Jeff Burt

Over the past few years, the issue of power and cooling costs for data centers has moved from being an afterthought to the forefront in the minds of IT administrators. Businesses are seeing as much as half of their IT budgets being spent to keep the facilities powered, cooled and lit, according to Duncan Campbell, […]

Cisco Systems is continuing its aggressive acquisition strategy, this time grabbing mobile infrastructure vendor Starent Networks for $2.9 billion. The cash deal continues a busy year in acquisitions for Cisco, whose purchases in 2009 also include Flip video camera vendor Pure Digital in May for about $590 million and Norwegian video conferencing company Tandberg for […]

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu are rolling out new SPARC64 VII processors and an enhanced memory controller that officials with both companies say will offer enterprises a 25 percent performance boost over previous versions of the chips. The new quad-core SPARC64 processors, announced Oct. 13, provide mainframe-class computing at a lower cost than IBM technologies, according […]

Intel’s third-quarter financial numbers indicate that consumer technology purchasing is continuing to grow, particularly in the notebook space. The world’s largest chip maker earned almost $1.9 billion in profit-just below the $2 billion earned during the same period last year-on $9.39 billion in revenue, down from $10.2 billion in the third quarter 2008. Still, the […]

Hosting company NaviSite is using the latest technologies from Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel and VMware to create a highly scalable and on-demand managed cloud computing platform for enterprises. NaviSite on Oct. 13 unveiled its NaviCloud Managed Cloud Services offering, which leverages such technologies as Cisco’s UCS (Unified Computing System), Intel’s Xeon 5500 Series “Nehalem EP” […]

Don’t look to Oracle to buy networking vendor Brocade Communications Systems. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reportedly said during the company’s annual shareholders meeting Oct. 7 that the software giant has no interest in acquiring Brocade. Ellison’s statement came in response to a question from a shareholder. News organizations reported Oct. 5 that Brocade officials are […]

North Carolina leaders want Dell to pay for shutting down a 4-year-old PC manufacturing plant in their state. Dell officials announced Oct. 7 that they were closing the plant in Winston-Salem, N.C., by January 2010, a move that will cost 905 employees their jobs. The closing is part of a companywide initiative designed to cut […]

A company called G2iX is offering an appliance based on IBM’s BladeCenter system designed to give businesses an easy and affordable way to create a private cloud computing environment. G2iX-or Global Gateway Innovation Exchange-introduced its Morph CloudServer Oct. 7 at the ITU Telecom World conference in Los Angeles. The Morph CloudServer includes 100 virtual machines […]

Federal regulators reportedly are investigating IBM for possible antitrust violations in connection with its mainframe business. MarketWatch reported Oct. 7 that the Computer & Communications Industry Association, an industry trade group that has often complained about IBM’s dominance in the mainframe space, and association member T3 Technologies had confirmed that T3 had received a civil […]

For IBM and the mainframe space, the beginning of this decade was a key time, according to industry observers. It was in 2001 that last provisions of a court-ordered consent decree dating back four decades-stemming from anticompetitive behavior by IBM in the 1950s-was lifted, according to the Computer and Communications Industry Association, an industry trade […]

Extreme Networks is adding new modules to its BlackDiamond 8800 switching family that will enable the portfolio to cover all scenarios, from the wiring closet to the data center. Extreme on Oct. 7 unveiled its 8500 series modules, which is aimed at the access edge and wiring closets. The modules join Extreme’s 8800 c-series modules […]

Pano Logic is releasing the latest version of its desktop virtualization technology into a highly competitive market that has seen its share of vendor moves recently. A day after Citrix Systems unveiled its XenDesktop 4 technology and VMware announced that its Fusion product now supports Apple’s “Snow Leopard” and Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating systems, Pano […]