Drew Robb

As part of a national campaign to reinforce and upgrade its overall level of service delivery to the public, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has incorporated system defragmentation technology on 120,000 of its servers and workstations nationwide. While this has resulted in improved performance, it has also brought a sharp reduction in system crashes and […]

Gone are the days when all a network administrator had to worry about was learning and supporting a single OS. Now a firm may have Windows desktops, Linux or Apache web servers, a Unix database, PDAs running Palm O/S, and several Macs running in Marketing. Now consider the predicament of a managed service provider (MSP). […]

For years, enterprise users of defragmentation software have commented upon an interesting phenomenon. In addition to better overall performance of servers and workstations, many also noted improved system reliability and uptime. Interviews with dozens of system managers appear to validate the premise that a defragmented system runs far more stably than a fragmented one. In […]

Many professions have agreed upon codes and standardized procedures for their members to follow. For accountants, there are the Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures (GAAP) published by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which have dictated the way companies prepare financial statements for the past three decades. Violate GAAP, and a company finds itself defending a shareholder […]

If you have to screen your calls to avoid an endless procession of headhunters and potential customers offering you ever-higher rates for your IT services, you can skip this article. In fact, you could probably write one of your own. But for those mere mortals faced with keeping customers happy, here are a few tips […]

Doing everything yourself may sound great, but it quickly becomes tedious and inefficient. So we outsource everything from pumping our water to ironing our shirts and educating our children, focusing instead on our core functions. The same holds true in IT. Outsourcing continues to grow as a means of cutting costs, improving quality/performance, increasing flexibility, […]

When the world’s first electronic tube computer, the University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC, went on line in 1945, all six of its programmers were women. One of those programmers, Betty Holberton, later designed the control console for UNIVAC I, wrote the FORTRAN test suites for the National Bureau of Standards and chaired the committee that set […]

For most American IT executives, offshore outsourcing presents an opportunity to cut costs. But there are many other considerations, so before you rush to outsource beyond U.S. borders, it’s imperative that you do your homework. That was the consensus at a U.S.-Russia Technology Roundtable held last month in San Jose, Calif. Experts at the event […]

Analysts and offshore outsourcing experts gathered at the recent U.S.-Russia Technology Roundtable in San Jose, Calif., identified five major trends in offshore development. Here’s a summary of those trends, as well as some of the factors driving them: 1. More and more IT jobs will move overseas in the coming years Forrester Research estimates that […]

A few years ago network management comparisons were easy. On the one side stood huge and monolithic network management frameworks, such as IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView, which took an army of technicians years to deploy. On the other side were low-cost tools and toolkits such as Aprisma, WhatsUp Gold and WebNM. It was a […]