For most applications, the storage industry is fairly adept at delivering requisite performance. All, that is, except for large data set processing. Think: Financial market modeling, or digital image rendering, or seismic analysis for the gas and oil industry. For these applications, thousands of servers churn away for days before the job is finished. And when there's a lot of data fetching, the speed of the storage system is critical, and in most cases, currently inadequate. Gear6 thinks it can help.

When I was a kid I remember sitting in front of the TV during the holiday seasons, waiting for one of the Charlie Brown specials to begin. Just before it started, CBS would display it's Special Presentation Identity logo -- the Word "SPECIAL" spinning with a multicolor trail to some seventies sounding drum and trumpet accompaniment. That six-second opener was like a dinner bell to the Pavlov's Dog in me.

It's distressing enough when a lay person mistakes the facts surrounding Wi-Fi security, but it's even more painful when an institution of higher learning, in this case the University of Maryland, leads people further astray.

Virtualization security has been on the minds of a lot of IT folks lately. There's no doubt that virtualization changes the security game - and because it involves new software - the potential for new exploits exists

Virtualization is a hot topic by any measure, and the security world has not escaped healthy debates and new discoveries from researchers just beginning to plumb the issues. They're looking at not only the impact of virtualization on security, but also the impact security can have with virtualization. Here's a brief summary of some of the different issues that are keeping things interesting.

Welcome to the Virtualization Immersion Center. Normally this first blog post would come from your site editor, Joe Hernick, but Joe is taking a few weeks to move and settle into a new home. So, in Joe's absence, I welcome you.

I know, I know -- how can it be called "Viral Video of the Week" if I don't have one every week? Cut me some slack, huh? One little slip, sheesh.

Anyway, I'm back with a doozy -- did you know that around 3pm, when your blood sugar is really low, Robert Goulet sneaks into your office and messes with all your stuff?

There is so much hype in the IT media and vendor product pitches about policy compliance it makes my head swim. Survey results published by Network Instruments shows many organizations don’t think they have the data or the means to meet compliance regulations.

While all of Sprint's services from push to talk (CEO Gary Forsee announced that Sprint's PTT services both iDEN and CDMA will be marketed as Nextel Direct Connect) to Sprint's Pivot quad-play product got their moment in the sun, it was clear that the day was dedicated to WiMAX. Sprint's new service will be marked as Xohm (pronounced Zohm) and Sprint expects to have 100 million people covered by Xohm service by 2008. The tone of Sprint's briefing was interesting, particularly given the interactions I've had with the company on WiMAX before. In previous discussions WiMAX just seemed like another access medium and myself and colleagues at Network Computing struggled to figure out the answer to: "If WiMAX is the answer, what is the question?"

As I start to test product for the upcoming NAC reviews, in-line NAC being the first of many, one thing strikes me as truly annoying—the lack of decent logging and reporting within network devices. Without good logging, there is no way to troubleshoot problems and that hampers my productivity and more importantly, support desks productivity.

Citrix buying XenSource is a bit of a surprise, but the real shocker is the price tag. A half billion dollars for a three year old company with a few hundred customers, almost no profits and a part of its intellectual property in the public domain seems like a huge premium to pay. On the other hand, VMware just set its value at $19 billion and counting through its IPO. Snatching up the number two player for a tiny fraction of that might not be such a bad deal. To make XenSource worth it, Citrix must build a data center infrastructure platform that offers significantly better manageability than what's in use today.

You know data security breaches are way too common when a company builds a business around customer notification of stolen information.

What happens when you get Michelle McLean from ConSentry Networks, Mike Rothman from Security Incite, Alan Shimel from StillSecure, Dominic Wilde from Nevis Networks together? The answer is a rather engaging give and take about network access control between four very outspoken people.

Web-based communication and collaboration tools are supposed to make physical proximity irrelevant by letting employees work together regardless of where they happen to be. But when it comes to building—and investing in—those tools, it turns out proximity is relevant as ever.

In a recent blog, I said that "NAC fails to reach into the application layer and frankly, it shouldn't" and I want to clarify that statement because in response to that blog both Michelle McLean from Consentry and Dominic Wilde from Nevis Networks are describing application level (as in the OSI model) control, not application access control. The difference is application level controls states that a user "may access this web server or that network service" while application access control states that a user "can modify this form/field in this application." The former is well suited for NAC controls, the latter is not.

So much for a 'closed system,' right Mister Jobs? This video short shows how someone hacked the iPhone in order to install an emulator running the classic Nintendo Entertainment System.

Alan Shimel, in his July 30th blog Is quantine black and white or is there access control in NAC?, takes Kurt Roemer from Citrix to task for Roemer’s portrayal of NAC as black and white access control. I agree with Shimel that access control doesn't have to be black and white, but I do have to agree with Roemer that NAC is about network access control and shouldn’t be confused with application access control.