The move to Cloud computing isn't just for businesses. At CES, home network giants D-Link and Netgear are showing a range of equipment that leverage cloud services to give consumers more access to and control over home networks--and network content--from mobile devices.

NETGEAR’s Genie application has been recognised as an honouree in the software and mobile app category at the CES Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Awards.

Netgear is well known for its line-up of wireless routers, adapters, gateways and print servers, but the company has made serious inroads into the network attached storage (NAS) arena as well.

They say that a man's home is his castle – we figure that if you're going to have a castle, it needs to be filled up with some really cool, high-tech stuff. If you're working at a home office or just want to boost that home network in order to get a better connected home entertainment system up and running, the following products are great gift ideas:

The home entertainment category in our Cool Yule Tools holiday guide used to be a part of the “After Hours” section, but with the explosion of high-tech features in the consumer electronics space, there’s a multitude of devices that will keep you entertained after a long day of work. Here are our picks for gift ideas that can keep you entertained and connected when you’re home:

My lab is dotted with Synology NAS devices providing a wide array of services, from disk-based backup to general file sharing to shared storage for small virtualization build-outs. In all the years I've had these boxes spinning, they've never once let me down. In fact, I have a four-year-old Synology DS409 that is still performing perfectly. It hasn't lost a disk yet.

Hear about the latest products, upgrades, routers, data management, solid state drives and mobile communication tools

The six-bay Iomega StorCenter px6-300d is the largest array you can get from Iomega before you venture into rack-mount servers, and it's just the kind of box you'd expect to see in a remote office or small to medium-sized business. Considering Iomega's parent EMC is a leader in the enterprise storage market, I had high expectations for this solution.

Distributor IPL Communications held a thought leadership event earlier this year specifically targeting 170 dealers that were a mix between telco and system integrators. This was underscored by the need to change. Julia Talevski sat down with IPL general manager, Paul Scanlan, and managing director, Stead Denton.

Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.

Either because server disks are full or because virtualization is a natural growth path, organizations large and small are moving toward shared storage. For large enterprises, high-capacity storage-area networks make sense, but what about small or mid-sized enterprises new to shared storage?

Network-attached storage (NAS), once only available (and affordable) for enterprises, is becoming more common for small business and even home use. And necessary - if you are looking for secure backups for your data, a single backup disk collecting data once or twice a day is no longer enough.