Terminology

Finalists for the 2013 Best of Interop awards have been chosen in seven IT categories, including

IT is consistently cited as one of the most-promising U.S. careers, even with the rise of offshore outsourcing. As with most professions, however, compensation is rising only modestly. The IT field still pays well, with staffers earning $90,000 in median total compensation and managers earning $120,000, the 2013 InformationWeek U.S. IT Salary Survey finds. But compensation for staffers is flat compared with last year and up only 3% for managers.

Compensation varies substantially by skill and industry. Staffers focused on enterprise application integration earn a median $110,000, those in general IT earn $73,000 and those on the help desk earn $55,000. A few staff specialties such as cloud computing ($130,000), Web security ($118,000) and mobile ($111,000) pay even higher, though our survey sample sizes are small for those areas. Staffers with the IT architect title make a median $130,000.

IT managers earn six-figure median compensation in 22 of 23 job categories -- help desk managers are the exception, earning $83,000. Among IT staffers, 13 of the 23 functions pay more than $90,000, eight of them more than $100,000.

This marks the 16th year of our Salary Survey, so we have data to track long-term trends. Compared with 10 years ago, few IT employers have dropped health insurance and 401(k) match benefits -- the percentage of respondents receiving those benefits declined only a few points, to 81% and 70%, respectively. The one plunge is in "further education/training," down from 45% for staffers and 46% for managers in 2004 to 29% for staffers and 28% for managers today. And people are our most important asset?

Today's data centers are essentially the same: long rows of metal racks stocked with machines,

There are a lot of reasons to go with VDI, but economics isn’t one of them; VDI is too

InteropNet provides the IT infrastructure for Interop conference attendees and exhibitors. Here are

Everybody agrees that spinning disk drives will give way to solid state alternatives, but there's much more debate about what share of storage will eventually move to server DRAM, what share will move to flash-based storage options and just how soon disk drives will disappear.

IBM on Thursday made the case that flash technology has reached an economic tipping point such that it's already cheaper than most spinning disks when you take into account power, cooling, floor space and software costs. IBM also argued that by adding all-flash storage arrays as an option within storage area networks -- a move that involves little more than plugging in racks -- organizations can realize dramatic improvements in both application and database performance without changes to software. Parts of these claims sound similar to claims being made by SAP and Oracle, but more on their very different approaches in a moment.

"If you slide in a flash array into an existing environment, you get a step-function change in economics and performance without a change in any system software, but that's just step one," said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM System Storage & Networking. In step two you eliminate striping, caching and other storage tricks previously necessitated by slow disk access speeds to get a next level of performance improvement. And in a third step, you tweak applications to take advantage of flash-optimized databases to get even higher performance, Goyal said.

IBM made this case as part of an announcement of a new family of all-flash storage arrays, as well as a $1 billion investment in flash research and the establishment of 12 storage centers of competency around the globe that will help customers run proof-of-concept scenarios. The arrays, acquired last August with IBM's purchase of Texas Memory Systems (TMS), pack 6 terabytes to 24 terabytes of usable storage in a 1U, pizza-box-sized rack. The technology offers 74% lower power, cooling and floor space cost than spinning disks, according to IBM.

Ubiquiti offers an 11ac AP for under $300 in a bid to grab early adopters and price-conscious

Recently I met with an organization's IT team after they had completed the initial rollout of their virtual desktop infrastructure project. The VDI install went quite well and desktop performance was by their description "acceptable." Although I am not convinced that the users think "acceptable" is, well, acceptable, but that is a story for another entry.

What jumped out at me in our meeting was the cost per desktop. Based on the number of desktop instances they felt that their "pod" of host and storage could support, the average cost per desktop was about $500 to $600, prior to the actual device that sits on the desktop.

Obviously the device has some bearing on the cost per desktop, but this company was counting on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend to alleviate all of those costs. However, the company reimbursed for the device brought in by employees, so it really should have been factored into the overall cost. But for now, let's leave the cost per desktop at $500 to $600. I think that cost is still way too high for broad adoption of VDI to make sense.

The key factor that drives up the cost per desktop is simple. How many desktops can you support per host? Obviously 2,000 desktops per host is going to be far less expensive per desktop than 1,000. What is the big limiter to desktop density? Storage -- primarily storage performance, not storage capacity. Capacity issues, assuming your storage has the performance capabilities to handle the dynamic write nature of thin provisioning, golden masters and linked clones, have largely been solved thanks to the efficiency of these technologies.

IT pros are leaving thousands of dollars on the table when they negotiate--or fail to

Cisco is using the open source OpenDaylight initiative to spur application development to make its

Cloud price wars sound like a good thing, but customers of IaaS have to be vigilant to ensure that

You gotta like Marconi, but you gotta love Tesla.

Guglielmo Marconi is usually credited with inventing the radio and pioneering long distance radio transmission, but Nikola Tesla's work on both was more seminal and farther reaching. For their contributions to wireless telegraphy, Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun, another early innovator, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909. But because Tesla and Thomas Edison were involved in a pitched battle on the AC/DC front, the Nobel Committee was probably looking for a set of compromise candidates. How pitched was that battle? Edison electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate the "danger" of Tesla's alternating current. An elephant? Weren't there any lawyers around?

Marconi was a first-rate businessman and built a major financial and manufacturing empire. He was a millionaire and tooled around on a luxury yacht. He proved Edison wrong. Edison thought the curvature of the Earth would limit radio transmission to 200 miles, but Marconi caught a break: The ionosphere reflected back electromagnetic waves.

The Supreme Court would later overturn Marconi's patent, in 1943, and award it to Tesla. It didn't hurt Tesla that Marconi was suing the U.S. government for using his patents and, if Marconi didn't really have a patent, the government wouldn't have to pay him a dime. Nor did it hurt that Marconi was a recognized fascist while Tesla, born and raised in the Austrian Empire, had become an American citizen.

ARM and AppliedMicro have teamed up on the X-Gene server-on-a-chip. Its scale-out design includes

Piston Cloud Computing Tuesday released version 2.0 of Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a pre-configured cloud operating system based on the OpenStack project and loaded into a Piston cloud key memory device.

The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack's Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.

Not every enterprise network administrator is going to want to plug such a device into the heart of the his cloud network, lest someone one day exploit the practice and inject malware into the heart of his cloud. But Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CTO of Piston and a veteran of both the NASA Nebula project and Netscape 8 browser development, said Piston wanted to bring a foolproof, non-fragile version of OpenStack to market that installed without complications.

OpenStack is also available as sets of software modules found in the Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse Linux distributions, but few would describe these versions of OpenStack as non-fragile from the moment the components are loaded onto the server.

HP's Moonshot servers are a tour de force of engineering that aim to restore the company's