Stories by: Jon Brodkin

You won't hear much talk about corporate IT at Apple's MacWorld Conference this week, but the maker of the iPhone and the Mac is nonetheless making steady progress in the enterprise technology world.

A start-up debuting at CES has made a device designed to seamlessly connect network attached storage to online backup services such as Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service.

Four years ago, when the New England School of Law in Boston suffered a total network failure that lasted almost a week, the IT department knew a major overhaul was in order.

In an attempt to bolster EMC's cloud computing business, the storage vendor has acquired assets from SourceLabs, a maker of support and management tools for Linux and open source software.

Enterprise IT shops are starting to embrace the notion of building private clouds, modeling their infrastructure after public service providers such as Amazon and Google. But while virtualization and other technologies exist to create computing pools that can allocate processing power, storage and applications on demand, the technology to manage those distributed resources as a whole is still in the early stages.

The growth of digital data is threatening to spiral out of control. More than 452 exabytes of information have been created and replicated this year -- an amount higher than the world's available storage capacity, according to IDC.

Novell's OpenSuse project is becoming more open, as a new release due out Thursday includes licensing changes that make it easier to redistribute the Linux operating system, and a build service that will encourage more contributions from open source developers.

HP has been remarkably successful in a difficult financial time, but keeping up the pace in 2009 will be tough.

By 2020, mobile phones will be the primary Internet devices for most people in the world, according to a panel of experts, who also predict that Web technologies will probably not lead to increased social tolerance.

VMware is still the top player in the hypervisor market, but the coming year will see the company move far beyond its original focus of virtualizing x86 servers.

A couple years ago Kronos suffered from a serious case of server sprawl. The workforce management software vendor had built up a data center with 330 servers that were being utilized at a rate of only 10 percent. In July of 2006, Kronos acquired a vendor called Unicru, a move that threatened to add another 80 servers.