Chris Preimesberger

NASA on Oct. 31 awarded a $206.5 million contract to a longtime contractor, United Space Alliance, to provide services for the next generation of its space exploration program. The contract will provide mission and flight crew logistics, training, and flight support for the International Space Station and subsequent space exploration activities after the space shuttle […]

So, you thought today was only Halloween here in the States? Well, right you are, but Oct. 31 also been declared Fall Backup Day — by storage media provider Maxell. Maxell would like to remind everybody to take stock of their current data backup practices and protect their files by performing a data backup by […]

For IT and Silicon Valley, the early part of the financial nosedive hasn’t been so much a crash as a dent. The following is a quick look at the some of the key IT companies and their financial results reported in the third quarter. GoodVMware: Revenue growth climbed 32 percent from the third quarter of […]

OK, so we’ve endured about 60 days of the zig-zagging U.S. macroeconomy, and now we have a number of quarterly financial reports to view as early evidence about how bad the damage may be. How is IT in general holding up in this volatile environment, and what are the prospects of various sectors going forward? […]

NetApp said yesterday it has canceled its first user conference, NetApp Accelerate, in response to customer feedback about increasing restrictions on corporate travel. The conference was to be held Feb. 23-26, 2009, at Moscone West in San Francisco. NetApp had expected about 3,000 attendees. I wouldn’t be surprised if more events like this are canceled. […]

Web content deployment provider Interwoven on Oct. 28 announced updates involving automation improvements to its flagship Composite Application Provisioning package.Interwoven’s CAP 3.0.1 automates and standardizes the way code, content and configuration changes are aggregated and deployed to custom Web or composite applications. The company claims that CAP automation delivers Web site code changes up to […]

Green IT has made a lot of headway in the data center during the past 18 months with the deployment of improved power supplies and power-saving servers, storage arrays and special-purpose appliances.Now the environmental IT mindset is moving to the workplace desktop. Dell on Oct. 28 announced wholesale upgrades in its high-end OptiPlex commercial desktop […]

Software as a service has many variations and aliases, which include the terms cloud computing, on-demand applications, grid computing and others.The idea of subscribing to SAAS for business goes way back to the big-hunk mainframe computers of the 1970s, which companies such as IBM and Amdahl built and subdivided for those services. Later, in the […]

What the Client-Server ‘Establishment’ is Saying about SAASMyth No. 1: SaaS is not secure.If SAAS were not secure, it would have to be true that the Internet is not secure, Luddy said.“That means people using banking applications would be using those in an insecure environment,” Luddy said. “The truth is, that almost all traffic goes […]

This is about the 2008 Global Tech Leaders Summit, held at the Four Seasons Hotel in East Palo Alto, Calif., on Oct. 21, 2008. The host law firm, DLA Piper, had a live blogger or two in attendance. Here is the link for more detail.

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the four founders of Sun Microsystems and the chief architect of the company’s hardware systems for the better part of a generation, said Oct. 23 he is joining Arista Networks, a startup in the cloud computing space.Bechtolsheim will become chairman and chief development officer of the startup, which has about 50 […]

EAST PALO ALTO, Calif.-Amazon.com, one of the universally acknowledged Web 2.0 world leaders that has made its fortune by selling books, CDs and DVDs through its online stores, now sees its long-term future in the Web services subscription and storage business-otherwise known as cloud computing.During the last three years, Amazon has come out with its […]