Chris Preimesberger

It wasn’t much of a surprise to people following the progress of the Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems that a formal objection to the $7.4 billion deal was handed down Nov. 9 from the European Commission.The EC, the antitrust arm of the 27-nation European Union, informed both Oracle and Sun that the decision was because […]

The IT giants that formed the Virtual Computing Environment joint venture Nov. 3 to create and market modular cloud computing systems appear to be building a coalition with the combined market share and product lineup to go way beyond a single data center product rollout.In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine […]

While Oracle tussles with the European Commission over sanctioning its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the future development of the Sun-owned MySQL, industry stakeholders are posting pro and con opinions-mostly con, as it turns out-about whether Oracle can ever be a suitable home for the popular open-source Web database. The EC, which serves […]

Two prominent European business publications, the U.K.’s Financial Times and Germany’s Handlesblatt, reported Nov. 4 that a so-called “formal objection” to the proposed Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems soon may be forthcoming from the European Commission.The EC, the antitrust arm of the 27-nation European Union, apparently will lodge the objection because the deal includes the […]

2010 is shaping up to be the Year of Unified Computing System Wars, and Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard have emerged as two of the main combatants in these skirmishes. IBM, naturally, would be the other big one. But outside of general information about its Blue Cloud initiative and partnership opportunities to create next-generation data centers, […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-There may be a worldwide recession that is cutting back travel for many people, but don’t tell it to the organizers and attendees of the fourth annual Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which opened Nov. 2 and is being held here at the Convention Center through Nov. 4.Most of the 30 or so […]

Three IT giants-networking leader Cisco Systems, virtualization expert VMware and storage provider EMC-revealed Nov. 3 that they have formed a new joint venture, the Virtual Computing Environment, to produce cloud computing systems called vBlocks that integrate hardware and software from all three companies.The coalition-along with processor maker Intel-also announced that is starting up a new, […]

On Nov. 3, newcomer Backblaze launched what it claims is the only unlimited online backup service for businesses: completely unlimited file storage for $50 per year, per computer. Just like the company’s consumer backup service, Backblaze for Business will automatically back up all data on Windows and Mac laptops and desktops. Additionally, companies will be […]

If you ask AFCOM, the world’s largest data center industry association, most of its member clients aren’t prepared nearly well enough for if a sophisticated cyber-attacker–or even if an unsophisticated hacker–decides to target them.If you also ask about the status of mainframes in most data centers, you’ll find that about 40 percent of all data […]

The European Commission’s roadblock slowing the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems has led to another international problem for the world’s second-largest software company.Oracle on Oct. 30 withdrew its petition to obtain antitrust clearance to do business in Russia after the addition of Sun, following the planned completion of the $7.4 billion deal announced last April.The […]

Electricity as a power source for motor vehicles goes back much further than most people think. At the turn of the 20th century, about one-third of the several hundred motor vehicles in New York City were electric-powered.In 1914 — the year World War I began — the president of the Minnesota Buggy Company wrote a […]

Intel and its solid-state processor research affiliate, Numonyx, on Oct. 28 revealed what they described as a “key breakthrough” in their continuing research on phase-change memory, or PCM. PCM is a relatively new type of nonvolatile memory chip that combines many of the benefits of current memory types, such as NAND flash, NOR flash and […]