In Depth

In Depth

IT hardware

• End user devices require careful orchestration

  Options for access to IT have soared since the desktop PC’s heyday, and organisations must conduct a balancing act  Continue Reading

• Storage briefing: NVMe vs SATA and SAS

  NVMe brings blistering performance gains over existing HDD-era disk protocols, and is a straight swap-in for PCIe server-side flash with array and hyper-converged products on the way  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery testing: A vital part of the DR plan

  Disaster recovery provision is worthless unless you test out your plans. In this two-part series, Computer Weekly looks at disaster recovery testing in virtualised datacentres  Continue Reading

• Software-defined storage: The pros and cons, and what is available

  Software-defined storage is a rapidly rising trend in the datacentre, but what are the advantages and disadvantages of building your own storage, and is it suitable for all organisations?  Continue Reading

• Using cross-industry collaboration on open standards to address big data in the datacentre

  Efforts are under away across the industry to create open standards to ensure datacentre hardware is equipped to cope with the amounts of information datacentres are required to process in real time  Continue Reading

• Pioneers take flash storage to analytics and big data use cases

  Flash storage is now being applied to big data and analytics workloads as array makers exploit flash performance for rapid access and high throughput for big datasets  Continue Reading

• NFV helps telcos save money on WAN infrastructure

  Telecoms providers are optimising their services through network function virtualisation,. How does this affect your network strategy  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged vs shared storage for SMEs

  The rise of hyper-converged infrastructure – with compute, storage and networks in one box – seems ideal for SMEs, but is it always a better idea than traditional IT architecture?  Continue Reading

• Docker storage: how to get persistent storage in Docker

  Docker, by default, doesn’t come with persistent storage, which presents an issue to some workloads customers that want to run in containers – however, there are ways to achieve persistent storage  Continue Reading

• Open source storage hits the mainstream

  Open source storage has gained mainstream acceptance in high performance computing, analytics, object storage, cloud (OpenStack) and NAS use, but can it crack the enterprise?  Continue Reading

• On-premise IT still the only way to run certain tasks

  How to augment a public cloud strategy with on-premise IT by running workloads in a private cloud and bursting to the public cloud  Continue Reading

• Cutting the cable: why industry is turning to wireless

  Wireless networking technology is heading out of the office and the living room, and on to the factory floor. We explore the trend  Continue Reading

• Blockchain and the promise of cooperative cloud storage

  Blockchain technology allows distributed retention of encrypted data and is at the heart of cooperative cloud storage  Continue Reading

• Digital transformation gives CIOs chance to be agents of change

  Whether it’s the IoT, cloud, mobility, big data or analytics, there is always something new to grapple with. Attendees found out how to keep up at Cisco Live in Las Vegas  Continue Reading

• SAP Hana storage 101

  If you're starting down the road towards SAP Hana in-memory analytics you'll need to understand its storage requirements. Here are some basics to get you started  Continue Reading

• Object storage product survey 2016: The big six

  In the first of a two-part series we run the rule over the big six storage suppliers’ solutions for object storage, an increasingly popular protocol for unstructured data  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged infrastructure product survey: The big names

  In the concluding part of a two-part survey, Computer Weekly looks at the offerings of the big players – Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HPE, VMware – in the hyper-converged infrastructure market  Continue Reading

• CW@50: The Great British chip invention

  There is a link between the world’s first working computer and the world’s most successful chip: they are both British  Continue Reading

• Executive interview: Phil Smith, UKI chief executive, Cisco

  Cisco’s Phil Smith discusses digitisation, its impact on national productivity, and how enterprises can apply the lessons lived and learned by tech companies to their own strategy  Continue Reading

• Growing possibilities for 3D printing

  As 3D printing disrupts business and technology mandates, CIOs can gain new relevance as business enablers  Continue Reading

• My first IoT project: A guide for businesses

  We’ve all had a good giggle about having our fridges hacked – but now it’s time to get real. What are the first steps enterprises should take when implementing their first internet of things project?  Continue Reading

• It makes sense to go hyperscale/hyper-converged

  Hyperscale computing and storage are the norm for web giants. Hyper-converged scenarios make it possible for small and medium-sized enterprises to gain the advantages of combined server/storage nodes  Continue Reading

• Unlocking the disruptive potential of 3D printers

  We look at where 3D printing started, highlights some current innovations and assesses where the technology might be heading next  Continue Reading

• How 3D printing will disrupt industry worldwide

  The technology is helping startups model prototypes and inventory suppliers lop millions from supply chain costs  Continue Reading

• PCIe SSD: Cache vs storage tier

  Adding PCIe flash is a popular way of speeding up application response times, with more rapid I/O guaranteed, but should PCIe SSD be added as cache or as a tier of storage?  Continue Reading

• CW@50: How UK home brew gave computing to the masses

  From batch processing to the graphical user interface, from desktop PCs to smartphones, from luggables to wearables, computing has come a long way since Computer Weekly was first published in 1966. We look at some of the personal computers that ...  Continue Reading

• Fourth-generation flash to rewrite software development

  Flash has outstripped Moore’s Law. If software development caught up, the solid-state datacentre would be a cost-effective reality, bringing a step-change in agility and performance  Continue Reading

• Amazon S3 storage 101: Object storage in the cloud

  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has emerged as a de facto standard for accessing data in the cloud. We run the rule over S3, its key attributes and what you need to know to use it with your applications  Continue Reading

• How to yield the benefits of converged infrastructure

  Bringing together the elements of enterprise IT generates a litany of operational and cost-cutting advantages – but care must be taken in balancing risk and in implementation  Continue Reading

• Hyperconvergence: A political and technological revolution

  Tips for IT leaders planning to consolidate their IT components into a single, centrally managed platform  Continue Reading

• CW@50: Storage – From punched cards to flash and the cloud

  Since the launch of Computer Weekly in 1966, we have moved from a world of punched cards and paper tape to one where flash and the cloud have revolutionised data storage  Continue Reading

• CW@50: From ICL to ITIL

  Standardisation helps industries to grow. Here in the UK, a number of highly influential standards emerged that have become building blocks for the modern computer industry  Continue Reading

• CW@50: From Captain Kirk to 5G – 50 years of mobile

  As Computer Weekly prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our first edition in 1966, we look back at 50 years of British innovation and development in mobile networking  Continue Reading

• CW@50: The heyday of British computing - how the Brits ruled IT

  We examine how the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s became an age of great innovation for the British computer industry  Continue Reading

• PCIe SSD roundup 2016: Some stall while others progress

  The PCIe SSD market is still important, but PCIE flash drive makers are split between those that continue to develop their products and those for whom product evolution has stalled  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation and the cloud aid disaster recovery in Spain

  As virtualisation and cloud services take hold, Spanish organisations can take advantage of less costly and more flexible responses to the threat of unplanned outages  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation rolls on, but still less than 50% of workloads are virtualised

  Survey finds server virtualisation is top way to upgrade datacentres, while public and private cloud storage gains serious momentum  Continue Reading

• Datacentre heat reuse: Why aren’t more operators doing it?

  With the datacentre industry’s sustainability habits coming under increasingly close scrutiny, we find out why operators are not rushing to reuse their waste heat  Continue Reading

• Interview: How John Deere uses connectivity to make farms more efficient

  After pioneering the use of automated vehicle technology 15 years ago, farm equipment supplier John Deere is now going further, with its sights set on efficiency and sustainability, says sales VP Christoph Wigger  Continue Reading

• All-flash array roundup 2016: The big six

  Computer Weekly surveys an all-flash array market in which the big six in storage have largely settled on strategy, but key new technologies – such as TLC flash and 3D NAND – are emerging  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage appliances: What they are and who provides them

  We look at the cloud storage appliance market – everything from local gateway presentation of the cloud, via hybrid cloud, to the new generation of cloud-resident appliances  Continue Reading

• Unaligned I/O: A storage performance killer

  As the stack piles higher – with virtual servers, their virtual disks and guest operating systems – the scope for unaligned or misaligned I/O to affect performance increases  Continue Reading

• Interview: James Bamford on surveillance, Snowden and technology companies

  Investigative journalist and documentary maker James Bamford was among the first to uncover the secrets of the US National Security Agency and its global surveillance  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery planning: Where virtualisation can help

  The disaster recovery planning process is not fundamentally technology-centric, so when can virtualisation make it quicker and easier to restore services after an unplanned outage?  Continue Reading

• Top five things to know about flash and storage tiering

  Automated storage tiering boosts storage efficiency and saves money, but why is tiering different from caching, why is it suited to use with flash and how do suppliers differ?  Continue Reading

• Snapshots: Hypervisor vs Array

  Snapshots are a valuable part of the data protection toolkit, but where is it best to run them from – the hypervisor or the storage array? We look at the pros and cons  Continue Reading

• Flash storage set to dominate Europe's datacentres by 2020

  A rapid shift among European enterprises towards all-flash storage could be a surprise positive outcome from the economic woes that have afflicted the continent  Continue Reading

• Avoiding security issues when recycling hardware

  What are the options for the environmentally and ethically responsible recycling of end-of-life hardware, without compromising data security?  Continue Reading

• Object storage: Cloud vs in-house

  Object storage is a rising star in data storage, especially for cloud and web use. But what are the pros and cons of cloud object storage or building in-house?  Continue Reading

• All-flash storage vs hybrid flash in Russia: Price and performance key

  Russian organisations are adopting all-flash and hybrid flash storage systems, with price and performance the key considerations when deciding between the two  Continue Reading

• HP Inc lays the foundations for a digital future

  Following HP’s split on 1 November 2015, how will the printer and PC components of the business define the future of HP Inc?  Continue Reading

• PCIe SSD vs all-flash for enterprise storage

  We run the rule over PCIe SSD and assess its potential as a server-side alternative to all-flash storage, as cache in conjunction with shared storage and in hyperscale environments  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation and disaster recovery: DR features in Hyper-V

  We run the rule over the key functionality in Microsoft Hyper-V that can help with disaster recovery, including backup, migration, high availability and replication  Continue Reading

• The best desktop strategy: Forget the desktop

  Before licensing and rolling out an updated operating system, it may be time to revise your IT estate  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation and disaster recovery: DR features in VMware

  The key areas of functionality in VMware that can help with disaster recovery – including VMware backup, migration, high availability and replication  Continue Reading

• Flash in NAS file access storage: Does it need it – and, if so, how much?

  While flash is rapidly going mainstream for primary storage with the all-flash datacentre, does NAS file access storage need flash – and, if so, how much?  Continue Reading

• The truth about virtualisation and disaster recovery

  The fundamentals of disaster recovery are well-established. But there is uncertainty, and even false claims from suppliers, about how the rise of virtualisation affects DR  Continue Reading

• Russian personal data law set to come into force despite fears

  New law says all personal data submitted online by Russians must be held in the country's datacentres. But can the infrastructure cope and will the legislation deter foreign companies?  Continue Reading

• How Verne Global tackled the Icelandic datacentre connectivity gap

  The wide availability of renewable energy has made Iceland an attractive location for datacentre operators, increasing demand for global network connections to the country  Continue Reading

• Barriers to adoption: Why are local councils holding back on G-Cloud?

  Is outsourcing, the dominance of incumbent providers, or a lack of central government guidance to blame for the low number of councils using G-Cloud?  Continue Reading

• Welsh Water billing replacement programme offers customers new tariffs

  Welsh Water (Dŵr Cymru) scooped a Computer Weekly award for a billing replacement programme for which it was its own systems integrator  Continue Reading

• Case study: Open University uses Microsoft Azure to create course content clearance hub

  The Open University recently scooped the award for Best Cloud Project at the CW European User Awards, and here's why  Continue Reading

• How database virtualisation helped the European Bioinformatics Institute save datacentre space

  The European Bioinformatics Institute recently scooped the award for Best Datacentre Project at the CW European User Awards, and here's why  Continue Reading

• Keeping European datacentres safe from cyber attacks

  European datacentre operators must take a proactive approach to preventing cyber attacks as hackers increasingly target their facilities  Continue Reading

• OpenStack Swift 101: the object store for OpenStack apps

  We run the rule over the OpenStack Swift object storage architecture, its key components, how it achieves resiliency and the data protection methods in use and development  Continue Reading

• All-flash vs hybrid flash for virtual desktop storage

  With massive random I/O and a huge bias towards writes, virtual desktop storage – especially for the more feature-rich VDI 2.0 – requires the speed of all-flash and hybrid flash storage  Continue Reading

• UK datacentre growth trends: Why are users shunning inner-city facilities?

  Research suggests inner cities are falling out of favour with datacentre developers, with cost-sensitive users willing to look further afield for co-location services  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery in Russia: Critical sectors play it safe

  Disaster recovery methods in Russia span tape backup to cloud disaster recovery, but for businesses in the most critical sectors in-house provision is the favoured method  Continue Reading

• Hybrid flash vs all-flash storage: When is some flash not enough?

  When it comes to choosing between hybrid flash and all-flash storage, the question is increasingly not how much flash is enough, but whether you still need any disk at all  Continue Reading

• Hotels.com turns to cloud and big data to drive up online holiday bookings

  Online hotel booking site explains how the use of public cloud and NoSQL database tech has benefited its business  Continue Reading

• ARM wrestles its way into the datacentre with the help of 64-bit chips

  Intel x86 technology has traditionally ruled the datacentre roost, but could the power consumption benefits of ARM 64-bit systems change all that?  Continue Reading

• VMware vs OpenStack: How they handle storage

  The opportunities and challenges presented by the two virtualisation environments when it comes to storage, backup and disaster recovery.  Continue Reading

• OpenStack Manila: File access storage for the open source cloud

  OpenStack Manila is the file level access method in development by the open source cloud platform. What is it, how does it work and when will it be ready?  Continue Reading

• Marseille: Europe’s networking gateway to Africa

  The city of Marseille in southern France is fast becoming a hub for datacentre and network operators who want low latency connections to Africa.  Continue Reading

• Journey to the West: Will Huawei make its services ambitions stick?

  As network hardware supplier Huawei enters the services game, we consider if the West is ready to buy IT services from China  Continue Reading

• Software-defined networking in Europe: The state of play

  What stage of the evolution of software-defined networking are we really at, and when will the hype turn to reality?  Continue Reading

• Erasure coding vs Raid for disk rebuilds

  Erasure coding as a means of data protection has emerged with object storage and offers an alternative to Raid systems  Continue Reading

• Flash storage in Benelux: Service providers kick-start flash adoption

  Demand for quick response times and non-stop availability has pushed use of flash – particularly hybrid flash – storage in Benelux, a region with a high presence of service providers  Continue Reading

• PCIe SSD product survey 2015: New form factors emerge

  PCIe SSD performance has not increased significantly but new form factors and protocols -- such as NVMe -- have emerged for better connectivity  Continue Reading

• Datacentre PUE: Who's keeping score?

  With datacentre operators under increased competitive pressure to cut their PUE scores, are their ratings really all they seem?  Continue Reading

• What’s slowing down your network and how to fix it

  When using the network feels like wading through molasses, finding the cause can be a difficult process  Continue Reading

• London-based virtual reality startup in quest for alternative worlds

  Visualise, a nine-strong UK startup, is developing cutting-edge virtual reality simulations  Continue Reading

• Virtual machine backup in Benelux: When to choose specialist software?

  Specialist software has changed the game in virtual machine (VM) backup. Benelux organisations talk about their dedicated VM backup tools  Continue Reading

• Docker storage 101: How storage works in Docker

  Docker nails some of the shortcomings of virtualisation, but what about Docker container storage?  Continue Reading

• The reinvention of Dell: What it must do next to succeed

  Two years after going private, Dell still has some work to do to educate the enterprise about what it has to offer  Continue Reading

• OpenStack storage options are not the only ones available

  OpenStack and its Swift and Cinder object and block storage lead the way, but are not the only options for building open-source cloud platforms  Continue Reading

• Is it time to jump off the Windows bandwagon?

  The growth of user power has forced organisations to re-think IT strategies as employees demand mobility, collaboration and the latest technology  Continue Reading

• Businesses need to equip staff with the tools to do the job

  Workforces will become frustrated if they do not have the technology they need to deliver what their organisation wants  Continue Reading

• Top five things you need to know about VMware Virtual Volumes

  VMware’s Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) promise a revolution in storage for virtual machines, but what are the key things you need to know?  Continue Reading

• Wi-Fi in the sky: The good, the bad and the ugly

  With in-flight internet options spreading around the world, which services should discerning business travellers try, and which should they avoid?  Continue Reading

• Five tech trends that will change the mobile world in the next 10 years

  Computer scientist Kevin Curran discusses some of the trends that will shape the future of mobile at Mobile World Congress 2015  Continue Reading

• What will office desktop computing look like in 2020?

  Over the next five years, IT departments will increasingly support a highly heterogeneous computing environment  Continue Reading

• All-flash and hybrid flash storage build momentum in Poland

  Hybrid flash and all-flash storage gain popularity in Poland, hybrid flash going mainstream and all-flash used for high performance  Continue Reading

• VM backup drops off as DR motors on: what’s behind the survey figures?

  We look behind the storage and backup headlines in the ComputerWeekly.com IT spending priorities survey  Continue Reading

• Build in resilience to simplify workloads with hybrid cloud

  Hybrid cloud offers benefits of hosted applications and offloading manual tasks but beware latency and outages in mission-critical functions  Continue Reading

• $/GB vs $/IOPS and how to compare enterprise storage pricing

  While raw drive prices are pennies per GB, the actual cost of enterprise storage is much higher. Finding a baseline can save you money  Continue Reading

• Virtual reality comes of age in manufacturing

  Will there be virtual reality headsets in the living room by the end of 2015? Perhaps not, but Ford and BAE Sytems are putting virtual reality to work  Continue Reading

• How to combat VM sprawl

  VMs are easy to create, but when unmanaged they proliferate around your infrastructure. Here, we explain VM sprawl and how to combat it  Continue Reading

• Polish companies face challenges with big data storage infrastructure

  As Polish enterprises embrace data analytics they face the challenge of big data storage that can handle rapidly growing and varied datasets  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage: The top five things that go wrong – and how to avoid them

  Cloud storage provides cost savings and ease of management, but there are pitfalls – and here are the top five things that can go wrong  Continue Reading