Stories by: Keith Schultz

Cloud storage seems like such a no-brainer for backups and disaster recovery, it's a wonder that more businesses aren't taking advantage of it. If you're concerned about cloud outages, cloud storage costs, data loss, data security, or the ability to push your nightly backup sets up the Internet straw, Riverbed Technology's Whitewater appliance may make cloud storage easier to embrace.

Many small businesses have relied on Microsoft's Small Business Server (SBS) family of servers to get their feet wet with their first server and network. Introduced back in 1997 as BackOffice Small Business Server 4.0, SBS has matured into a tightly integrated platform of the most important services a small company needs: file and printer functions, email, calendar and contact sharing, and document collaboration. While it is limited in the maximum number of concurrent user connections, SBS doesn't shirk core services, providing enterprise-grade features at a price point almost every small business can afford.

Ever since VMware coined the term, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has conjured images of large data centers, beefy servers, centralized storage, and complex software stacks. It's a given that each VDI installation requires numerous servers, software packages, and storage systems in order to provide desktop virtualization for more than a small handful of users, so VDI just has to be both expensive and complicated to deploy. Right?

Intel's newest server processors represent a major architectural change from earlier Xeon generations. One big improvement over previous-generation Xeons is the addition of an onboard memory controller and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA). Taking a cue from AMD, Intel added NUMA to Nehalem to help eliminate cache starvation by tying banks of RAM to each processor.

Optimizing and accelerating traffic across the WAN no longer requires searching for exotic solutions -- there are a variety of appliances available from which admins may choose. Simply install an appliance on both ends of the WAN circuit and let them reduce network chatter, help mitigate the effects of latency, and make better overall use of the link.

Webroot AntiVirus with AntiSpyware and Firewall provides real-time and on-demand detection and remediation for virus and malware threats, and it boasts an easy-to-use user interface.