Drew Robb

With so many airlines in financial trouble, a common thread seems to be emerging among the rising stars of the industry. Upstarts like America West, Southwest Airlines and Jet Blue are working to harness technology to shave costs and heighten efficiency. America West Airlines, based in Tempe, Ariz., for example, recently completed the rollout of […]

Attend any storage conference and speaker after speaker mentions the storage explosion. Some studies place the figure at 50 percent, while others grow at a rate of 125 percent a year. Yet according to Meta Group (Stamford, CT), up to 80 percent of this data remains inactive in production systems where it cripples performance. “To […]

A year ago, server blades were the ”in” thing. Tech magazine gave them extensive coverage. IDC boldly predicted they would hit $9 billion in sales by 2008 and account for 29 percent of server units that ship. The 2003 total of $583 million seemed to confirm this in its big jump from $90 million the […]

Some call it On Demand Storage, some call it the On Demand Enterprise. Other terms are Utility Computing, N1, Autonomic Storage, and the Adaptive Enterprise. Whichever label prevails, the basic idea is to offer storage as a service much the same way you deal with your utilities. You use the service, pay for what you […]

Companies have never suffered from a lack of data. They have warehouses of file boxes and terabytes of storage. What is missing is actionable intelligence that they can use to improve business results. Using data mining tools helps to convert database stores into business intelligence. But that only gives part of the picture since 85 […]

When people hear mention of the OpenVMS operating system and Alpha-based servers, they typically think ”old” and ”legacy”. And then they think about buying something much more modern. It might appear very strange for a company to buy a brand new OpenVMS operating system. Yet that’s exactly what the IT department did at the Albert […]

Data is growing at a rate of 125 percent a year. And a laundry list of regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC 17a and HIPAA make it necessary to hold onto just about all of it. Yet according to Meta Group (Stamford, CT), up to 80 percent of this data remains inactive in production systems, where […]

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke told us that ”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Anyone who has worked in IT for long can tell of the miracles they have pulled off. But a manager’s job description doesn’t stop with technical wizardry. It also includes that other piece of the black arts: predicting […]

Someone calling in saying the network is slow is about as useful as the patient telling the doctor she feels sick. It doesn’t provide you with a specific situation to rectify. It only lets you know that you had better do some testing and diagnosis. And in any case, the problem is unlikely to be […]

Vendors regularly ask their customers to rate the quality of service, typically on a scale of one to 10. That concept of different levels of experience isn’t new. In The Divine Comedy, for example, 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri describes the afterlife as consisting of heaven (Paradiso), hell (Inferno) and purgatory (Purgatorio) each divided […]