Drew Robb

In some organizations the adage may prove true: Old servers never die, their performance simply fades away. But in most IT shops, there comes a time when a servers must be disposed of. The question then becomes what should be done with it? In most cases, it is less expensive and more efficient to leave […]

Like old soldiers, it could be said that old databases never truly die. But instead of fading away like their military counterparts, some databases conceived in the 1980s are still very much a part of the IT fabric of many large enterprises. Particularly on the OpenVMS platform, products such as Rdb, Ingres and even System […]

NASA has just revamped the storage environment at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. This revamp consists of a new 450 TB storage network working in tandem with the massive Columbia supercomputer, which runs on Intel Itanium 2 and Linux. “All of the storage is within one […]

Things may be hard financially for many areas of IT… but not so much for security. In fact, Secure Content Management (SCM) is one of the few areas of IT spending which continues to expand in this sluggish economy. According to IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based analyst firm, worldwide revenue for SCM software grew 34 percent […]

In this age of increased gender equality when women are doctors, astronauts and Supreme Court Justices, the stats for women in IT are surprisingly poor. According to the American Association of University Women based in Washington, D.C., women represent roughly 20 percent of IT professionals, and receive less than 28 percent of the bachelors degrees […]

It’s not what you know, but who you know. That statement is usually used when talking about closing a sale or getting a job, but it also applies to attacking a network. Perimeter defenses are set up to keep out unauthorized traffic. If you can reach someone with trusted access to the corporate system, however, […]

The need to comply with emerging government and industry regulations is driving corporations of all sizes to protect critical data and content. This applies both inside and outside the firewall. But for many of these regulations, it isn’t enough for enterprises to provide safeguards that prevent unauthorized access. “Access rights alone will not stop accidental […]

Boy, has Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology matured in recent years. If you are the CEO of a company with high-level corporate data on your laptop at home and you get fired, for example, someone at headquarters simply cancels your rights to the document and that’s the end of that. How does that work? Remember […]

A couple of years ago, if you called up tech support to fix a problem with your broadband connection, you’d speak to representatives in Wyoming, Ontario or maybe even Newfoundland. Today, however, you’re as likely to be talking with someone in the Philippines or Bangalore, India. But this tech support globe trotting has raised some […]

Letting a database grow without action can lead to disaster. Transactional performance can suffer to the point where people are screaming about access rates or their queries timing out. And if you do run out of disk space, your whole system could crash. “Our overweight database was months away from crashing due to exceeding our […]