Mitigate the pain of storage growth with active archiving, data deletion, and data de-duplication

David Hill, Mesabi Group

Estimates of annual storage growth are 60% and annual budget growth around 4-5%. While your storage growth may not be that high, the growth rate of storage is still likely to exceed the annual overall decline in storage prices. Can you afford it? This problem isn't new, nor is it only about how to squeeze out enough dollars to pay the bill. It's also a question of management. Throw in power and cooling requirements, and will you be able to handle the extra environmental demands? ...continue reading 'Mitigate the pain of storage growth'

Unix tip: File extensions and you

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld

It's good to have a resource available to help you identify the type of unusual files when you run across them or to learn a little more about the format of a familiar file type. ...continue reading 'File extensions and you'

Optimizing virtual machine performance

By Mitch Tulloch, Microsoft MVP

Virtualization is popular in the enterprise today, but getting the best performance from a virtualized operating system can be challenging. One issue you may not have considered has to do with the different types of virtual hard disks (VHDs) supported by Microsoft virtualization products such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server. For instance, one choice you can make is to choose between fixed-size or dynamically expanding VHDs. ...continue reading 'Optimizing virtual machine performance'

Ten ways to strengthen critical business relationships

Ty Freyvogel, Freyvogel Communications

Even the smartest, most hardworking entrepreneurs depend on other people for their success. Ty Freyvogel, founder of MakingSenseOfYourBusiness.com, suggests you make 2008 the year you start showing them you know that. Here are ten ways you can start strengthening your business relationships in the upcoming year. ...continue reading 'Ten ways to strengthen critical business relationships'

The rise of thin provisioning

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

Thin provisioning gets you out of the guessing game as to how much storage a server or application will demand, but it's not a panacea. Here's what you need to know.

Tracking down a reboot using DOS commands

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld

When one of only a handful of Windows servers that I manage dropped off my radar for a while, I wasn't sure what to think. I had been running an application, for which this system was the server and it stopped responding. When I tried reconnecting, it was clearly not available. The system was rebooting, but it took me a while to figure that out. How do I go about determining if a Windows server has rebooted?

Who's Got the NAC? Best Practices in Protecting Network Access

Carol Baroudi, AberdeenGroup

Some organizations have effectively shut down unauthorized access, eliminated network downtime attributable to attacks and dramatically reduced the incidence of malware infection and data loss. For others, their worlds are getting worse on all counts. The good news is there are things they can do to make things better. ...Continue

Windows Tip: Configuring ALT+TAB in Vista

Mitch Tulloch, Microsoft MVP

The behavior of ALT+TAB has changed subtly in Vista. What other changes do you like in Vista? What changes don't you like? Have you found ways of reverting such changes so that Vista behaves like previous versions of Windows? Do you think doing that is a good idea? ...Continue

2007's Top applications with known vulnerabilities

Brian Gladstein, Bit9, Inc.

To help IT departments understand and ultimately close the gap in endpoint protection, Bit9 has compiled the following list of applications with known vulnerabilities for the year 2007. ...Continue

Employ storage technologies in the right order to maximize benefit

David Hill, Mesabi Group

Sooner or later you'll need to buy into technologies that manipulate the layout of bits on storage media, and the order in which you deploy these technologies is important. Repeat after me: Data de-duplication. Compression. Encryption. Here's what you need to know.

When no password can be best

By Mitch Tulloch, Microsoft MVP

Best and worst approaches for securing built-in Administrator accounts. ...Continue

Windows Tip: When no password can be best

By Mitch Tulloch, Microsoft MVP

Best and worst approaches for securing built-in Administrator accounts.

Windows Tip: Page files, system volumes, and large memory 64-bit systems

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Conventional wisdom is that your page file should be 1.5 times the size of your system's RAM. But since 64-bit Windows servers often have huge amounts of memory, do you really need to allocate a whopping 48 GB of hard drive space just to your page file on a system that has 32 GB of RAM? ...Continue reading 'Page files, system volumes, and large memory 64-bit systems '

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How to break out of the CISO role in five easy steps

The path from CISO to executive team may not be a well-tread one, but breaking out of the security box and into the board room can be achieved by thinking about business. Here are five flaws that can keep security professionals from making corporate leaps, and suggestions for overcoming them. ...Continue reading 'How to break out of the CISO role in five easy steps'

Kick-start your job search with new Yahoo social network

Yahoo Inc. launched a new professional social network called Y!
Kickstart Sunday aimed at helping college students take the social
networking skills they perfected for fun during college and use them to
launch their professional lives. ...Continue reading 'Kick start your job search'

Creating a chrooted FTP account

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

Often referred to as a "chroot jail" or a "padded cell" because users cannot escape from the directories into which they are put when they log in, the basic concept of a "chroot" (change root) configuration is that a user's working view of the system's file system is dramatically modified so that only some particular directory and its contents is visible. However, in order to be useful, each chrooted environment should contain many of the same directories you would expect to find in the root file system on a typical Unix system. ...Continue reading 'Creating a chrooted FTP account'

Netuitive 2.0

By James Gaskin, ITworld

Can you define Business Services Management without looking at the latest vendor advertising? Not looking at vendor information, I call it managing the systems your customers use to verify they are receiving the service you designed the system to deliver. Above all else, customers must be satisfied or they become ex-customers. ...Continue reading 'Netuitive 2.0'

High availability and disaster recovery are not the same thing

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

What seems to be the problem? IT organizations may confuse the terms "high availability" and "disaster recovery." You need both, but if you think that the two are synonymous you may do one or the other and think that you have done the other. And that could be a problem as the two, while interrelated, are not the same. ...Continue reading "High availability and disaster recovery are not the same thing"

Unix File System Names Demystified

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names -- like /etc, /var and /usr/local -- came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular names we use today instead of names that might make more sense to the casual user? What do these file system and directory names tell us about the intended content? ...Continue reading 'Unix File System Names Demystified'

Printer Security First-hand

James Gaskin, ITworld.com

I hoped the "hacked zombie printer" stories were just security company scare tactics. When someone asked me about securing printers during an Altiris ManageFusion security panel, I questioned it and said no one I knew has suffered from a hacked printer.

Unfortunately, printer hacks do exist, according to Jesper Jurcenoks, CTO of NetVigilance. He was a panelist on my Security 2008: What You Need Now panel at the ITEC show in Chicago, and he has first hand experience. ...Continue reading "Printer Security First-hand"