InformationWeek.com | 8 Things To Think About For Windows 7

InformationWeek.com recently posted an informative article with eight things enterprises should think about when considering Windows 7.

Here are the listed considerations:

1. Remote usage features
2. Information security
3. Advanced group policy management
4. Netbook friendly
5. Runs on all virtualization platforms
6. Software as a service (SaaS) friendly
7. User enthusiasm
8. Clarity of Microsoft's release and support dates

Click here to read the post in its entirety.

HP offering Samsung Solid-State Drives on ProLiant G6 Servers

InformationWeek.com reports today that HP will be offering Samsung's 60 and 120 GB solid-state drives (SSDs) as an option across all HP ProLiant G6 rack, tower and blade servers. They will also offer the SSDs with select G5 servers.

While they are significantly more expensive, SSDs offer lower power usage while adding the advantages of better performance and reliability -- arguably lowering costs over time.

HP VP of marketing Jim Ganthier said in a statement that combining Samsung's SSD technology with HP ProLiant servers "delivers energy-efficient server platforms to enable customers to slash their power usage and reduce costs."

According to the article, SSDs are the best bet for high-performance applications including "video-on-demand, virtualization, Web serving and online transaction processing. ...Because SSDs cost much more than HDDs and have far less storage capacity."

For more information on the power consumption and performance of SSDs, visit the entire InformationWeek.com story here. They also offer an independent report on the state of enterprise storage (registration required).

Starting in May of 2009, IBM also began offering SSDs with its Power6 processors.

Study: 2 in 3 IT Managers budgeting for cloud computing

A newly released study by Applied Research, West finds that 66 percent of IT managers have already dedicated budgets for cloud computing, and 71 percent expect their cloud computing budgets to increase over the next two years. 250 IT managers of enterprise-level companies were surveyed by phone in the study on enterprise adoption of cloud computing, sponsored by F5 Networks.

Eighty-two percent of respondents said that they are involved in a trial, implementation or use of public clouds, while 83 percent reported being in one of these phases with private clouds.

For more information on the findings of the study, see this Information Week article on the topic.