Honk if the car in front is connected
Feature The networked car is coming sooner than you think
Connecting cars to the internet and to each other seems to be inevitable, whether or not you approve - and plenty don’t. Let’s face it, though, everything else is connecting to the internet, so why not your favourite drive? By 2017, according to ABI Research, a market watcher, some 50 million connected cars will be sold every …
Windows security begins at the desktop
Beware malware and careless users
The risks of desktop computing are now well known. They stem from the growth in financially motivated malware, which aims to steal from the user or from the user's employer.
Malware does this through viruses, worms and Trojans carried by emails, infected websites and so on. However, the tools to combat such attacks are now …
Virtualised desktops: provisioning done the MS way
Two paths to IT happiness
A virtualised desktop offers huge advantages, both to the user and to the IT department.
For anyone using a laptop at home or on the move, the experience is the same and everything is exactly as when they left it.
What they see is the image of a desktop running in a virtual machine on a server in the data centre. Users log onto …
Burnish your blacklists to patrol internet access
Desktop Stop them at the gates
What makes PCs so popular is the range of software you can run on them. But, as always, with great power comes great responsibility. And one of the first decisions you need to make about your desktop estate is who you give the power to.
Some users may well benefit from full admin privileges, given the range of "revolutionary" …
Virtualisation lets the applications roll
Desktop Delivery made easy
Virtualisation can ease desktop application deployment in a variety of ways.
It separates the application not just from the underlying hardware but also from the operating system. It means, for example, that you can run applications – or several copies of the same application – side by side in separate virtualised spaces without …
Brush up your virtualisation skills
The way to an employer's heart
Virtualisation has expanded its remit since back in the 1960s, when only the white-coated acolytes tending the IBM mainframe in an air-conditioned hall needed to know anything about it.
Today, it is everywhere, and it would be a blinkered IT staffer who failed to recognise the importance of the technology to his or her role. …
Tablets for work: time for a clean slate?
They're coming anyway
There's a revolution going on in the enterprise, driven - usually - by the Apple iPad. Tablets are becoming increasingly visible at work but are they business tools or toys? Can they bring benefits to the business or are they just a security hole?
Before tablets, we saw laptops with rotating screens that could be converted into …
Wiltshire Council on its Windows 7 roll-out
Case study
Amalgamation of four separate authorities, 270 offices that needed to be reduced into four hubs and 70 outlying offices, and many constraints including a host of governmental regulations, were among the challenges facing Wiltshire Council as it planned to roll out Microsoft Windows 7, which was at the core of its workplace …
Unlock the secrets of data encryption
Be safe rather than sorry
Encrypting your backup data always sounds like a good idea. It protects data and appears to be cost-free. So what's not to like?
In practice, it isn't always a good idea, it doesn't always protect your data and it is not free. There is a time and a place to deploy encryption, but it needs planning and thought.
The walls have …
Blade servers 101
The pluses and minuses
How are blade servers different from their rack-mounted counterparts?
The blade server trend started about ten years ago when RLX launched its system of servers built into a chassis that slotted into standard 19-inch racks.
The idea is that you can install a blade server or any other type of device that would fit into a server …
Easing the pain of applications delivery
Desktop Gain time and control with virtualisation
Application virtualisation separates the application not just from the underlying hardware but also from the operating system. That means, for example, that you can run applications side by side in separate virtualised spaces without fear of clashes between them or with the operating system.
Application virtualisation is …
A bit about Bitlocker
Encryption, Windows and you
Encryption is the staple weapon of the security business. As old as war itself, it scrambles data to conceal it from those not meant to see it.
It sounds simple but nothing is simple about encryption, as the mathematical geniuses at Bletchley Park knew. That said, a modern, well-managed encryption system can protect desktop …
Is the IT Dept failing users?
Desktop Can it catch up with personal devices?
The number of tools the enterprise can deploy to enhance productivity is huge. And even if the tools are generally simple to use, they are also mind-bogglingly complex under the skin.
Balls in the air
Each tool, including the desktop PC, has to interact with all the others securely, quickly and seamlessly. It is such a a …
Herding cats: mobile device management for sales teams
Desktop Using every device and always looking for shortcuts
Connectivity and security are the keys to maintaining an efficient mobile sales force - while managing an explosion in the diversity of devices in use.
The biggest productivity killer is when the sales person needs access - only to find that the link is broken somewhere along the line. Yet connectivity is not entirely in the …
So many users, so many devices, so many problems
Meeting desktop needs
Mobile users are different to the home worker and they're all different to a branch worker, so how do you find out what they need and give it to them effectively.
Finding out what end users want from their desktop and comparing it to what you think they need can be a sobering experience. Performance, fast access to data and the …
What’s with WAN optimisation?
Dealing with latent tendencies
The data centre is no longer alone. It's not a facility that occasionally releases data sporadically, on special occasions for particular jobs. As IT functions become increasingly centralised within the data centre, it's hammered constantly for both input and output by all parts of the business.
This has huge ramifications for …
Mother of all Win 7 rollouts: Microsoft eats own dog food
Desktop Rolling, rolling, rolling
Globally, 190,000 Microsoft users received an OS upgrade recently from Microsoft Vista to Windows 7. It was a large and complex roll-out - but it certainly wasn't the logistical nightmare you might imagine, nor was it a heavily locked down, centrally managed operation. This is the story of how it happened for Microsoft's users …
Servers, networks and storage sold as monoblocs
Stack those racks
Building a data centre has traditionally been a long process, with one of the major tasks being to equip it with computing devices. Specifying these, testing the various configurations and ensuring that they meet the specifications and perform the required tasks is time-consuming.
It was a lot easier in the days of the mainframe …
Wading through the software licensing minefield
Desktop Sweat those assets
Efficient licence management is crucial for a number of reasons, but they boil down to two: cost containment and legality.
According to an IDC survey on software pricing and licensing, conducted in 2010, almost all the respondents believed that some of their software licence expenditure went on either under-used or unused …
Best practices in virtualisation
A pitch for ITIL
Getting IT aligned with the business's needs and strategies is probably one of the toughest elements of any IT manager's job - yet remains among the most essential, right up there with keeping the lights on.
It's about ensuring that IT delivers a return on investment, demonstrates its business value, provides continuous …
Air cooled data centres are hot!
Taking the temperature
Air cooling in the automotive world has practically disappeared, with the last major hold-out - Porsche - having moved to water-cooling its cars' engines more than 10 years ago in order to reduce emissions.
Data centres are moving in the opposite direction but for precisely the same reason: they're big carbon emitters, with …
Desktop options today
Dtop Strategy A checkpoint on delivering desktops
Tomorrow's desktop is mobile. It's a phone, a smart device of some sort, a laptop - and there will of course be some fixed PCs in there too. But enterprises already need to cater for an increasing proportion of mobile workers, and that proportion is set to grow.
The challenge is not just how to deliver enterprise-level services …
Power and cooling in the data centre
Hot and hotter
Power and cooling are the critical services demanded of a data centre facility, yet diagnosing problems and fixing them while keeping the infrastructure running can be surprisingly difficult. Yet they've never been more important as virtualisation increases the concentration of critical resources in the data centre.
For example …
Network mapping: you know it makes sense
Workshop Diagramming tools to the rescue
Keeping track of your network infrastructure is crucial to maintaining control, because you can’t expect to manage it without an understanding of what you have And since a picture is worth a thousand words, keeping a live map of the network makes it easier to see what’s going on when faults are detected or when change planning …
The 64-bit question
Desktop Strategy Maybe the future of the desktop, but should you care yet?
There's no question: 64-bit computing is here to stay - and it seems set to be the future of computing. But is it an essential element of your next desktop refresh cycle? Chances are it will be.
The struggle to reach a stable 32-bit platform may have escaped you but it took many years before we were finally rid of slow 16- …
How do you find the skills needed in the virtualised data centre?
Datacentre Calling all-rounders
Staffing the constantly churning world of the data centre is becoming increasingly tricky. Not only is the technology moving fast, but many key IT workers are reaching retirement age. When they leave, decades of experience leaves with them, a problem that looms large among the concerns of many CIOs, according to Symantec’s …
The desktop lifecycle: How long is it anyway?
Desktop Strategy You wanna roll, or you wanna forklift
It's a recession so do you look to squeeze an extra year out of the desktop. How and is it wise to do this? How long is the lifecycle anyway?
Once the desktop PC had successfully colonised the office, it became clear that they would need replacing regularly to keep up software and hardware developments. Hardware has become more …
The job of a server is...
Workshop It's not all flashing lights
At its most basic, the job of a server is to process incoming data and turn it into something more useful, thereby adding value. For example, a web server will accept a request for a web page when you click on a link, search for the page and, if found, bundle up the text and images, and squirt them back the to the requester. …
Are you crying out for virtualised storage tiering?
Tiers before bedtime
You can virtualise pretty much any technology these days, so the thinking goes, and that includes storage. This means hiding what's going on behind a virtualisation layer - including tiering. But why tier?
Remember the old equation that you can have any two out of faster-cheaper-better but not all three? It's no secret that the …
Why is virtualisation important?
Datacentre Show this to your family next time you need to work all weekend
Lower costs are the basic attraction of all enterprise technologies, and virtualisation promises that in spades. In particular, it reduces hardware maintenance costs via what is now a fairly simple process of packaging physical servers up and hosting several of them on one large server.
The technology can also lower energy bills …
Getting your virtual hands dirty with virtual networking
You need something to link all those virtual servers
We're all familiar with the concept of a virtual server. However, when planning and implementing a virtualisation project, it's not just the servers that can be and should be virtualised – it's the network too.
Among the first differences that you'll notice when setting up a virtual machine (VM) is the network setup. Naturally, …
SAN vs NAS: Spelling out the differences
The order of the letters is important
The names almost give away the difference between network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs): you would expect a NAS to consist just of storage and a SAN to be a network, and that is true – up to a point.
Designed to be easy to manage, a NAS is fundamentally a bunch of disks, usually arranged in a Raid and …
And here's how a datacentre network works...
It's all about layers
The job of a datacentre network is to connect the equipment inside to the outside world, and to connect the internal systems to each other. It needs to be secure, high performance and operate with an eye on energy consumption, with a guiding principle of minimising device numbers and costs, so you end up with a system that can …
What's in your datacentre?
It's not a giant central heating system
At the fifty-thousand foot level, a datacentre is nothing more than a box in which IT assets are stored. While it gets more complicated, if you want a quick overview of what's in a datacentre, this is the place to look.
Broadly speaking, the job of the IT equipment in a datacentre is to accept incoming data, such as a request …
The optimised datacentre
Introducing our new topic
If you're a datacentre manager then you know just how tough it gets. Whether the customer is a small business down the road or a large enterprise halfway across the globe, whether you work for a service provider or in an in-house datacentre, it all amounts to one thing: an unsquareable circle.
On the one hand, everybody wants …
Stratus makes $50,000 zero downtime promise
Guarantees VMware performance
Fault-tolerant server company Stratus is betting real money that its latest range of servers running VMware will never fail - for at least six months.
The company is backing its words with action: it has issued a promise that new and existing Stratus users will experience no unplanned downtime with its new top-of-the-range 2.93 …
Is running a datacentre just like running a kitchen?
Analysis Bladeroom hosts chill-out session
Cooling a datacentre the wrong way is like cooling a hot kitchen by opening the fridge door: it makes more sense to open a window and pump fresh air in.
That's the view of Bladeroom boss Paul Rogers, whose CV includes designing industrial kitchens. He and engineering partner Red Engineering Design ended up building what's …
Guy Kewney: Integrity in socks and sandals
Obituary My years in the Kewney Chaos Field
Guy Kewney was the UK's first technology journalist and remained the doyen of the trade until the end.
Born in South Africa in 1946, in the 1960s Guy quit the apartheid regime for the UK. After rattling around in a number of jobs, including programming and writing advertising copy, in the 1970s he eventually found his permanent …
