Drew Robb

Big businesses employ all kinds of sophisticated uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems to protect their computer rooms in the event of a power failure. Such systems not only provide battery power so that computers remain powered up when the main power source fails, they also adjust the voltage to eliminate surges and other kinds of […]

There are tens of thousands of green industry companies around the country, and the vast majority are small businesses. Garden centers, nurseries, landscapers and green maintenance firms can be found just about anywhere. But it takes more than a green thumb to succeed in this industry. With big national chains offering low-cost plants, flowers, tools […]

The majority of small business owners don’t think about e-mail archiving, and if they do, it’s mainly seen as a big business issue. Large corporations have the burden of retaining the e-mail of thousands of employees for posterity – or at least as long as the law requires it of them. Yet such requirements apply […]

What will Microsoft Vista do for small businesses? It will make the bankrupt solvent overnight. It will take a mom-and-pop outfit and turn it into a Fortune 500 giant within a year. It will change sloppy business processes into efficient best practices that would make a Harvard MBA drool. OK, maybe not. But it does […]

Some storage vendors have an unrealistic idea of what constitutes appropriate storage solutions for small business. They’ll tell you about “inexpensive systems” for under $100,000 or mind-boggling Storage Area Network (SAN) architectures that are now “SMB ready.” Any small business that’s tried to implement one probably found out it wasn’t nearly as ready as its […]

In part one of this two-part article, we looked at what differentiates a storage server from a general-purpose server. Storage servers have a host of specialized features, but what’s the trade off? What’s Missing Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, defines a storage server as an optimized appliance designed to feed information, via […]

When is a server not a server? When it’s a Storage Server. Ask people what a storage server is, and you can expect to hear a variety of answers. Some will say it is a regular server with added features, a few describe it as a stripped-down box dedicated to a specialized function, and still […]

Many small businesses have avoided Linux for a variety of reasons: not enough applications, complexity of installation or that it requires too much technical know-how to run. The technology has matured over many years, which raises the question: how valid are these considerations today? “At this point, this is more of a perception issue than […]

The consumer and small business security market is a real battlefield these days. The well-known players such as Symantec and McAfee are under attack by upstarts such as Trend Micro and Panda Software that are intent on carving out market share. And meanwhile, Microsoft has entered the fray with its trademark flourish — slashed prices […]

Security software has become a necessary part of running any computer-based business, and it’s been evolving almost as quickly as the Internet threats the software is designed to combat. Where anti-virus software once stood as the lone guardian, firewalls and anti-spyware products soon joined the defensive line. The latest advancement is called hosted intrusion detection […]

In the James Bond flick, The Spy Who Loved Me, Agent 007 (Roger Moore) had to work with his female Soviet counterpart (Barbara Bach) to find the answer to the disappearance of nuclear missile-carrying submarines. When it comes to computers, the title might shift to “The Spyware Who Loved Me,” and the plot could revolve […]

It’s no secret that smaller companies get far less attention from technology giants than the Fortune 500 crowd. And in a sense, it is perfectly understandable. The vendor has the choice of speaking to a powerhouse that could place a $100 million order versus a few thousand dollars from a small business — it’s a […]