Chris Preimesberger

DALLAS—Mark Monroe has a simple solution for any data center manager, especially those new on the job who arent exactly sure which of the servers is hosting which application, and which people are using which application on certain servers. Its also an ecologically- and economically-friendly solution: Just shut them off, he says. “Yes, just shut […]

DALLAS—James Gosling, Sun Microsystems distinguished scientist and generally known as the father of Java, likes to call them “big hunk” servers. Some people call them Big Blues—since IBM builds most of them—while others describe them simply as room-size computers. But they are known best as mainframe computers, and, if you listen to at least one […]

DALLAS—Volume servers, those commodity machines most enterprises have running somewhere in their IT systems, are the low-hanging fruit that the EPAs Energy Star server program is targeting first in its quest to bring more energy efficiency to the data center. Andrew Fanara, director of the Energy Star Product Specifications Development Team, told a capacity audience […]

Custom-made for Their SMB Customers To Ann Livermore, one of the mistakes major OEMs make when courting smaller businesses is offering enterprise-class products that have been scaled down to serve companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. The result is companies with limited technology dollars and small IT staffs having to deal with overwhelmingly complex hardware […]

SAN FRANCISCO—So, what exactly is the big deal about VMware and its annual show, VMworld, which just concluded here at the Moscone Center? VMworld used to be the little guy; only 1,400 people four years ago, it registered 10,800 paying attendees this time, although it appeared there were many more than that at the event. […]

5 Steps to a Scalable Data Center”> So, you want to make over your old storage data center—or, even more daunting, build an entirely new data center from scratch? Here, eWEEK offers five steps to building or reinstituting a data storage center. Yes, we know it will take more like 500 steps, but were hitting […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Xsigo Systems might look like just another IT company with a strange, unpronounceable name, but it stands a good chance of becoming well known in data center circles. The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., which spent three years in R&D, officially launched itself and a product line here at VMworld Sept. 11. It then […]

SAN FRANCISCO-VMware President and CEO Diane Greene put the virtualization phenomenon into keen perspective when she kicked off the fourth annual VMworld conference Sept. 11. “A year ago, we were talking about virtualization becoming mainstream, now we’re talking about it as an industry,” Greene told a standing room-only crowd of some 10,000 attendees at Moscone […]

Reacting to research that suggests midsize enterprises are looking to buy more storage hardware over the next four years, Network Appliance on Sept. 10 launched a new line of products aimed directly at that busy sector. NetApp, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., rolled out its FAS2020 and FAS2050 storage arrays plus new deployment and auditing services […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Dell, which has already introduced three new storage products in 2007, is releasing yet another storage product line for small and midsize businesses. The new SAN (storage area network) array, the PowerVault MD3000i, is probably a good example of what the SMB storage market will offer for at least the next few years, analysts […]

One of myriad lessons learned in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was that a financial supercenter such as New York City had better have an excellent aggregate backup plan in case of another such disaster. It didnt then, but it will soon. Wall Street financial decision-makers have come together—with the help of federal, state […]

Expanding on its 2006 acquisition of deduplication specialist Avamar Technologies, EMC on Sept. 6 launched what it calls the storage industrys first deduplication and backup tool designed specifically to run on VMware virtual machines. VMware, with about 85 percent of the server virtualization market, is a sister subsidiary of Avamar under the common ownership of […]