thought measuring and maximising disk performance for a single server was complex, wait until you start to research the topic for VM host servers.This thread was was prompted by a conversation yesterday with Virsto, a company that makes a plug-in for virtualisation hosts with the aim of making your disk systems run faster.
Switching quickly from one technology to another is not something that large organisations are prone to do. They have responsibilities to their shareholders, partners, customers and employees among others, and getting it wrong by moving too fast would be a bad thing to do.
How do you manage multiple mobile devices? We're talking hundreds if not thousands here, not a handful that you might find in a small company.
Found myself getting interested in social media in the enterprise, driven by a couple of recent encounters with a couple of very different organisations who are developing systems in that area.The first was ServiceNow, a cloud-based IT management systems vendor.
Whither Cisco? Rumours swirl around the possibility that Cisco may be about to sell Linksys and -- possibly -- its WebEx collaboration division too.