Scott Alan Miller

Clearly, virtualization is the “hot, new technology” facing many IT organizations. Yet it seems to be the space where currently we see the “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” problems rearing their ugly heads most prevalently. As with everything in IT, it is critical that all technical decisions be put into a business […]

Guessing at a company’s roadmap is always a dangerous venture. In the case of Apple and its iOS family of products, it feels less like predicting a roadmap and more like computing a trajectory. Apple’s fortunes have shifted from its traditional desktop market (Mac OSX) to its portable device market (iOS.) This began, innocuously, with […]

If you’re straddling the fence, what’s your reason for not upgrading to Windows 7? Many IT managers wait for the first service pack before deploying an OS upgrade; others update the operating system as part of a hardware refresh. Here are some advantages to upgrading to Windows 7 sooner rather than later. 1) Inevitability Microsoft’s […]

Corporate interviewers often forget that interviews are a two way street. Yes, the company is interviewing the hopeful job candidate — but that candidate is interviewing the company as well. Unless you are a wildly well-known and highly desired company at which to work (e.g. Apple, Microsoft or Google) then you have probably little more […]

In enterprise IT shops, system patching is a complicated process involving large numbers of test systems that mirror production systems. Each new patch arriving from OS and software vendors can be tested in a real world environment to see how they interact with existing hardware and software. In an ideal world, every shop would have […]

A question that comes up on a pretty regular basis is whether or not servers should be routinely rebooted. Should they be rebooted once per week, or should they be allowed to run for as long as possible to achieve maximum “uptime”? To me the answer is simple: with rare exception, regular reboots are the […]

As IT managers we face the need to deal with two very different types of technical professionals, roughly categorized as “engineers” and “support professionals.” Understanding the unique needs of these two job types is critical in effectively managing them — but few IT departments truly take the time to understand and appreciate the nuances inherent […]

Thin Clients in The Dark and Distant Past The IT world loves to swing back and forth between moving processing out to the user via fat clients and moving processing back to the server, leaving users with thin clients. The battle is a long running one that started with the first appearance of multi-user computer […]

If you talk to email specialists what you seem to find, in my small, anecdotal survey of the market, is this: half will tell you to simply install email locally, normally Microsoft Exchange, and the other half will tell you to simply go with a hosted (a.k.a. Software-as-a-Service or “in the cloud”) service, most often […]

Back when I was a novice service tech and barely knew anything about system administration, one of the few topics that we were always expected to know cold was RAID – Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It was the answer to all of our storage woes. With RAID we could scale our filesystems larger, get […]