Stories by: Stacy Collett

NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center wasn't shooting for the stars when it turned to virtualization to meet its storage needs. IPAC's cash-strapped effort to record images of our universe -- up to 30 million objects captured each night and 42 billion records over the life of the project -- required big storage capabilities, and the engineers needed them fast and at a low cost.

Today's data centers pack more processing power into smaller physical spaces than ever before. But too much of a good thing creates new challenges for next-generation data center design.

Administrative staffers may not have their fingers on the pulse of business-critical operations, but they do get their hands on a lot of sensitive company information.

Receptionists are at the front line of communication with customers and guests, which often makes them the first targets for hackers and saboteurs looking for company information.

Predicting how much energy a household will use in the future -- perhaps a year or five years from now -- is the lifeblood of Direct Energy. The company traditionally forecasts energy consumption at an error rate of less than 4 per cent. That's better than industry standards, but even a small miscalculation could mean millions of dollars in losses.

What is a data-retrieval plan worth to a company caught up in litigation? For Morgan Stanley, US$15 million.

Spurred by stretched-out budgets, IT managers want to get the most business bang for their IT buck. That means delivering bottom-line impact and business value as quickly as possible.

Law Firm IT director Patti Henderson says it's an open secret among a group of her professional peers in Boise, Idaho: Men working in the same IT positions freely admit that they make more money at the same jobs. For Henderson, her predecessor at law firm Givens Pursley LLP earned 12% more as director of IT.

When IT comes to enviable IT assignments, it's hard to beat Adam Grand's job as a project manager at Royal Caribbean Cruises. Grand regularly travels to Europe to install leading-edge technology on Royal Caribbean's luxury ships. In May, he finished a three-month assignment aboard the Freedom of the Seas, the company's newest and largest ship. He installed some of the most advanced technologies ever placed on a cruise ship -- wireless and Internet applications, BizTalk tool sets and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems.

In a perfect world, a computer would stay just as pristine and lightning-fast as the day it came out of the box. Performance wouldn't get bogged down by all the applications added and removed from its operating system over time.

The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" -- those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.