The humble storage device is again under fire after reports surfaced that National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden, 29, used a removable USB storage device to exfiltrate top-secret information from the agency, reported the Los Angeles Times .

NSA investigators now "know how many documents he downloaded and what server he took them from," a government official -- speaking on condition of anonymity -- told the paper.

In general, the use of removable USB storage devices is prohibited inside the agency. "Of course, there are always exceptions" to that rule, said the official. "There are people who need to use a thumb drive and they have special permission. But when you use one, people always look at you funny."

One job role that would require using removable storage, however, would be that of IT or systems administrator, which was Snowden's job at the NSA, although he was a contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton.

VCenter Log Insight is a stand-alone product being added to VMware's lineup. With a $200 license fee per monitored operating system , it's meant to work hand-in-glove with a preexisting VMware data center product, vCenter Operations. VCenter Operations is used to capture and help manage configuration settings, performance management and capacity management.

Log Insight will supply an analytics engine to the log file data, which captures a record of server events, such as when the application gets a new user or contacts a database server for records. A vSphere host system, generating a large virtualized environment in the data center, produces 250 MB of log file information a day, Martin Klaus, group product-line manager, said in an interview. A Microsoft Exchange email server will generate 1 GB of log file information a day.

The Log Insight analytics engine will do what the human eye cannot do as it confronts the thousands of streaming alerts and notices of software events in a running virtualized infrastructure. It will separate the reporting that reflects normal operations and not bother the system administrator with it. It will perform diagnostics on exceptions or information patterns that might indicate an operational issue is taking shape.

The enterprise-owned glass house is alive and well: Our survey shows just 4% of respondents aggressively moving applications to the public cloud, and another 4% of survey respondents expect demand for data center resources to decrease, compared with 69% expecting increases. Many are girding for upticks of 25% or more. At that pace, enterprises can't further virtualize or build new facilities fast enough to keep up, even if they could afford to -- which many can't, given that spending on data center facilities and associated infrastructure is little changed year over year.

After you've consolidated existing facilities and servers to the limit, what then?

To get more done with the same physical resources and people, CIOs might look to such cutting-edge technologies as self-service private clouds; software-defined networks and storage; and high-density, low-power servers. They can off-load commodity IT services such as email, unstructured data backup and public-facing websites to public cloud and software-as-a-service providers. But is that enough, given how fast demand for application resources, storage, network capacity and services is rising?

The report follows similar conclusions released earlier this week by Gartner.

HP claimed the leading position, snaring 26.9% of the market's total factory revenue, but the news was still mostly bad for the company. Its 14.8% downtick in revenue was almost twice as severe as the industry's already-lousy overall average, and its revenue share was down from Q1 of last year, when it held 29.2% of the market. IDC attributed the losses to diminished interest in HP's x86-based ProLiant servers, which have ceded territory to more aggressively priced competitors.

The research firm also singled out weak demand for HP's Itanium-based, mission-critical servers. One of the only products that uses Intel's Itanium chips, the servers' future has been in doubt in recent years, a period during which they've lost ground to more-prominent x86 systems. Itanium servers also played a central role in a contentious HP-Oracle lawsuit. Despite this history, HP has continued to express confidence in the platform's longevity.

IBM was second, with 25.5% of the market, down from 27.2% last year. IDC blamed the company's 13.4% revenue drop on decreased demand for not only Power Systems servers, which compete with HP's Itanium systems, but also the x86-based System x line.

That trend continued Wednesday at the Citrix Synergy conference in Anaheim, where Dell announced a range of cloud computing products for Citrix-based environments, including options that support Citrix XenDesktop 7, also unveiled on Wednesday. Dell hopes the moves will diversify its revenue streams, which are currently reliant on its low-margin PC business.

The announcements include a version of Dell's Active System 800 converged infrastructure line optimized for Citrix XenDesktop. The product is a pre-integrated system that fits server, storage and networking into a modest footprint. It includes Active System Manager, which facilitates single pane management of both physical and virtual assets.

Dell is also offering two reference architectures that add additional features to the Active System 800 configuration. One supports NVIDIA's GRID and targets users whose virtualized graphics needs are particularly demanding, and the other includes a local storage option that Dell says will drive down costs by eliminating the need for SAN.

When it comes to scale out, EMC was quick to recognize the shifting technology landscape by scooping up Isilon more than two years ago. While Isilon supplied the base technology, quickly becoming the most popular scale-out systems in the market, this year's EMC World demonstrates the EMC influence coming through in a big way. The company is introducing a new version of the OS, oneFS; breaking out of the traditional scale-out usage silos; and positioning modular storage systems such as Isilon to be key components in a new era of software-defined storage and big-data applications. As such, the big news about Isilon at this year's EMC World has nothing to do with new hardware and is all about adding new software features.

As we outlined in this Network Computing column detailing EMC's major software-defined storage product, ViPR, Isilon arrays can be full participants in virtualized, heterogenous storage pools that can include everything from high-performance VMAX and VNX arrays to Atmos private cloud object stores. But it's now clear that Isilon is inheriting other strands of EMC's enterprise DNA as several features of the upgraded oneFS are atypical for scale-out systems.

Sure, big iron like Arista's 7500E Data Center Switch, Broadcom's massively integrated Trident II switch chip, and EMC's high-performance and exceedingly scalable VMAX and VNX arrays still generate plenty of crowds and headlines, but the real focus of development resources, R&D dollars and executive attention is on software. If not eating the world, software is definitely encompassing a greater and greater share of it.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at EMC World, and nothing drove home the point with greater force and clarity than EMC CEO Joe Tucci's admission -- nay, proud affirmation -- of the fact that the storage goliath that rose to dominate its industry on the strength of its powerful and burly hardware now devotes the vast majority of its development resources on software. In response to a question at a media briefing on the effect of hardware commodification and the attendant proliferation of white box storage systems on the company's business, Tucci stated that at most, EMC has a mere 500 engineers developing hardware, out of 12,000 total. Indeed, Tucci claimed the company embraces commodity hardware wherever it can, citing as supporting evidence the fact that EMC makes only one custom ASIC. Chiming in, EMC COO David Goulden reinforced the point, saying, "Our value is in the integration and the packaging." Goulden left unsaid the implication that building a VNX array is easy; making it operate like a VNX array isn't.