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Website Scaling, Part 2: The Metrics of Measuring January 18, 2012 
Measuring Web scalability is a critical component of website scaling. The way you do this in a testing environment is, of course, called "load testing." In this second series installment, I'll go over what Little's Law is and how it can be related to load testing, determining how to scale the Web and data layers. Finally, I'll share my tips for troubleshooting common scaling bottlenecks.
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Website Scaling, Part 1: What It Means and How to Get There January 17, 2012 
The stories of websites that fell over and died when they got unexpected traffic are legion. A recent example of what not to do would be Target's introduction of a low-priced Missoni collection. The site attracted so much traffic that Target.com was swamped for several hours on Sept. 13, 2011, leading would-be shoppers to face a cute but frustrating site-down page.
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Identity and Access Management: A New, Less Excruciating Approach January 10, 2012 
As essential as open systems and mobile applications are for doing business, they also put significant strain on an organization's security systems and, in particular, the key line of defense: identity and access management systems.
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One Year Later: MS Exchange Practices Most Companies Should Still Shun January 04, 2012 
Over a year ago, we presented a list of the top 10 worst practices that you should avoid if you want to maintain the performance and uptime of your Microsoft Exchange email system. Since then, some things have changed, while others have not. So here's a revised Top 10 List of "Don'ts" to point out which practices still hold true and which do not.
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Microsoft Adds Firepower to Dynamics CRM October 25, 2011 
Microsoft is rolling out a service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for both the partner-hosted and on-premises deployments. The update includes its promised "Activity Feeds," as well as administrative enhancements and stepped-up disaster recovery practices. Microsoft has put Dynamics CRM on a rapid release schedule, said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
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The Future Enterprise, Part 3: Technology Designed to Fit the Job October 15, 2011 
Not all computing tasks are created equal, and the same goes for computing systems. Corporations and other organizations will be best served by systems that are designed to perform particular jobs or are flexible enough to adapt to them -- one of the core principles of engineering. In techie jargon, these are "workload optimized systems."
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Enterprise Security System Puts Android Under Lock and Key October 12, 2011 
The proliferation of smartphones has created headaches for security-minded IT departments everywhere, but a Motorola subsidiary aims to give system administrators more peace of mind with a solution for managing Android phones in business environments. Three Laws Mobility, purchased by Motorola eight months ago, announced Tuesday that its management solution for Android phones is now ready for prime time.
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Social Menaces August 11, 2011 
In terms of online communication, social media is the biggest trend in recent years. There are billions of participants around the globe as well as an array of forms: blogs, forums, wikis, multimedia content, social bookmarking and, of course, popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. What's more, social media is strongly established as an important channel for companies to communicate with their customers.
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The IT Infrastructure Renaissance June 20, 2011
This latest BriefingsDirect panel discussion on converged infrastructure and data center transformation explores the major news emerging from this month's HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. To put it all in context, a series of rapidly maturing trends around application types, cloud computing, mobility, and changing workforces is reshaping what high-performance and low-cost computing is about.
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The Enterprise's Shifting Center of Gravity June 13, 2011 
Enterprise application integration as a function is moving out of the enterprise and into the cloud. So-called Integration Platform as a Service has popped up on the edge of the enterprise. But true cloud integration as a neutral, full service, and entirely cloud-based offering has been mostly only a vision.
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Using the Cloud for Backup? You're Missing the Point May 10, 2011 
Cloud storage systems are different from the storage systems that we are accustomed to today in that cloud service providers -- companies such as Amazon and Google -- began their efforts a decade or more before they actually opened their public services. When they were first establishing themselves more than decade ago, they were focused on constructing an infrastructure with tremendous scalability.
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Brewing Data Center Superfuel May 04, 2011 
Data center Quality of Service and Total Cost of Ownership has a major impact on an enterprise's business growth and profits. IT departments and application developers seek architectures and deployments providing high service availability and resilient performance scalability to meet rising service demand while controlling capital and operating expenses. Tremendous technology advances have been made in recent years.
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Wringing More Value From Enterprise Cloud Computing With Open Source May 03, 2011 
You're an IT manager responsible for keeping your infrastructure up and running while squeezing every bit of value from your budget. You're interested in the latest trends and have done your research. Many enterprises rely on their existing vendors for guidance on these trends and probably recommend their own cloud offerings -- the same vendors with six-figure pricing and annual release cycles that are often lagging behind the latest technology developments.
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It's Cold Out There: Protecting Data Outside the Enterprise Firewall May 02, 2011 
Today's business has come to rely on mobility. Employees take their laptops home, work on tablets and collaborate anywhere via the Web. Unfortunately, these productivity advancements have paved the way for new cyber-vulnerabilities against an organization's private data and intellectual property. Can mobility continue to be a business benefit when attackers take advantage of security loopholes?
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5 Budget-Friendly Ways to Tighten Up the Data Center March 30, 2011
As online shopping becomes a larger and larger part of global consumers' spending habits, they are demanding the highest levels of availability, performance and security. Your application cannot be unavailable, slow or vulnerable. Period. The single most important factor in keeping an application live and performing well is ensuring that your data center is running properly.
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Big Data, Big Open Source Tools February 25, 2011 
Enterprises are grappling with the skyrocketing amount of data they have to handle as that data proliferates into the terabyte and petabyte stage. Datasets that large are known as "big data" to IT practitioners. Relational databases and desktop statistics or visualization packages can't handle big data; instead, massively parallel software running on up to thousands of servers is needed to do the job.
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