Storage: If, like many IT professionals, you’re not exactly satisfied with your storage gear, you just might find what you need in an ostensibly unlikely place, offers Mario Apicella in Raising the storage bar. That would be vendors NEC and Stratus. “New or old, both companies are putting some heat on the storage industry,” Apicella writes. “Although Stratus has perhaps more moderate ambitions, NEC has the financial and technological muscles to give the largest storage vendors a headache or two.” Security: It’s been ten months since Roger Grimes kicked off his password hash cracking contest in which he posited that short and complex passwords are easier to break than longer but less complex ones. The first piece was cracked in November of last year. “We have a winner for the second of three hash challenges,” Grimes writes in this week’s installment of Security Adviser. “I just don’t know who they are.” The original contest guidelines are here. Oh yes, and to the very clever cracker of part 2: reveal yourself and collect your well-deserved prize!Columnist’s corner: Indifference and incompetence can make for a potentially lethal combination. At least according to our Off the Record author, who claims to have gotten a cold, hard look at the dynamic duo — and in a piping hot server room, to boot. “The machine and drives were so old that there was a legitimate concern that they would not power up again.” Guess what … management, comprised of non-IT folks, “never really understood what was at stake.” Startups: London-based Cogneto brings risk analysis to the authentication equation with its Unomi solution for verifying user identity and measuring risk against biometric and behavioral factors. “The way that people interact with information is incredibly unique,” CTO Patrick Audley says. Cogneto: to identity and beyond! “So if you can find a way to capture that, then you can measure someone’s identity.” View the slideshow Month of Enterprise Startups to see all those we’ve thus far revealed.