Scott Lowe


Latest from Scott Lowe

HP’s Officejet Pro X: Is Innovation in Printing Back?

I really didn’t think I’d ever say that the anachronistic printing space would be something that I would be writing about in the age of the ubiquitous mobile device.  After all, who needs to print anything anymore, right? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.  Years ago, people envisioned a future that included a paper-free office.  That ...

Metrics for the Chief Information Officer (CIO) – It’s All Semantics

I will be the first to admit that I can be kind of picky about certain things.  Hey, everyone has his quirks!  Although I try not to take political correctness to an extreme – a fact that those who know me will attest to – I do cringe when I hear certain words used in ...

Analysis: Microsoft Is Squandering Its Hyper-V Opportunity

Last week, Chad Sakac released his My Crystal Ball for 2013 article in which he discussed his top 10 industry prognostications about what he sees as happening in 2013.  His analysis runs the gamut from the hypervisor to the cloud to Hadoop to convergence and more.  There was one item, however, that caught my attention ...

Apple iPad Mini: A Poorly Executed Defensive Play

Over the past few years, you might say that I’ve become something of a fan of Apple products.  There was a time when I wouldn’t give the company’s products a second look, but today, I carry an iPhone 5, iPad 3 and MacBook Pro Retina 15.  I have reasons that I use these devices, though.  ...

Dell’s MD3200 Storage Line: Capacity Behemoth with Performance Options

Although Dell acquired both EqualLogic and Compellent and continues to develop and innovate in those portfolios, the company’s native PowerVault storage line does not appear to have suffered for it.  In fact, Dell has continued to advance and expand the PowerVault line in some significant ways, as evidenced in the MD3200 series. Unlike Dell’s EqualLogic ...

A Complete Data Center In Just 10U Of Space? Dell Has One And It’s Not a vStart

The beauty of solutions such as vStart is that they are fully turnkey architectures.  Simply place the shipped racks in the data center, connect the rack to power and to the network and power on and begin using the hardware.  The mess and fuss of designing the environment is taken out of the equation. Generally, ...

CIOs: Apple’s New iPhone is a Welcome Evolutionary Update

For months, we’ve been treated to rumor after rumor regarding the new iPhone and what kinds of features it would include.  Today, most of those rumors were (surprisingly) verified as accurate as Apple trotted out a series of product updates that included the iPhone 5.  Although the updated product doesn’t create world peace and isn’t ...

Simplivity’s CN-3000 Launch Plays Into a VMworld Simplicity Theme

Information technology is complex.  Making it easier means being able to spend less time on the technology and more time on business-facing, bottom line-driven tasks.  A new company at VMworld has plans to do just that and they hit the show with a splash, using the event as an opportunity to launch their new product. ...

HP Relaunches Renamed VSA Product and Cuts Price

A number of years ago, a then-independent LeftHand Networks released a revolutionary product into the market.  This product, what LeftHand named Virtual SAN Appliance or VSA, allowed organizations to harness local host-based server storage and aggregate that storage with storage from other servers in a cluster.  Under this aggregation method, the harnessed storage became a ...

Veeam Explorer for Exchange is a necessary addition to the Exchange admin’s arsenal

A few weeks ago, I was treated to an early look at one of Veeam’s new tools: Veeam Explorer for Exchange.  As a longtime Exchange administrator, my first thought was, “Where was this tool 10 years ago?!?” There are a number of things that might scare an Exchange administrator, but nothing quite so much as ...