Data Center

Wed, June 10, 2009 - No question, telepresence tools greatly reduce costly, productivity-sapping travel, with the added benefit of lowering a company's carbon footprint. Yet scratchy audio quality, out-of-sync slides, and tiny, Webcam-quality video often diminish these solutions' usefulness.

Tue, June 02, 2009 - From the start, Apple's Xserve has ranked best-in-class in build quality, engineering, durability, and serviceability among 1U x86 rack servers. The newest Xserve, redesigned around Intel's Nehalem Xeon quad-core CPU, adds performance to the list of Xserve's leadership criteria.

Mon, June 01, 2009 - Ubuntu Server is a fast, free, no-frills Linux distribution that fills a niche between utilitarian Debian and the GUI-driven and, some would argue, over-featured Novell SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Mon, June 01, 2009 - Microsoft's Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2 combination offers a big payoff in terms of virtualization and administrative policy controls.

Wed, May 13, 2009 - SanDisk's Ultra Backup USB Flash Drive combines a physical backup button with sophisticated backup tools to make the little device convenient and easy to use.

Wed, May 13, 2009 - Pogoplug, from Cloud Engines, is a nifty little gadget. This compact box, which costs $99, lets you share files from a local USB hard drive via the Web--without the hassle of setting up a NAS server or router connection, or manually uploading the files. For backup or access to your files while on the road, you can't beat it.

Mon, May 04, 2009 - Sun's latest addition to its high-end enterprise storage repertoire -- the iSCSI-based Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System -- is certainly a high-performance offering, but we found some usability and some integration issues.

Mon, March 30, 2009 - Intel's new Nehalem Xeon CPUs, which are being introduced in countless one- and two-socket servers and workstations today, have already generated a lot of heat. While introducing the new processors to technical journalists in February, Nick Knupffer, Intel's global communications manager, boasted that "Nehalem represents the biggest performance jump we've made since the introduction of the Pentium Pro."

Tue, March 24, 2009 - The world of low-rent key-value storage silos is exploding. Read on for a list of some of the more prominent new projects.

Fri, January 16, 2009 - The value of capturing and analyzing network traffic is well established. Wireless links introduce a number of complicating elements to this process, however