Stories about: Galactic

Whether they're performing an analysis of an attack or observing the network traffic for large corporations, security professionals deal with a lot of data. Charged with protecting the electronic crown jewels, the task of sorting through the mountains of recorded information can seem daunting at times, but help appears to be on the horizon.

The CTIA Wireless show kicked off in Las Vegas this week with a new Windows Mobile, an iPhone-style handset from Samsung and a surprise announcement of galactic proportions.

Since Apple first announced the initial 10 features of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" in August 2006, the one that has captured the most interest of Macintosh fans is Time Machine. Apple has billed Time Machine as the backup tool for people who hate the task. That's almost everyone, according to Steve Jobs, who says only 4 percent of computer users regularly back up their data.

Combining "open source" and "storage" in the same sentence used to trigger a sardonic grin, but no longer. The availability of free and open software is as true today for storage as it is for operating systems and applications.

Vint Cerf is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of the TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet. In 2005, he and Kahn received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The federal government yesterday made available $365 million in funding to all states and territory governments for a host of projects including the creation of swimming microrobots, antivenoms from jellyfish and galactic mapping of distant eight billion year old universes.

When entrepreneurs pitch their software-as-a-service ideas to me, I always ask how they plan to compete with what I call the galactic clusters -- Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These giants have set a high bar for Internet-scale operations, and they're relentlessly pushing it higher.

In the next several newsletters we are going to discuss two technologies, both of which are likely to exert a profound influence on storage and storage management during the next few years. First we will look at information lifecycle management; then, we will examine storage grids.

Imagine running the latest version of EMC's Enterprise Control Center Open Edition to migrate data from a midrange Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks array to an IBM Shark. Or being able to set up replication from a Web browser between a Hitachi Data Systems. Lighting and an EMC Symmetrix. Sounds far-fetched and years away from reality. But the first open storage management standard that will make this possible - at least in theory - is just around the corner.

Galactic IT Vice President Anthony Okrongly recently harnessed Web technology to automate and scale up the traditional employee suggestion box. Galactic offers trips, merchandise, gift certificates and other noncash incentive programs that firms can use to reward their employees. It designed the Ideaworks program as a way for its clients' employees to earn rewards by submitting cost-saving or revenue-generating ideas via the Web -- an intranet suggestion box that pays off.

Calling it the "most crash proof operating system in the world," Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs in his Macworld Expo keynote Monday said that Mac OS X was a raging success and that over 2,500 native apps are available today.