From Recovery to Fighting Fit

May you live in interesting times, goes one of three Chinese proverbs. These are not only interesting times but also adverse ones for CIOs at most enterprises. There's a perpetual sense of that need to deliver flexibility in the dynamic environments; the need to save costs by optimizing data center resources; in short yes, that dictum again: 'Do More with Less.'

Is a combination of pay-as-you-go computing, increasingly via cloud networks, and virtualization the silver bullet? Probably not yet, but EMC, a global leader in storage solutions, and Dell, among the world's largest makers of computers, say it is a more potent, and an increasingly reliable, alternative to expensive hardware.