Chris Preimesberger

Sin No. 1: Building an Infrastructure Cloud Rather Than an Application Cloud Applications are the driving force behind cloud systems. While a focus on infrastructure may be important for a software development environment, business outcomes are built on applications. Application delivery, not infrastructure, has become a new bottleneck. To avoid this, ensure that computing, storage, […]

Solid-state storage provider Violin Memory on Sept. 27 introduced a new series of NAND flash arrays, describing them as the industry’s first all-silicon storage systems. Violin’s 6000 Series flash memory arrays are intended to push solid-state storage from spot deployments, where it is used most frequently, into the front tier of storage systems. Violin uses […]

In the late 1980s, there came Sybase SQL Server, a powerful relational database server that Microsoft bought and set out to compete with Oracle, Siebel, SAP and others. Later, when many IT administrators got fed up with being held hostage by then-standard MS lock-in tactics, MySQL — an open-source, freely downloadable version of the SQL […]

Not long after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, it did some rebranding and ported over its 2-year-old, Hewlett-Packard-boxed Exadata Database Server to its new SPARC-powered hardware and began weaning it off the older machines. If Oracle was going to become a full-service IT provider, this is where it had to start. That was the […]

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — President Barack Obama, speaking at the Computer History Museum here on Sept. 26 as a guest of career-oriented social network provider LinkedIn, defended his recently proposed American Jobs Act and its provision to reform the tax code to make it more equitable among all income groups. The president spoke to LinkedIn […]

Hewlett-Packard, which desperately needed a better communicator and executor of business strategy at the top of its organization, introduced its new CEO, Meg Whitman, to an audience of press and analysts on a conference call a mere one hour after announcing her appointment on Sept. 22. Following a full day of speculation, Whitman replaced former […]

EMC took another dive into the “big data” processing pool Sept. 21 when it introduced a new analytics appliance that runs on its Greenplum software. The announcement was made at the O’Reilly Strata Conference in New York City. The data storage provider is positioning the Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance as the industry’s first “complete” […]

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard on Sept. 22 fired CEO Leo Apotheker, the man it had selected to lead the company into the 21st century, after 11 months on the job. HP’s embattled board of directors immediately installed one of its newest members, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, 55, to replace Apotheker on a permanent […]

The virtualization of networking functions is beginning to come up in more conversations involving IT managers, network administrators, and their current or potential vendors. Virtual networking is just as it sounds. Ports, switches and routers are virtualized to work inside a hypervisor with virtual machines in similar fashion to how physical ports, switches and routers […]

Oracle, led by its steady software sales, turned in an upbeat earnings report Sept. 20, showing gross and net income up for the most recent sales quarter. The database, middleware and data center hardware company reported that its fiscal first-quarter 2012 total revenues were up 12 percent to $8.4 billion over the same period a […]

The fallout from the bombastic Aug. 18 Hewlett-Packard corporate strategy left turn is beginning to take shape in the form of real effects on people. HP confirmed Sept. 20 that it has started workforce reductions in what remains of its webOS group and Palm smartphone business. Several staff members already have left on their own […]

ROUND ROCK, Texas — Pre-med student Michael Dell started his computer-upgrading company at age 19 in his University of Texas dorm room in 1984. Twenty-seven years later, although he’s traded that little place in Austin for a tad-larger headquarters 20 miles up Highway 35 in Round Rock, his company has moved about a zillion miles […]