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News

  • University of Queensland to spend $2.4M on ‘Flashlite’

    The University of Queensland will spend up to $2.4 million on its latest high performance computer for intensive data crunching across multiple research areas, including astrophysics, climate change, geonomics, and computational chemistry.

  • InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies

    Everyone is a trend watcher. But at a certain point, to determine which trends will actually weave their way into the fabric of business computing, you need to first take a hard look at the technologies that gave life to the latest buzz phrases.

  • First look: Oracle NoSQL Database

    For the last few years, the world of NoSQL databases has been filled with exciting new projects, ambitious claims, and plenty of chest beating. The hypesters said the new NoSQL software packages offered tremendous performance gains by tossing away all of the structure and paranoid triple-checking that database creators had lovingly added over the years. Reliability? It's overrated, said the new programmers who didn't run serious business applications for Wall Street banks but trafficked in trivial, forgettable data about people's lives. Tabular structure? It's too hidebound and limiting. If we ignore these things, our databases will be free and insanely fast.

  • NAS shoot-out: Iomega StorCenter px6-300d

    The six-bay Iomega StorCenter px6-300d is the largest array you can get from Iomega before you venture into rack-mount servers, and it's just the kind of box you'd expect to see in a remote office or small to medium-sized business. Considering Iomega's parent EMC is a leader in the enterprise storage market, I had high expectations for this solution.

  • NAS shoot-out: Thecus N5200XXX

    For many InfoWorld readers, the name Thecus will not be a familiar one. This Taiwan-based corporation has been around since 2004, and I remember when it showed off its first NAS in 2005. If you go to the Thecus website, you'll find an overwhelming number of different NAS options (about 30 at my last count). If you look at the market share numbers for NAS, Thecus is usually part of "other." This is unfortunate because these NAS boxes are little powerhouses.

  • NAS shoot-out: Synology DiskStation DS1511+

    I bought my first Synology NAS in 2006 -- the CS-406. The box was small, quiet, and better than the PC I was using as a do-it-myself file server. Speed was good and the product was well-designed. Much has changed in Synology products over the past six years, some for the good and some for the bad. The hardware is still solid and performance is still great, but I'm not sure I would recommend this NAS to a nontechnical business user. Other products in this class make setup and ongoing backup much easier.

  • NAS shoot-out: 5 storage servers battle for business

    The entry-level NAS market is red hot. With prices dipping below $2,000 for a versatile storage server packing 10TB of disk, there's no wonder this market segment is witnessing extremely fast growth. Unfortunately for the business customer, it's also experiencing a lot of confusion.

  • Riverbed Whitewater: Data deduplication for cloud storage

    Cloud storage seems like such a no-brainer for backups and disaster recovery, it's a wonder that more businesses aren't taking advantage of it. If you're concerned about cloud outages, cloud storage costs, data loss, data security, or the ability to push your nightly backup sets up the Internet straw, Riverbed Technology's Whitewater appliance may make cloud storage easier to embrace.

  • HP's Leo Apotheker: We're heading to the cloud

    A day after Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker outlined his strategic vision for HP -- a plan chock-full of new cloud offerings -- he sat down with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant and InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr to share his thoughts on a wide variety of issues in this latest installment of the IDGE CEO Interview Series. In this conversation, Apotheker, who's been with HP just over four months, talked about why HP is better positioned than IBM to help customers deliver on the promise of cloud and how he plans to rapidly eclipse the likes of IBM, Oracle, and others in the analytics market. (Short answer: Apotheker will leave old-school BI to the other players. HP's focus will be on analytics and Big Data.)

  • Rack-mount QNAP storage server packs a wallop

    There's an area of the NAS landscape where the lines between consumer and corporate use are blurred. While high-end NAS arrays cost plenty of money, they also provide essential features like redundant power supplies and superior performance. At the lower end are the truly consumer-grade devices that might seem like they'll work in a corporate environment but fall short of meeting the essentials critical to infrastructures. They are, however, very cheap.

  • Enterprise needs 'predictive analytics' to survive

    Organsations that want to survive in an ever-changing marketplace must supplement their business intelligence activities with business analytics, according to SAS senior vice-president and chief marketing officer, Jim Davis. Speaking at the SAS Forum in Sydney, Davis told delegates the past couple of years have provided a global challenge for enterprise that was unlikely to dissipate.

  • Build archiving systems to meet compliance demands

    The thicket of federal, state, and industry-specific regulations is enormously complex. Most organizations fail to comply with some rules, often due to policy conflicts. The best way for companies to navigate the maze and avoid penalties is to show a "best effort" -- a serious, honest attempt to ensure that records are properly and securely archived in accordance with the best possible understanding of regulations.

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