Cloud computing promises a number of advantages for the deployment of data-intensive applications. Most prominently, these include reducing cost with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and (virtually) unlimited throughput by adding servers if the workload...

In the course of consulting for and coaching IT managers, the complaints I hear most often involve politics. "I'd love my job if it weren't for the politics." "This would be a great place to work if not for the politics." "Politics...

An old but still relevant case study in achieving high availability with SQL Server. Achieving maximum availability and near immediate recovery from a disaster is essential for maintaining our revenue stream. We have worked hard to eliminate all single...

Hotmail's fight against spam has certainly come a long way in the last five years. Over the last several years we've made substantial investments in the research and development of sophisticated anti-spam technologies. SmartScreen is the collective name...

SOASTA based in California, the company offers both internally installed and cloud-based testing applications.  SOASTA developed a cloud-based testing application that it now deploys on the Windows Azure platform. Their CloudTest Service Helps Performance...

There’s never been a better time for putting your IT career on the CIO track. With the economy on the mend and customers and users clamoring for new technology, companies are turning to their chief information officers to plot profitable strategies for...

In a conference call and email announcement on Wednesday April, 28, Microsoft Learning announced that it would discontinue offering the Infrastructure and Solutions architect certifications, and would fund the migration to the Certified IT Architect Professional...

The mega-data center has become a staple of our global technology infrastructure, serving as the backbone of the digital economy. The growth of the Internet is driving an enormous appetite for network capacity and data storage, creating a new class of...

In part, architecture is about enabling many people to work on a complex system , and still achieve something that is coherent. So the architect needs to have technical insight that comes from technical experience, and the architect needs to be good at...

Microsoft's FUSE Labs --the cutting edge, innovative research group behind the recent Docs.com announcement--unveiled yet another new project today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Spindex is a new FUSE Labs project to help aggregate and streamline...

Polls from the December 2009 Gartner Data Center Conference show that clients are concerned about public cloud computing, the challenges of private cloud computing and their plans for both through 2012. Polls show that IT professionals focused on the...

When most people think of the cloud, they generally look at is as means of building and hosting highly-scalable, highly-available applications to their customers and partners. However, many forward looking companies see the cloud as a way to enable and...