Storage: Who’s responsible for the ostensibly unstoppable increase in storage spending? Not the vendors alone, Mario Apicella asserts in Storage spending at a crossroads. “Our research indicates that only 7 percent of storage budget allotments will be spent on services in the next 12 months, up a meager 1 percent from a year ago,” Apicella writes. “That said, the actual increase could be significantly more than our respondents anticipate; after all, the need to ensure compliance while protecting data assets shows no signs of abating.” Best of the blogs: Having spent more and more time with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, Randall Kennedy declares Virtual PC 2007 the great CPU gobble. “One of the unexpected side effects of moving from Virtual PC 2007 to VS: Lower CPU utilization,” he reports. “For testing applications that use high-resolution timers, or that make frequent calls to certain system libraries, Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 does a much better job of handling what should normally be a very fast, lightweight operation.” Gripe Line: Best Buy “no lemon” buyer is bitter. Say that three times fast. Okay, so it might not technically be as tortuous as some traditional tongue twisters, but that’s little consolation to the reader who bought into the company’s guarantee on its extended warranties only to find out that Best Buy did not fulfill it. Not by a long shot.