Stuart J. Johnston

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is coming clean on what caused their cloud services to go down in late April. Amazon’s problem started while it was trying to upgrade network capacity at its AWS datacenter for the eastern region located in northern Virginia. “During the change, one of the standard steps is to shift traffic off of […]

Microsoft’s continual parade of record revenues and earnings reports has become almost a sure thing, but one usual cash driver is missing from its third fiscal quarter results this time around — Windows 7. Thursday, after the financial markets closed, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) did it again — reporting revenues of $16.43 billion for the quarter […]

After a week of brouhaha regarding mobile devices — particularly those running Apple iOS — collecting massive amounts of data about users’ locations from their phones, Apple announced it is working on a fix that will greatly shrink the information it collects and stores. Further, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) says it is working on a fix […]

Emulex (NYSE:ELX) posted net revenues of $112 million for its third quarter of fiscal 2011, for a 10 percent year-over-year gain. Revenues for host server products came in at $84.4 million, some 76 percent of total revenues. That constituted a gain of 22 percent over last year’s third quarter, but a decline of 8 percent […]

Online retailer Amazon posted higher-than expected sales for its first fiscal quarter of 2011 and, despite surprising employment growth during the quarter coupled with lower than expected profits, investors appeared to be satisfied overall. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) reported net sales of $9.86 billion for its first fiscal quarter of 2011, which closed March 31 — […]

Microsoft’s(NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows 7 operating system is no Vista and that’s good news for Microsoft. After 18 months of Windows 7 availability, Microsoft has now sold some 350 million licenses for the system — helping Windows 7 retain its ranking as the fastest-selling operating system in PC history. “The momentum we’ve seen and continue to see […]

EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) announced at the end of last week that it is shipping version 6.0 of its Avamar deduplication and backup software. The Avamar 6.0 release includes technologies from a pair of companies that EMC has acquired in recent years. EMC purchased Avamar in 2006, while Data Domain was acquired in July 2009. Avamar […]

The cloud is supposed to be an elastic environment that scales to meet whatever demands are placed on it. For Amazon’s EC2 cloud service this week, elasticity wasn’t enough to prevent a network outage that lasted several hours. Among the sites affected by the Amazon outage was the popular reddit social new sharing and networking […]

Data breaches in 2010 were on the decline, according to a report from Verizon (NYSE:VZ) The Verizon report shows the total number of data records compromised in 2010 down to 4 million — a huge drop from 144 million in 2009, and an even greater decline from 361 million compromised records the year before that. […]

EMC (NYSE: EMC) reported record first quarter revenues this week. The company said that consolidated revenue for the first quarter came in at $4.6 billion, an 18 percent jump from the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, GAAP income for the quarter grew by 28 percent year over year, bringing in some $477.1 million for the […]

Apple had record sales and earnings for its second fiscal quarter of 2011 ended March 26. In fact, the figures were nearly double the same quarter last year, the company announced Wednesday. Sales were particularly strong for iPhones and iPads during the quarter, officials told financial analysts on a call following Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) announcement […]

As the volume of data continues to grow, data deduplication has become increasingly important. A new report titled “Federal Government Data Deduplication Strategies Worth Duplicating” has found that the U.S. Federal government hasn’t been as advanced as the private sector when it comes to deduplication. “Many agencies have embraced virtualization as a way to control […]