Servers & Storage - Features

Google outage lesson: Don't get stuck in a cloud

Google has apologized for yesterday's service outage that left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours.

What happens to the data when an online storage site closes?

Online storage sites, the toast of the Internet circa 2006, are shutting down in droves, putting the data and images of their users in jeopardy.

Enter the cloud

Cloud computing is a reality, and it's a force that IT professionals need to quickly come to terms with. The economic and social motivation for the cloud is high, the business need for speed and agility is greater than ever before, and the technology...

End of financial year bargains: Top 5 portable hard drives

With the end of the financial year creeping closer, it is time to ensure you have the space to backup delicate information. If you are partial to digitizing your receipts and tax information, then this is even more important. Keeping your files and i...

Oracle will stay in the hardware business, Ellison says

Oracle plans to stay in the hardware business following its planned US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, CEO Larry Ellison has said, adding more detail to earlier statements made by the company.

SSD performance -- is a slowdown inevitable?

The recent revelation that Intel Corp.'s consumer-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives suffer from fragmentation that can cause a significant performance degradation raises the question: Do all SSDs slow down with use over time?

57 amazing things you didn't know your tech could do!

We've worked long and hard to come up with the best tips and tricks for your PCs, smartphones, cameras, game controllers, music players, and the Web. Let's start with PC, laptop, and networking tips.

Why IT should start throwing data away

It can be a storage nightmare: Given expanding regulatory requirements and the key role that electronic records now play in lawsuits, some enterprises are saving every bit of data they have, just to be safe. As a gauge of storage demand, IDC says the...

Moving a Data Center Into the Cloud

A year in which the economics of the travel and hotel industries are so bad that business analysts keep making comparisons to the months immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is not generally the time most IT peop...

The top 7 encrypted hard drives

By now, we're all getting desensitised to horror stories about missing hard drives full of private information. When you hear that another 20,000 customers of a less-than-careful company are at risk of identity theft, you probably roll your eyes. And...

11 impractical and amusing USB Drives

Flash memory drives that are more about looks than portability.

VMware vSphere: Does It Solve IT's Biggest Worries About Cloud?

For all the hype about cloud computing in the enterprise—hype that Gartner believes is now nearing its peak—IT professionals continue to tell cloud-related vendors that the cloud will not be practical until several serious concerns are addressed. VMw...

Desktop Virtualization and Licensing: IT Wary of Gotchas

CIO Roxanne Reynolds-Lair of The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising wanted to bring both Macs and Windows to her college's students, administrative employees and teachers. She bought a MacBook Pro and tested new-fangled desktop virtualizat...

Disk Defrag Help From Hassle-Free PC

For the last couple months I've been troubleshooting a vexing problem on my new quad-core HP desktop: Roughly once per week, the machine would start running as slow as molasses.