1. Opinion

    Ransomware Liability and the Future of Security

    If you’ve visited any tech related web site in the past week, you’re painfully aware of the WannaCry ransomware outbreak.  This one has been really bad as it exploits a vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft patch in mid-March of this year.  For those that patched their systems, things may no… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  2. Opinion

    Tech Marketers: What Do IT Pros and Decision-Maker Audiences Really Want?

    Tech marketers across the globe are working hard to get the word out about their products and services. If you're a tech marketer, you know that it can be tough sometimes to connect with in-the-trenches people that are always too busy and budget strapped to look at new solutions on a regular basis.… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  3. Opinion

    2017 Enterprise IT Secrets Revealed!

    First off, 2017 will see an increase in the quantity of clickbait article titles... Each year about this time, analysts, bloggers, and random people on the street start to prognosticate about the coming year, seeking to predict the trend that will define the year, the hype that will get blown out… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  4. Opinion

    The Container Storage Persistence Challenge

    As you heard in the above video, there are many players addressing the problem of persistent storage for containers. I promised to highlight two that I think are particularly interesting to us in the enterprise space. Here's a quick note about each of them. Portworx We interviewed the CEO of Port… Read More

    By James D. Green
  5. Opinion

    The Silent Threat of Dark Data

    [su_spoiler title="Disclosure" icon="plus-circle" anchor="disclosure"] This post is based on observations I made while attending Tech Field Day 12. I wasn't compensated for writing this post, nor was I compensated for attending the event. My travel and incidentals to attend the event were cover… Read More

    By James D. Green
  6. Opinion

    A Look at Illumio's Adaptive Security Platform

    At VMworld about two months ago, we had the opportunity to meet with Alan Cohen, who is the Chief Commercial Officer at Illumio. We were also joined by PJ Kirner, CTO and co-founder at Illumio. Both of these gentlemen (as well as the rest of the Illumio leadership team) have a track record of buildi… Read More

    By James D. Green
  7. Opinion

    Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple While Apple Loses Its Way

    I don't write a lot about non-enterprise IT stuff, but in this case, I’m making an exception. I used to be a Windows guy and was vehemently anti-Apple… and then I gave it a real chance and discovered, well, I was wrong.  Apple was releasing products that worked extremely well while, at the s… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  8. Opinion

    Stories From the 2016 Emerging Technology Summit

    The Emerging Technology Summit took over Edina, Minnesota earlier this week as DeltaWare Data Solutions brought in a variety of their partners to meet with and teach their customers and prospects on various progressive IT topics. Some of the ActualTech Media team was also in attendance, speaking an… Read More

    By James D. Green
  9. Opinion

    Microsoft #Ignite 2016 - In Review by @DavidMDavis

    There was a lot of excitement recently at the Microsoft’s annual user conference – Ignite 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia. With over 23,000 IT Pros in attendance from around the world, bigtime keynotes in the arena, and countless new innovations across a wide breath of products – it was a great show!… Read More

    By David M. Davis
  10. Opinion

    Have We Really Outgrown RAID?

    The industry has been talking about this for a few years now, but it's becoming a real and present concern. RAID protection schemes have been used for a long time to protect data, either by mirroring the same data across redundant drives or by calculating parity across a collection of drives such th… Read More

    By James D. Green
  11. Opinion

    Greasing the Skids on Object Storage

    Anybody heavily entrenched in the storage aspect of IT infrastructure is excited about object storage these days. And for a good reason. Data for some of the biggest cloud-based services available today is often stored as objects. Using an object storage solution allows for massive scale and durabil… Read More

    By James D. Green
  12. Opinion

    Join the ActualTech Media Team at the 2016 Emerging Technology Summit!

    We're excited to announce that we're going to be in attendance at the 2016 Emerging Technology Summit organized by DeltaWare Data Systems on Tuesday, October 25th in Minneapolis, MN.  This one-day summit is an annual educational trade show focusing on state of the art, dynamic technologies that… Read More

    By James D. Green
  13. Opinion

    Analyst-Induced Hype and Managing Real-World IT

    Recently, I received an article in my inbox entitled “If you’re not planning for IoT, you’re already behind” and, frankly, it just frustrated me. Although the article author was listed as simply “CIO Staff” the featured picture was that of Vernon Turner, SVP Enterprise Systems & Fellow f… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  14. Opinion

    vChat Podcast - Containers vs Virtual Machines (Episode 43) with Wes Higbee @g0t4

    In episode #43, David talks with Wes Higbee of WesHigbee.com to discuss containers vs virtual machines. Wes is an author  of 12+ Pluralsight.com courses, he's a great speaker, educator, and very knowledgeable developer. For those reasons, this vChat turned out especially great (which you'll… Read More

    By David M. Davis
  15. Opinion

    Disaggregated Physical Storage Architectures and Hyperconvergence

    In the data center, technology advances in distinct steps rather than smoothly along a continuum. One day we don’t have SSDs, and the next, the first SSD is generally available and we do. Market adoption, however, smooths out those distinct steps into what looks more like a gradually sloping line… Read More

    By James D. Green
  16. Opinion

    Five Key Factors That Will Define the Future of Unstructured Data Storage

    This article contains excerpts from a recently authored ActualTech Media whitepaper. The article will be updated with a link to download the full paper as soon as it's available for download! Every organization leverages data in some way. Whether that data is in the form of neatly designed dat… Read More

    By James D. Green
  17. Opinion

    vChat Podcast - Getting Started in Coding for Infrastructure Admins with Dan Appleman (Episode 42)

    In episode #42, Simon and David talk with Dan Appleman, CTO at Full Circle Insights to find out the best ways for infrastructure admins to learn more about development. You want to get started in coding and the cloud? You want to ensure you future success in your career? Dan's got some great advic… Read More

    By David M. Davis
  18. Opinion

    ActualTech Media 2016 Cloud MegaCast Recap

    Yesterday was an exciting day as ActualTech Media organized the 2016 Cloud MegaCast event - this was the first time in the MegaCast event series that the featured topic has been Cloud. The event was extremely well received and attendees had a great time digging deeper by using the Q&A panel of the e… Read More

    By James D. Green
  19. Opinion

    The Continuing Evolution of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

    It doesn’t seem all that long ago that the market was introduced to what we now consider “original” hyperconverged infrastructure technology.  In that initial wave of technology, we saw appliances combining servers and storage hit the shelves, firing a shot over the bow of storage providers t… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  20. Opinion

    Think Differently About Storage With Superconvergence

    Modern virtualization introduced overhead into the compute and storage stack in a number of ways. For many production workloads, IT organizations were happy to trade the overhead incurred for the massive increase in workload consolidation and ease of administration. But there are always outliers.… Read More

    By James D. Green
  21. Opinion

    Blazing Fast Network Virtualization with Superconvergence

    VMware's acquisition of Nicira in 2012 and Cisco's major push with ACI were confirmation that software-defined networking and network function virtualization were coming to a data center near you. SDN solutions like NSX work their magic by making use of an overlay network to virtualize a network… Read More

    By James D. Green