Drew Robb

What do you do when off-the-shelf software just isn’t what you need, or if you want to integrate a couple of different systems – say QuickBooks with your shipping application or your customer database with a new Web-based system? Unless you happen to be a programmer, or have one on the payroll, the chances are […]

EMC seems to be setting great store in its Mozy acquisition as an integral part of its strategic thrust into the consumer marketplace. Company CEO Joe Tucci admits to SMB and consumer ambitions. He sees the companies Lifeline, Iomega and Mozy product lines as being key to that strategy. “The individual consumer is generating 85 percent […]

It isn’t easy adopting a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) strategy if you are in the small business category. As Memphis-based Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance LLC has approximately 100 employees, it can only afford to have one or two people in IT. “Although we had had two IT staff, one was more of a lower level […]

It wasn’t so long ago that buying a server was a hefty investment. Then component prices began to tumble, vendors got very competitive and servers suddenly became affordable. You’ll find plenty of choices available in the sub-$1,000 category (and sometimes sub-$500) from the big vendors such as Dell, HP and IBM. “All of the major […]

Selling businesses on the benefits of Linux has been a tough proposition for many years. Common reasons cited for not moving to the open-source operating system include system complexity, lack of in-house IT skills and a shortage of business applications. Both the open-source software community and the vendor world have done a lot to address […]

Apple, it seems, can do no wrong — the iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, Xserve RAID — well, maybe not Xserve RAID. After a couple of years in the business, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has decided to leave storage hardware manufacturing to others. It will continue to make storage software, but hardware is not part of […]

Every year, EMC, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of software and hardware systems for information management and storage, hosts its EMC World conference in Las Vegas. This year, more than 9,000 people gathered for a series of keynote addresses, 500 sessions and product demonstrations in the storage, security and virtualization categories. Specific to small […]

Software as a Service (SaaS) has become quite the buzzword in these days, and the category covers a wide variety of applications that you can access and use over the Internet – without having to invest in any servers or install any software on your premises. A few examples include office applications from Google Apps […]

Maybe you started your business with a couple of desktops. When that quickly multiplied to a dozen, your staff wandered the corridors with floppies in order to swap data from one system to another. Then you added a server — and another server and yet another. But each time you add a server, it seems […]

The last time we waded into the inkjet-versus-laser printer debate, we advised our readers to dump their inkjets and move to monochrome (black and white) laser printers. Our advice stemmed from the high costs of consumables (i.e., ink) over the lifetime of the printer, due primarily to the inflated price of inkjet cartridges. Since that […]

Virtualization is the latest buzzword steamrolling across the IT landscape, influencing every computer room in its path. Everyone is doing it, according to analysts. Everybody needs it, say the vendors. But does it really add any value to the small business? As usual the answer varies from company to company. If you own or manage […]

The way storage prices are going it won’t be long before you put your quarter in the slot a terabyte of storage will pop out. However, the way many people consume disk space these days, there’s no doubt that even very small businesses will eventually need storage servers as big as the latest from Hitachi […]