Kenneth Hess

Although the Department of Homeland Security and the televised news media would have you believe that hordes of foreign attackers and terrorists constantly prepare themselves for cyberwarfare, the reality is your greatest threat is currently occupying a cubicle inside your company. The majority of all computer security breaches are those launched by insiders taking advantage […]

These top 10 virtualization vendors deliver the best virtualization software solutions on the market today. You might not require every bit and byte of programming they’re composed of, but you’ll rejoice at the components of their virtualization feature sets when you need them. These solutions scale from a few virtual machines that host a handful […]

Everyone has heard of Ubuntu Linux and how great it is on the desktop, but have you heard that there’s a server version of that same uber-cool operating system? There is, and you should know about it. Ubuntu Server not only follows the same twice yearly updates (April and October) as its desktop counterpart does, […]

If you think open-source server technologies are limited to Linux distributions, think again. Although these software projects pair well with Linux, it isn’t an integral part of any of the 10 listed. Open-source software no longer refers to a Linux-only environment. In fact, open source now crosses all operating system boundaries, so much so, that […]

In the first week of September last year, I explained, Why You Need a Fuller Data Center and challenged you to partake in some data center minimizing activities. One of those activities was workload (server) consolidation. If workload consolidation wasn’t on your 2009 to-do list, I’d put money on the probability of it being on […]

Mobility and agility are the two key concepts for the new decade of computing innovation. At the epicenter of this new enabled computing trend is cloud computing. Virtualization and its highly scaled big brother, cloud computing, will change our technology-centered lives forever. These technologies will enable us to do more; more communicating, more learning, more […]

Data Deduplicationsounds like an excellent candidate for an HGTV reality show — companies drowning in a sea of redundant data receive a visit from two perky IT people who descend on their files like vultures on road kill with the promise of curing the company’s duplicate data ills with a weekend and few thousand dollars […]

You’ve thought it but you didn’t say anything. You know it’s an ugly baby but your sense of decency prevents you from saying what you’re really thinking. Your internal editor engages and disconnects your tongue from your brain just in time. Unfortunately, I don’t have that same internal editor. Your data center, aka your “baby” […]

Can you save money by converting from a physical to a virtual infrastructure? Yes. Can you do it without spending any money? No. Can you do it without spending more than you would on conventional architecture and technology? Definitely. The truth is that saving money with virtualization is possible, but the all-too-common lie of omission […]

It might seem odd for a Linux and open source pundit to try to convince you it’s possible to operate your Windows environment frugally, but I have a reason for doing it. If you’re going to use Windows, you should learn to do so for as little out-of-pocket expense as possible. There’s nothing wrong with […]