Cover Your Assets: A new data center trend might be your light at the end of the tunnel.

Is innovation overrated? Both Windows and Mac OS X have found success by borrowing from each other and building on it -- a model not that dissimilar from Linux and the open source software movement.

Cover Your Assets: Does your 2010 budget have you seeing red? Living creatively under budget takes patience and creativity. Upgrading wisely, budgeting monthly and recycling willfully is one way to achieve this and find temporary refuge from this economic slump.

OS Roundup: Red Hat last week released its eagerly awaited Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers and the corresponding hypervisor. Exciting? Perhaps, but Red Hat users need not apply.

Cover Your Assets: How do you know when you've trimmed too much budget, too much staff and consequently, too much profit? Because it hurts when you do that.

OS Roundup: Windows 7 has been out for barely two weeks, and its market share already rivals that of Mac OS X, despite years of marketing and strategizing on Apple's part. Does Windows stand a chance of being dethroned?

Cover Your Assets: Security is both necessary and good, but can it make your environment less usable? Single sign-on and virtual LANs are two options for securing your internal environment with minimal performance impact.

OS Roundup: Apple last Friday announced ZFS would not be making an appearance in Snow Leopard. An interesting choice, given that some believe when the Sun-Oracle deal closes, the new entity may have the two most powerful file systems around.

Cloud computing solves many dilemmas, while at the same time introducing others. By its very nature, when you move to the cloud, you enter a legal gray area, a minefield of privacy and legal implications not fully understood — by anybody.

Cover Your Assets: Are you ready for Windows 7? Is Windows 7 ready for you?

OS Roundup: Windows 7 launches in two days time. For many organizations its debut won't be welcome.

Cover Your Assets: If you think a few hours of unscheduled downtime is bad for your business, compare that to a few years of down time for software piracy.

If Red Hat is to be believed, its KVM virtualization technology is so advanced it will consign the Xen hypervisor to the technological scrap heap, altering the virtualization landscape completely.

OS Roundup: The operating system isn't nearly as important as the data, yet neither Microsoft nor Apple seems to realize this. When it comes to protecting your data, you're your own best defense.

Cover Your Assets: Help for Active Directory integration for Unix, Linux and Mac OS X has arrived. Here are three products to aid you in the travail.

OS Roundup: Talk free software and the free in question is the noble 'study and modify' free, not the 'I don't have to pay for this' ilk. Reality indicates otherwise, according to a recent survey.

Few technologies last 30 years, let alone become more dominant with each passing one, but the x86 architecture has done just that.

Cover Your Assets: Are you trying to decide whether to invest in Windows 7 for the long haul?

Looks like the long-running data storage technology may be headed for trouble. We examine the problem -- and various potential solutions.

OS Roundup: Not Red Hat users, certainly. Sales and profits are up for the feature-laden OS. Meanwhile, HP UX's latest semi-annual update is out, and the verdict on its value is in.

Cover Your Assets: Being frugal is more than just being cheap, it's being smart. Nowhere is this more the case than commercial software, where fewer options mean fewer excuses.

OS Roundup: With arguments against cloud computing becoming irrelevant, Red Hat and other OS vendors are scrambling for slots as key players in the 21st Century data center -- wherever it may reside.

Microsoft is talking up lower IT costs, increased user productivity and better risk management with its soon-to-be-released Exchange Server 2010. Can it deliver?

Cover Your Assets: Open source software is all about freedom, but is the price of freedom too high?

OS Roundup: While the world waits for Oracle's acquisition of Sun, IBM and HP aren't wasting any time going after Sun's customer base. Will there be a place for Sun hardware or Solaris when the sale completes, and does Oracle care?