Follow via:
RSS

Back office

What's going on in networking, operating systems, servers, storage and data centres?

Manek Dubash

Manek Dubash is an analyst and journalist with over 30 years experience. Focused on business technology, he observes and comments on enterprise infrastructure issues for a range of industry-influential websites including The Register, ZDNET UK, Computer Weekly and CloudPro, and produces reports for research firm STL Partners.

Latest Posts

IT jobs: Will convergence simply end up deskilling staff?

In today's datacentre, the watchword is convergence. But convergence in all its guises has the potential to cause tension and the deskilling of staff.

September 27, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Data Centers

ARM vs Intel: The fight for the datacentre hots up

ARM and Intel go head to head over the processors at the heart the datacentre, but can mobile chips really prevail against their established rivals?

September 21, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Processors

Are SSDs worth the extra cost?

Whether solid-state drives are worth considering over disks will come down to cost calculations involving performance and the nature of your datasets.

September 14, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Storage

Scale-out NAS: Time those smart features helped smaller firms

Whatever the attractions of network-attached storage, scaling out or up is tricky. So where are the enterprise-level features that address those issues for smaller organisations?

September 6, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Storage

Cloud archives start to melt

Who would have thought it? Archiving to the cloud sounds like one of the dullest applications going but a fire has suddenly been lit underneath it.

August 31, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Storage

Flash memory: How the technology is getting smarter

Flash storage may be faster than disks but datacentres will be more concerned about integrating it with other systems — and there are signs that issue is being addressed.

August 22, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Storage

Woz says the cloud sucks — but does it really?

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's unhappy cloud experiences as an individual have coloured his views. Yet it's worth thinking about his complaints from an enterprise perspective.

August 13, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Cloud

Want to make friends with the CIO? Get beyond the slogans

A recent exercise confirms what many have long suspected — vendors often fail to address customers' underlying problems.

August 2, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Data Centers

Secrecy is Google's Achilles heel in battle for the cloud

Google is trying to position itself as a more reliable IaaS provider than Amazon Web Services. But given that its cloud technology is proprietary, can it meet enterprise demands for openness and transparency?

July 25, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Cloud

Backup problems? Top tips for virtualised environments

Backing up a virtual environment continues to be problematic. So what's the best approach? One company reckons it has some answers

July 17, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Storage

Why too many cloud relationships turn sour

Mid-sized firms are still signing on the dotted line for external services without checking the right things

July 11, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Cloud

The market for virtualised server I/O hots up

It looks like the market to rewire your datacentre by virtualising I/O is hotting up.In March, I wrote about Xsigo, and how it is bidding to centralise the arrays of cabling that infest server racks.

June 29, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Networking

Cloud update - and how Apple still doesn't get it

I've been doing some research into cloud, the wheres, hows and whys, and it's thrown up some interesting (if not spectacularly surprising) results.On the face of it, and if you're taken in by the hype, cloud is the next wave of technology before which we should all genuflect.

June 21, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Networking

SMB storage gets smart. Or does it?

Time was when a network-attached storage (NAS) box was pretty much that: just storage. But those times have changed, and you can now buy a NAS that offers features that were enterprise-level not that long ago.

June 12, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Networking

Virtual desktops are on the march

Virtual desktops are the next mountain to climb if you're an IT or datacentre admin. So far so obvious, I hear you mutter.

June 1, 2012 by Manek Dubash in Networking