The “connected home” is becoming a reality thanks to improved broadband networks and mobile apps. Here’s a rundown of how our homes are getting smarter. The connected house is no longer a futuristic vision — many of the barriers that blocked the realization of a smart home have eroded. Network bandwidth is widespread, connectivity is becoming more common in many traditional home products, and consumers are craving smart-home experiences. Technology, which had presented the greatest challenge to creating a connected home, isn’t anyw manageable. The broadband and residential networking connections are available in, mobile devices provide a natural fit because the handheld remote control for the house, and the choices for making local connections are manageable for vendors.  [Implementing IoT technologies inside the enterprise is a fancy task. Read How To Prepare For The net Of items] Some of the pieces to the connected home puzzle: Broadband networks provide the back-end connection. Without an always-on broadband connection from the house to the net, consumers cannot maintain awareness... Read More »

Tackling the information explosion requires bold new thinking and the abandonment of tried and tired methodologies. Scale matters. On the subject of datacenter infrastructure, scale separates technology that allows a company to thrive from technology that constantly gets within the way because it crumbles under growth. Nowhere is scale more important than in terms of storage, and specially file storage. Files within the sort of email, documents, and other unstructured information make up 80% of enterprise data, and files grow at a faster rate than all other data types combined. Cloud storage enables file synchronization at scale. The rush to virtualize everything moved every file server into the SAN while forcing file-specific platforms, like NAS, to become dumb-block devices with an emphasis on performance and price in preference to on scale. But files failed to leave. While datacenters embraced virtualization, the file footprint continued to double every two or three years. Traditional storage, data protection, and replication strategies are running out of steam against the... Read More »

On the mainframe’s 50th birthday, IBM positions it because the still young Enterprise Cloud System, able to running 6,000 Linux workloads. 8 Datacenters For Cloud’s Toughest Jobs (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) An IBM mainframe will also be subdivided to run Linux virtual machines, in something of an analogous manner that Amazon Web Services or the Rackspace cloud runs virtual machines. But unlike an AWS host, a single mainframe runs 6,000 VMs at a time. Likewise, the old mainframe Customer Information Control System, better called CICS, can process 1.1 million transactions per second. It was the predecessor to client/server architectures and connected thousands of users to a single mainframe. That number, incidentally, is more transactions than are conducted by the Google search engine per second, based on a spokesman for IBM partner GT Software in Atlanta. On the mainframe’s 50th anniversary this week, IBM buffed up and displayed it as probably the most few systems which could scale to cloud-like proportions. It could... Read More »

How can IT leaders meet the challenge when enterprise teams “go rogue” and implement new services and products without IT buy-in? There are lots of challenges keen on leading an IT organization within the era of Bring Your individual Everything (BYOE), but there also are a lot of opportunities. That message became clear on the InformationWeek Conference in Las Vegas March 31 through April 1. Executive presentations and panel session discussions here covered the whole gamut of BYOE possibilities, including Bring Your individual Device, Bring Your personal Cloud, or even Bring Your individual Infrastructure. During a panel session on April 1, IT leaders from Dish Network, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, and H.D. Smith shared their experiences in facing parts of the business which have “gone rogue” by circumventing IT when implementing services. Rob Dravenstott, VP of IT application development and testing with Dish Network, shared the tale of a “shadow IT” project that helped change how it operates at Dish Network. In line with Dravenstott,... Read More »

Oracle president Mark Hurd says new account teams with single-contact accountability are improving customer satisfaction, but he has no kind words for SAP. Interop 2014: 8 Hot Technologies (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Oracle president Mark Hurd threw verbal rose petals on the feet of consumers during his keynote talk on the InformationWeek Conference on Tuesday, while giving competitors SAP and Rimini Street the thorns. Hurd hit on Oracle’s cloud and engineered systems strengths, as is typical in his public appearances, but he also broke new ground in keeping with questions from InformationWeek editor-in-chief Rob Preston at the difficulty Oracle customers have in facing only one person, as a result of company’s 80-plus acquisitions during the last six years. “The client-facing piece is the most important issue that we’ve had, but we believe that the folks who represent Oracle should know their products,” Hurd said. “After I got to the corporate three or four years ago, we did not have single accountability for... Read More »