Recent Articles
-
SMB Storage Gets a Whole Lot Smarter
The trouble with storage is that it’s difficult to manage, so very few organizations do it well. It’s kind of like the digital equivalent of cutting the hedges; many IT staffs don’t do it particularly well because they’re secretly hoping that somebody else will just show up and do it for them. Unfortunately, most small-to-medium…
-
Time for Solution Providers to Help Reinvent Enterprise IT
Most solution providers today still think in terms of classes of products. But it’s become increasingly clear that many of those products are starting to converge. Customers are obviously starting to think more holistically about IT. Instead of having isolated conversations about servers, storage and network, the arrival of next-generation systems such as the Cisco…
-
Unified Storage Drives New Enterprise Opportunities
There’s a tendency to think of the enterprise as one massive entity. In reality, an enterprise is much like the average city, which is usually made up a series of neighborhoods that share access to common services. Similarly, most enterprise IT organizations are an amalgamation of divisional systems that ideally should depend on a common…
-
Mastering Your Own Cloud Computing Fate
As many solution providers continue to evolve into cloud service providers many of the server vendor relationships that many of them built their businesses on are being reevaluated. The primary reason this is happening is that if customers are buying a service they generally don’t care much about the specific IT infrastructure that enables it.…
-
Pressure to Take Sides in Virtualization Wars Starts to Mount
There is no shortage of virtual machine platforms these days, but from a market perspective the dominant three are VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. What’s still a little unclear at this point is to what degree are solution providers going to need to support all three platforms. In general, the Citrix Xen platform tends to be…