Chances are if you are in IT management or providing IT services you have had to deal with virtualization hosts. When it comes time to retire your old hardware and move to a new host, there are a number of different ways to go about it. One in particular for ESXi lets...
Almost a year ago, I wrote about 10 Pitfalls that Can Impact VMware Performance. I thought I’d revisit this topic, provide some specific situations I've encountered over the past year, and explain what I've learned from them. You may have already taken the advice of...
When involved in IT strategy consulting services, you need a way to keep track of passwords in a safe and accessible manner. There are a number of different options out there ranging from single machine managers to cloud-based services. The one I found to be a great...
The value system and practices that embody Agile Software Development have been around for well over a decade, and have been touted as having "crossed the chasm" by organizations such as the Agile Alliance, Gartner, and Forrester Research. Numerous studies indicate...
Whether or not your in a heavily regulated industry, having a solid email archiving solution is an absolute necessity. Email’s importance in the workplace for the past decade-and-a-half is similar to the need of having a dial tone in years past. In addition, email is...
Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems have evolved from being custom-built, on-premise applications to cloud-based, off-the-shelf solutions. As adoption for PLM in the cloud increases, system validation approaches in FDA/GXP regulated industries have had to...
Several weeks ago, Ron provided some great insight regarding how to install the Hudson continuous integration tool on Windows. This week, I'll be discussing a different tool: Buildbot. My initial exposure to continuous integration tools in general was only a few years...
An often overlooked part of IT network infrastructure management is network security. The majority of business networks, even for small businesses, have a large variety of heterogeneous devices that are working together to provide the services for the various...
How Economizing can Hurt your Business There is a saying in some parts, “I am too poor to buy cheaply.” At first it sounds contradictory, but anyone who has bought something cheaply (electrical goods, car parts, computer equipment or any kind of service) and then...
I’m just going to come out and say it: I drank the Windows Phone 8 Kool-Aid. My coworkers mock me, and I accept this. But darn it, I want to believe! (and it tastes a lot better than what I was drinking before.) And it's certainly better than if I wandered over to the...
Today’s clients are global -- and today’s content is rich. Without adapting to the use of modern tools, dynamic content can slow down the performance of your website, frustrating your potential customers. The problems of hosting international sites are well known:...
Unfortunately, it is all too common for companies to overspend on their software licensing. It can be easily done, especially if licensing is handled in an ad-hoc or de-centralized manner. A license is need by one part of the business and so a bundle of licenses is...