Stories by Joanne Cummings

Three virtualization lessons learned

Tim Hays, IT director for Lextron, a wholesale distributor of animal health pharmaceuticals, found that virtualizing the company's servers provided a host of benefits, from reduced costs to improved efficiencies (see main story for more on this proje...

Doing the math on virtualization

Money is tight. Performance is declining. Your servers are all nearly three years old and pretty soon, their high-priced maintenance contract is about to kick in. What do you do?

Desktop of the future

Metro Health Hospital, a healthcare system serving 130,000 patients across Michigan, is already using what some consider the desktop of the future. The hospital has rolled out server-hosted virtual desktops to every employee no matter where they are ...

Hospital reaps healthy returns from wireless

Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, a three-hospital campus with more than 7,000 employees and annual revenues of US$1 billion, was mired in paper.

Boeing subsidiary solves its storage problems

When the lease was up on its old storage equipment and it came time to consider a new platform, Aviall Services knew exactly what it needed.

How to build a data center in 6 months for US$800,000

For years, Robert Wakefield and Dameon Rustin lived with the problems of keeping Snelling Staffing Services' old, poorly designed data center up and running. Not only were the intricate cable runs and varied server makes and models difficult to keep ...

VOIP veteran shares lessons learned

When you've lived with VOIP for more than seven years, as Mike Shisko has, you learn a thing or two about what works and what doesn't. Inadequate prioritization techniques can derail a deployment, for example. So can choosing the wrong security gear....

TiVo records big savings in compliance

Like other public companies that handle credit cards, TiVo faces a double whammy: meeting the requirements of the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the Payment Card Industry data security standard. Through a savvy combination of proactive auditor relations, aut...

10 virtualization companies to watch

Everybody knows virtualization isn't just about VMware anymore. Many users are past the rush to server virtualization and now need to increase the benefits of the move. They need not only to improve efficiency, performance and management, but also to...

Web 2.0: people who need people

With all the hype surrounding Web 2.0 technologies, serious IT organizations may be tempted to dismiss them as just more consumer-oriented fads. After all, do we really need something like MySpace or YouTube on the corporate network?