Drew Robb

What a difference a few years make. Walking the aisles of Comdex in the ’90s meant being assailed by a barrage of the latest and greatest in hardware — servers, disk arrays, switches, routers and storage devices. This year, enterprise-class hardware was hard to find. Servers, in particular, could well be candidates for the endangered […]

A lot has been written about the right of all citizens to access the Internet. Billions has been spent placing computers in classrooms and libraries, and stringing broadband to rural communities. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has donated vast sums to wire Navajo reservations in the Southwest. But you don’t have to […]

Sometimes you just hit a dead end. It can happen when you are out driving, and also in the rapidly changing world of IT. Clothing retailer Burlington Coat Factory, for example, used Sequent NUMA-Q (Non-Uniform Memory Access) servers for its Oracle database. IBM bought Sequent Computer Systems and decided not to develop new NUMA-Q products. […]

The facts of life regarding Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are both shocking and remarkable. On the plus side, the technology’s popularity is obvious — from annual revenues of about $2 billion in 1999, CRM vendors are expected to rake in $20 billion a year by 2004, according to Boston-based AMR research. Currently, the technology has […]

In most areas of life, experience is a good thing. You prefer to have a veteran mechanic, doctor or lawyer, for example. But then again, you wouldn’t tend to boast too much about being divorced five times or undergoing your seventh IRS audit. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies getting a job. You will […]

Accurately modeling climate issues is a huge computational task. The National Weather Service’s supercomputers, for instance, have a hard enough time generating accurate local weather forecasts just a few days out. So imagine trying to generate accurate forecasts on a global scale 50 years into the future. This is causing particular consternation when it comes […]

Cooper/T.Smith Corp. of Mobile, Ala. knows a few things about monitoring traffic loads. Since 1840, the privately held stevedoring, import/export and international logistics company has been keeping loads moving along the Mississippi River and in and out of ports throughout the Western Hemisphere. When it came to monitoring the loads on its WAN, however, it […]

Using the image of a cloud to depict the Internet is a convenient metaphor. Once the user connects to the ISP, he’s not concerned about how or why the messages arrive where they should. It’s as easy as flicking a light switch and being certain that somehow all those generators and transmissions lines will manage […]

When the City of Los Angeles decided to implement a PeopleSoft ERP/procurement throughout the city, it didn’t bargain for the complaints, outright refusal to use the system and headline news that greeted the project long before its completion. So the project team took a step back, reevaluated the implementation process and pushed it through to […]

These days, IT has evolved into a tangle of mainframe, mid-range and client/server systems. This confusing array of platforms, operating systems, applications, and databases adds a massive burden to IT that acts as a roadblock to corporate growth. Non-relational databases, for instance, rarely integrate well with the enterprise reporting systems implemented by top management. Typically, […]