Drew Robb

Thought by many to be long since dead and buried, the OpenVMS operating system persists inside many enterprises. OpenVMS continues to host critical applications, and in some areas such as disaster recovery, it is even enjoying a renaissance. Why? Despite an avalanche of hype about unsurpassed availability, fault-tolerance and security capabilities in UNIX, Linux and […]

In a perfect world, email would be a beautiful thing. Friends wouldn’t send you bad jokes or trivia that didn’t interest you. Messages always would arrive instantly without any delay. At work, email would be reserved for truly important communication rather than 15 screen’s full of irrelevance about the new canteen schedule or miniscule changes […]

Just over three years ago Microsoft announced its Licensing 6.0 program, which included changing its software upgrades from a purchase to a subscription model. Under the new Software Assurance (SA) system, companies would pay an annual fee of 25 percent of a server license and 29 percent of a desktop license. In exchange, the customer […]

With storage vendors shooting beyond the mid-market, a lot of businesses are left without the right solution. And the storage vendors are missing out on a huge market. But still, the two sides haven’t been able to come together. The big storage vendors recently gathered at Storage Networking World to discuss the new wave of […]

A Storage Area Network (SAN) is seen as the way to go in an enterprise of any size. That idea has caught on so strongly that even small businesses now are being wooed by the big storage vendors. A panel at last month’s Storage Networking World, for example, made the case for SANs in small […]

When FleetBoston Financial evaluated its disaster recovery responsiveness, the company received a shock. IT administrators there realized that it would take at least two full days to recover their data and systems from a collapse during a serious disaster. By applying EMC Symmetrix in conjunction with SunGard electronic vaulting services, FleetBoston’s disaster recovery window shrank […]

While companies search for the most economical way to implement new applications, for some the answer could be a big surprise. They already have it installed as part of a larger suite and aren’t aware of the fact. Or they are buying applications they don’t need. Software purchases are consuming an ever-expanding portion of IT […]

Regulatory complexity, exploding storage demands, constricted budgets. It all adds up to CIO’s with their sleeves rolled up or fixated on “immediate ROI” projects. Unfortunately, this means too little time spent on the core of the job description — IT strategy. “CIO’s and CTO’s tend to fall into day-to-day tasks to fulfill the perception among […]

The usual image of an astronomer shows someone peering through the eyepiece of a large telescope observing the heavens. In reality, they are more likely to be peering at a computer screen, running queries and simulations, or studying the digitized output of telescopes on the other side of the world. On March 15, the Sloan […]

According to most analysts, the amount of stored information is growing at a rate anywhere between 50 percent and 125 percent annually. This places an enormous burden on the storage infrastructure. Servers are typically thrown at the problem, new storage arrays added, and additional SAN islands implemented. Yet performance suffers, disk space remains a problem, […]