Networking: Features

Although Google always seems to be up to something, the past few months have seen a flurry of activity in a space long associated with IT: Google has driven its cloud computing applications -- Google Apps -- into businesses.

Sun Microsystems is an old hand when it comes to telework. The technology company has been growing its telecommuting ranks through its Open Work program for a decade, and today nearly 19,000 employees (56 per cent of Sun's population) work from home or in a flexible office.

Network executives rake in more than just stock options and big bonuses

Welcome to the petaflop generation. That was the message as the new most powerful supercomputer in the world IBM's $100,000 million Roadrunner system installed at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory was officially named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world.

If the Australian economy used to be carried on the sheep's back, it's now sailing a swelling commodities wave. Demand from vastly populous Asian countries like Japan, China and India for the things we grow on our farms, dig up from under the red-brown earth and extract from the depths of the sea has jammed traffic outside national ports as ships queue up to carry our commodities north. Coking coal, iron ore, thermal coal, nickel, copper, uranium, wheat, lead, you name it and we're probably shipping it in large numbers.

There are three huge and hugely influential organisations that vie for top spot on the IT procurement scale every year. No, they don't dig up coal, or manage funds, produce widgets or ship wheat. Their contribution to the Australian economy is vast, but difficult to measure, and with over 600,000 screens and 14,000 servers spread across the eastern half of the country, they are far and away Australia's most important buyers of ICT.

Virtualization is a superhero among technologies, transforming static, brittle data centers into dynamic, flexible resource pools and giving IT an easy way to cut costs, improve services and expand operations beyond the limits of the physical world. With great power, however, comes great responsibility.

1. Take a SWAT team approach

Education demands so much more than a notebook and pen these days.

How to optimize, accelerate and otherwise ignite application performance

The scenario is typical: The lights on the network management consoles are a soothing shade of green, but a top revenue-generating application is crawling. Business users have swamped the help desk with calls and trouble tickets. Everyone there is calling the network team to figure out the problem.