Opinion

Opinion

Servers

• IT security is broken: Six ways partners can help fix it

  Many organisations have numerous non-integrated security point products installed across their enterprise, the management of which is a huge challenge. Here, we discuss how partners can help their customers to adopt a more holistic approach to ...  Continue Reading

• Apstra stops the cyber criminals from loitering with intent

  Intent-based networking fine-tunes all the complicated variables that influence the performance of a network infrastructure and can head off any potential cock-ups  Continue Reading

• Making the business case to create a successful IoT initiative

  The internet of things has the potential to address multiple business objectives, but it is not a miracle technology that will provide business benefit in isolation – true value comes only when the wider challenges are considered across all ...  Continue Reading

• Storage is already confusing and now its shrinking

  Coping with existing server farms is quite a challenge for some customers and the technology is emerging that will squeeze even more out of smaller spaces leading Nick Booth  Continue Reading

• What happened to the HP machine?

  Anyone remember the HP announcement about 'the machine'? Billy MacInnes does and he wonders just what has happened to the grand project  Continue Reading

• Channel matchmaker on MariaDB

  It’s big, it’s robust and it’s all over the place! Meet MariaDB  Continue Reading

• Dell resellers get to say 'I told you so'

  Those resellers that embraced Dell when it returned to the channel almost eight years ago have even more reasons to think they made a wise decision  Continue Reading

• WS2003 end of life – Is your business ready?

  Mark Scaife, head of technical development, Phoenix IT, looks at what the forthcoming support switch off for WS2003 means for the channel's customers  Continue Reading

• Time to hug that server

  Nick Booth finds that not all research provides clear cut answers as he looks at some findings on the rise of server hugging  Continue Reading

• IBM is starting to wrestle with its hardware problems

  In the week it revealed in its latest results that hardware sales were poor and then sold off its x86 server business to Lenovo, Billy MacInnes takes a look at IBM's hardware strategy  Continue Reading

• Being approximate might just be good enough

  There is an obsession with using computer technology to get the right answer but Billy MacInnes is interested in the idea of getting close enough  Continue Reading

• Silver linings in the server and storage market playbook

  As customers move to more agile infrastructures, virtualisation and the cloud could drive higher value sales potential for servers and more attach potential with storage, says Fujitsu's Craig Parker  Continue Reading

• The datacentre combover

  Are you recruiting a datacentre manager? You can tell a lot about them by their hairstyle, says Nick Booth  Continue Reading

• Plain speaking gets you clouds, but no smoke and mirrors

  You can only sell to SMEs if you speak their language, so it's time to start brushing up. Nick Booth meets 4D, a datacentre firm that's doing just that  Continue Reading

• Whitman's latest report makes grim reading

  Meg Whitman might have provided analysts and investors with a great deal of honesty about the time it's taking to turn the business around but as Billy MacInnes discovers the bad news has been coming for quite a while now out of HP  Continue Reading

• SCH sells distribution business – what took it so long?

  In the wake of SCH's decision to sell its distribution business, Billy MacInnes asks, why now?  Continue Reading

• Fujitsu bucks the trend but can it buck the economy?

  At a time when everyone else seems to be cutting Billy MacInnes ponders over Fujitsu's decision to keep spending  Continue Reading

• Not everything is virtual at VMworld

  As more than one observer has already remarked, this year's VMworld Europe event in Copenhagen was occasionally like a conference in reverse.  Continue Reading

• Oracle OpenWorld not so open to Salesforce.com CEO

  Doesn't look like Oracle's OpenWorld event in San Francisco is all that open after all. What else are we to think of the bizarre story that Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff has had his keynote speech, due to be presented at the event today (5 October...  Continue Reading

• Yah boo sucks, that's enough Oracle and Autonomy!

  I love a good spat as much as the next person but am I alone in thinking there is something incredibly childish in the current very public row between Oracle and Autonomy?  Continue Reading

• If HP wants to be the new IBM, does Google want to be the new Apple?

  So I go away for two weeks and all hell breaks loose. First, Google decides to buy Motorola's mobile phone operation, then HP says it's getting out of the PC business and discontinuing WebOS products.  Continue Reading

• Google spurned offer to join Microsoft and Apple in bid for "bogus patents"

  To many people out there, the name Brad Smith might not be too familiar. He's Microsoft's general counsel and most of the time anyone would have come across his name in the past would probably have been in defending the software giant against ...  Continue Reading

• Jargon buster is a good idea but it misses the real target

  Earlier in the week, IT support company Barton Technology released a "jargon buster" designed to help small businesses and SMEs decipher some of the jargon in hardware, networking, software and licensing, backup, server applications and security ...  Continue Reading

• Cloud computing is a lot of hot air (and it can heat your house)

  There's an intriguing paper published by Microsoft in which the authors argue that it could be possible to send servers used in cloud computing data centres to houses and office buildings and use them as a primary heat source.  Continue Reading

• Is there more to Microsoft than Windows?

  Only the churlish would seek to dismiss a company reporting record revenue and profits, especially when that company is Microsoft, the biggest software business in the world. As I'm not churlish by disposition, I won't, although quite a few others ...  Continue Reading

• Currency fluctuations can be good for your business, ask IBM

  Here's an interesting snippet of information: IBM's second quarter revenues were positively affected by currency fluctuations to the tune of 7% or around $1.6bn.  Continue Reading

• Jobs boom in IT channel, featuring Mind Candy, mobile startups, cloud computing outfits and Certero

  We keep coming across companies that are short of staff and too busy to go recruiting. Mind Candy, for example, is arguably one of the best companies to work for in Britain. This is the games developer that created Moshi Monsters, a kids social ...  Continue Reading

• Memo to Turner: You can run Windows 7 on an iMac. It's not a big deal

  Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner was in combative mood at the vendor's Worldwide Partner Conference last week, taking jabs at all manner of rivals, including Google, IBM, Oracle, salesforce.com, VMware and Apple.  Continue Reading

• Recyclebank nicked my idea for making recycling fun and profitable by turning it into a game

  I'm livid! Nearly a decade ago, I devised an idea that would make recycling fun. The scheme would boost recycling rates, save money for the councils (possibly even the taxpayer!) and give people the chance to win prizes. It would turn rubbish from a...  Continue Reading

• Hardware sales distract attention from Oracle's software

  Oracle has taken an interesting stance with its decision to walk away from loss-making hardware deals. Explaining why the company's hardware revenues were 6% down in the fourth quarter, president and CFO Safra Catz said it had decided to avoid ...  Continue Reading

• Would Oracle have dropped Itanium support if it hadn't bought Sun?

  The bust up between Oracle and HP over Oracle's decision to drop support for Itanium-based servers is intriguing.  Continue Reading

• SolarWinds can make virtualisation a simple pleasure

  It's only when you look at an ant under a magnifying glass that you realise how often they spontaneously burst into flames, according to a study by Dr Harry Hill, at St George's teaching hospital in Tooting. Now new research by Solar winds aims to ...  Continue Reading

• Webby Awards take note: People are people, computers are machines

  The people behind the Webby Awards probably thought it was cool to give the Person of the Year Award to Watson, the IBM computer that beat the world's best 'Jeopardy' players on TV earlier in the year.  Continue Reading

• Why are Oracle EMEA server sales lagging worldwide figures?

  By the looks of it, Oracle needs to take some lessons in how to sell hardware in Europe. While revenue for the overall EMEA server market in the first quarter of 2011 grew 10.8%, the software giant failed to match the trend.  Continue Reading

• Thank Christ PRs haven't discovered social media!

  A new report from Source wire says that technology PRs are failing to use social media to reach journalists. Well, thank goodness for that, we say. That's a bit like a report complaining that 'stalkers still not using your work number'.  Continue Reading

• Pleb banned from drinking tea in IP row

  Have you noticed how some people in the office put practically a bath full of water in the kettle, every time they make a single cup of tea? After they've heated it up, they throw it away. What a waste of electricity!  Continue Reading

• US companies want to bring their money home

  An interesting story which originally appeared in Forbes, has revealed that a consortium of companies - Cisco, Oracle, Apple and Pfizer among them - are lobbying the US government for a tax holiday to repatriate as much as $1 trillion banked in ...  Continue Reading

• IP hyenas await the IPv6 stampede

  Continuing in his series of seminal briefings on IPv4, Jeff Smith warns of the pain involved in mass migration. Have you ever watched those wildlife documentaries, where the lush pastures of east Africa begin to dry up and grazing animals are forced...  Continue Reading

• IP-change deniers refuse to believe that IP4 will run out warns Global Crossing

  We must switch to IPv6 before the last raw addresses of IPv4 are swallowed up by rampant global consumerism, says Jeff Smith, Global Crossing's senior director for infrastructure services. When the internet was built they were on version 4 of the ...  Continue Reading

• Stop knocking the data centre industry if you know what's good for you, warns Craig-Wood

  Here's Kate Craig-Wood, boss of data centre company Memset, who takes issue with our criticism of data centres and their carbon footprint.  Continue Reading

• Can Emerson slash your power bills by 20 per cent?

  Here's a grim looking machine from Emerson. It might even be too stark for our computers to handle. But look again, it's a thing of beauty because this monster could give you twenty per cent more power for your money, which amounts to a huge saving ...  Continue Reading

• Competition - win an energy monitoring system for your office

  Energy monitoring expert Current Cost is offering our readers the chance to win free equipment that will help cut their bills. Current Cost is offering its energy monitoring technology to reads of this blog, after we pleaded for help in reducing the...  Continue Reading