Chris Preimesberger

Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison, in his first public appearance since Oracle announced April 20 that it intends to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, told a packed auditorium in an informal appearance onstage at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco that his new ownership will continue to invest heavily in Sun’s Java franchise. […]

Surprise! EMC now wants in on the Data Domain sweepstakes. The biggest gorilla with the most bananas in the storage cage comes to the table with an impressive cash offering: 300 million more bucks, or about 20 percent more, than NetApp’s already generous offer, for a total of $1.8 billion in cash. That’s a lot […]

EMC on June 1 dropped a surprise financial bomb on longtime competitor NetApp’s $1.5 billion offer to acquire Data Domain. EMC, the world’s largest external disk storage company, tendered an offer of $1.8 billion in cash, or 20 percent more than NetApp, which had announced May 20 a proposed transaction involving both cash and stock.NetApp […]

Cisco Systems, a profitable and steady-riding IT infrastructure provider for nearly 20 years, gained a world of prestige in the global business community on June 1 when it was named to join Dow Jones Industrial Average lineup of 30 publicly traded companies.Cisco will replace long-embattled General Motors on the list beginning June 8; GM opted […]

Hewlett-Packard, continuing to brand itself as the go-to supplier of data storage systems for small and midrange businesses, on May 28 launched a bevy of new unified computing and storage-related products aimed at those growing markets.Unified storage systems combine both storage and application deployment through a single set of controls. Cisco Systems made news back […]

EMC on May 27 demonstrated once again that automation is the definitive trend in data centers in 2009.The storage and data protection infrastructure giant added a key component to its data center control software catalog when it announced the acquisition of OEM partner Configuresoft, a provider of server configuration, change and compliance management software.Financial details […]

Aetna, one of the world’s largest health insurance providers, had to do something special for its customers following a security “oops” reported May 26 involving its Website. It turns out that a number of human resource-related e-mails containing important personal information that had been stored in a “secure” place on the site somehow became public […]

SanDisk, the company that holds more patents than anybody else in the NAND flash sector but which also has been struggling financially, celebrated a victory May 27 when it renewed its longstanding memory chip license with its biggest customer, Korean device maker Samsung, for another seven-year period.Samsung renewed its license with SanDisk at a lower […]

As reported here in The Station on April 29, Hewlett-Packard recruited longtime EMC storage executive David Donatelli to become its new senior vice president for Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking. Donatelli was to start his new job May 5, but, oops, that didn’t happen. EMC, its corporate dander up at the defection, immediately obtained a […]

Two-and-a-half years and one far-ranging equipment specification later, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program for data center equipment is now looking ahead to providing new levels of environmental guidance.As of May 15, 2009, CTO/CIOs and data center managers evaluating various brands of servers for purchase have another important factor to consider: whether or not […]

Facebook received a tidy $200 million infusion of cash May 26 from Russia-based Digital Sky Technologies, a global investment group with interests in Eastern European and Russian Internet businesses.Digital Sky made the investment in privately held Facebook in exchange for preferred stock, which became a 1.96 percent equity stake for a $10 billion valuation. Digital […]

IBM is placing increased emphasis on the emerging solid-state server, storage, and software sector of the data center.As of May 21 it is now offering SSDs as an option in its latest Power Systems servers. It also has launched a new set of “smart” software tools to optimize SSDs used to run its DB2 database […]