Stories by: Robert L. Scheier

Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same.

About 15 miles from its medical center in downtown San Antonio, Christus Health is building a US$23 million data center to house a flood of digital information ranging from patient insurance records to CT scans.

As long as IT managers encrypt data using only one vendor's products, the keys used to decrypt that data can be relatively easy to manage. But it will likely become much more complicated as more vendors build encryption into more and different types of storage devices, each with their own key management system, and as users need to move encrypted data among devices for disaster recovery, legal discovery or simply everyday business communications.

Jeff Pieper's marketing design business runs on data, and he doesn't mind swapping out a server or fiddling with cabling here and there.

Customers are replacing disk drives at rates far higher than those suggested by the estimated mean time between failure (MTBF) supplied by drive vendors, according to a study of about 100,000 drives conducted by Carnegie Mellon University.

Eric Foote is considering 64-bit Windows servers for his growing base of 4,500 users. But he's in no big rush to make the shift from 32-bit computing. His first target application is Presentation Server 4.0 from Citrix Systems, thin-client software that performs most application processing on the server, sending only changes in the user interface to the client's PC.

Chief Security Officer Barak Engel doesn't store many customer credit card numbers at San Francisco-based Loyalty Lab, which runs customer loyalty programs for retailers. But he protects those numbers fiercely.