Storage

"Somebody messes with me, I'm gonna mess with him," says Robert De Niro, playing gangster Al Capone in one of my favorite movies, The Untouchables. That line popped into my head while reading Mike Manos' vigorous, occasionally-mulish rebuttal to my article last week with, admittedly, the rather provocative title, '6 reasons why Microsoft's container-based approach to data centers won't work' (and, yes, the even more goading kicker, 'Are you listening, Microsoft?')

Both Google and Apple appear to be rolling out new solid state disks in two different environments: the data center and retail products, according to industry sources.

It's IT Blogwatch: in which Sun finally releases OpenSolaris, but with a surprising, cloud-computing twist, courtesy of Amazon EC2. Not to mention a joke for Photoshop users...

Heather Harreld Havenstein has, err, this: [Good grief -Ed.]

Randall Craig stole sensetive data on more than 17,000 U.S. Marines and military employees with the explicit purpose of selling it to a foriegn government. His act, which netted him a whopping $500, should carry with it a special punishment.

There are many issues to confront when choosing an archiving tool

It's the weekend of a big system upgrade for this not-so-big company, and the hired-gun consultant is confident everything will go off without a hitch. ...

Request comes to pilot fish to provide employee data for the companywide address book. That's no big deal. Time to code: 60 minutes. Affected employees: 8,000. Now flash forward two years ...

Pilot fish is hired by a small company that does work for a larger IT vendor. She's assigned to be the contact person dealing with this vendor on a job that's already in progress -- though no one seems to know what it is.

ROAR! It's IT Blogwatch: in which Western Digital offers its latest amazingly speedy 10K RPM drive. Not to mention more loopy error messages...

Brian Fonseca reports:

Western Digital Corp. today launched the first model of its new 2.5-in. VelociRaptor VR 150 hard-drive product line, which company executives said offers about twice the capacity of the 2.5-in. Raptor hard drive it will replace ...

Sometimes the instincts necessary to do security well run exactly counter to all that is happy in the world. Take, for example, the case of the undestroyed Atari EPROM...

One analyst firm says Microsoft Exchange's market share is growing. Another one says Exchange customers are jumping ship. Here's an alternative in case you're in the latter camp.

User comes to this pilot fish with 100 pages of hard copy that he needs to e-mail to a client -- which shouldn't be a big problem. ...

As a Macintosh business consultant, I've built up IT infrastructure for dozens of companies over the past few years. Most of these companies have been under 200 desktops and at least half Macintosh. I've just completed my first medium sized business move to Google Apps, and I have to say I am extremely pleased.

In fact, I find myself in a position to recommend the switch anyone out there is a similar situation.

It's IT Blogwatch: in which Seagate protects its intellectual property portfolio against a flash drive maker. Not to mention how not to fix a leak of personal information...

Intel displays its home server at SNW, which includes seven devices, from an Xbox 360 to an iPod Touch, all streaming movie video to a top-of-the-line Pioneer 50-inch plasma TV. Total price: $18,932.