Someday soon the digital economy will be powered by big black boxes, formerly known as datacentres, that are so self-managing they may be partly robotic.

"Everything fails, all the time," so says Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels.

Demand for data center space is on the rise. IT pros responsible for facility planning are juggling physical requirements for secure, power-abundant space with operational considerations, including the need to improve disaster recovery, deploy new applications and services, and handle increasingly large data volumes.

DENVER - IPv6 appears to have found a new killer app: business continuity.

Brennan IT has secured a hosted managed service deal with national furniture retailer, Super A-Mart

As tornadoes ripped through Texas on Tuesday, hurling tractor-trailer trucks in the air and shredding houses, people took to social networks to warn of advancing storms and to help their neighbors.

We all know that the data we rely on to run our businesses can be subject to subpoena and other government actions. Such actions create additional risks when that data is in the cloud .

When my editor in chief handed me a Thunderbolt-enabled solid-state drive recently, my first thought was: "I didn't think these existed yet." I was close to being right.

Start-up Nimble Storage came out of the development stage this week with its first product -- an array that combines solid state drives (SSD) with high-capacity, cost and performance serial ATA (SATA) hard drives, acts as primary and backup storage and replicates offsite for disaster recovery.

The promise of cost savings derived from cloud computing is attractive, but concrete financial returns are not always quickly achieved. Except, perhaps, when it comes to disaster recovery.

Australian health authorities may have given the all clear for two local suspected cases of the swine flu virus -- which has killed more than 80 people in Mexico and infected 20 in the United States -- but concern over the spread of the potentially fatal disease has local CIOs revisiting their business continuity plans (BCP).