Kenneth Hess

You’ve quietly rocked along with Windows XP for a few years and now you feel compelled to upgrade to Vista or the upcoming Windows 7. You’ve heard bad things about Vista or experienced them first-hand, and you’ve heard that Windows 7 is a promising replacement for XP. Which is it? Do you trade in your […]

You’re probably in that middle ground somewhere between needing to save money on your in-house IT services and outsourcing the whole thing to an external vendor. However, you can’t quite see yourself giving up any convenience or control just to cut those costs. It’s hard to give up control of your local computing assets and […]

Do you have several employees with salaries approaching or breaching the six-figure mark and carry service contracts on your hardware assets? Consider stepping-up those service contracts to full 24×7, 2-hour response, on-site versions and dumping some of those chatty, annoying, vacation-taking, sick day scamming, office supply stealing leeches from your budget. Yes, I remember what […]

Do you remember a time when Linux was a niche OS? Beyond college kids and a few converted Unix nerds, Linux was something for hackers, Ham radio operators and ivory tower dwellers. No one would ever put a Linux-based computer into a data center. How times and attitudes have changed. Once known as the “little […]

More on server operating systems Everyone has heard of Ubuntu Linux and how great it is on the desktop, but have you heard that there’s a server version of that same uber-cool operating system? There is, and you should know about it. Ubuntu Server not only follows the same twice yearly updates (April and October) […]

More on Open Source Servers If you think technologies for open source servers is limited to Linux distributions, think again. Although these software projects pair well with Linux, it isn’t an integral part of any of the 10 listed. Software for open source servers no longer refers to Linux-only environments. In fact, open source servers […]

In the first week of September last year, I explained, Why You Need a Fuller Data Center and challenged you to partake in some data center minimizing activities. One of those activities was workload (server) consolidation. If workload consolidation wasn’t on your 2009 to-do list, I’d put money on the probability of it being on […]

Mobility and agility are the two key concepts for the new decade of computing innovation. At the epicenter of this new enabled computing trend is cloud computing. virtualizationand its highly scaled big brother, cloud computing, will change our technology-centered lives forever. These technologies will enable us to do more; more communicating, more learning, more global […]

Data Deduplication sounds like an excellent candidate for an HGTV reality show — companies drowning in a sea of redundant data receive a visit from two perky IT people who descend on their files like vultures on road kill with the promise of curing the company’s duplicate data ills with a weekend and few thousand […]