Jeff Burt

Sun Microsystems, in the midst of getting bought by Oracle for $7.4 billion, is releasing the latest update to its Solaris 10 operating system, focused on enhancing virtualization, security and network communications. The new features in Solaris 10 5/09 also include greater optimization for Intel’s Xeon 5500 processors-aka “Nehalem EP”-that Sun officials disclosed before the […]

About six years ago, Silicon Valley mainstay Bill Coleman-at one time a Sun Microsystems executive, and later a founding member of BEA Systems-started Cassatt. The company was founded to build software that helps enterprises manage huge and distributed infrastructure environments, and could have played a major role given the rise of cloud computing. However, according […]

Hewlett-Packard is integrating its Insight Control systems management software suite into Microsoft’s System Center offering, the latest move by the systems vendor in its integrated data center initiative. HP officials said the move to integrate the server management features of HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers into Microsoft’s consoles will give IT administrators greater visibility into […]

In something that sounds like it was cooked up by the writers at “Saturday Night Live,” IBM is building a computer that will compete with human contestants on the game show “Jeopardy.” IBM researchers have spent two years creating a QA (question answering) system-code-named “Watson”-that they say will be a significant step forward in giving […]

Opalis Software is bringing greater IT process automation capabilities to Microsoft’s suite of system management software. At the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas April 28, Opalis officials announced that their offerings for Microsoft System Center touch on such key data center areas as virtualization, cloud computing and power management capabilities. The offerings will give […]

In a move seen to be targeting Cisco Systems, Brocade Communications Systems and IBM announced April 28 that they are expanding their partnership to include Ethernet switching and routing products. IBM and Brocade said IBM will rebrand and resell Brocade’s family of enterprise IP networking products, creating a strong presence in an area that has […]

CA is upgrading its data center management software to address the growing trend toward integrated infrastructures. CA announced April 27 that it is enhancing its Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and eHealth Performance Manager software to give IT administrators a single point from which to manage their physical and virtualized data center environments. The new releases of […]

Building Blocks for Cisco Unified Computing System Initiative by Jeffrey Burt Cisco UCS Blade Server Chassis Cisco officials say that, compared with a four-socket, 256GB rack system, a UCS offering can save 40 percent on capital expenses, 19 percent in power and cooling costs over three years, 86 percent in cabling and 61 percent in […]

When Charles Wuischpard came to Penguin Computing in January 2007 as president of worldwide field operations, he found a company that lacked focus, had stagnant financials and was trying to serve too many markets. In the two years since, Wuischpard-now president and CEO-has refocused the company primarily on the HPC (high-performance computing) space, paring the […]

The Distributed Management Task Force is creating a group that will look at the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The group-called the Open Cloud Standards Incubator-will develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management that should lead to the eventual adoption of standards, according to the task force, which announced […]

Advanced Micro Devices, which for years has made energy efficiency and performance per watt cornerstones of its processor development, is lowering the power consumption of its Opteron server chip. AMD April 22 is rolling out the Opteron EE processor, a 45-nanometer quad-core chip that offers similar features as the other Opteron chips but comes in […]

Unisys is ramping up the virtualization capabilities of its enterprise x86 servers by upgrading to Intel’s Nehalem EP processors and VMware’s latest version of its virtualization platform. Unisys announced April 21 that it is incorporating the Xeon 5500 series chips into its ES3000 rack systems and ES5000 blade servers, and will support the new VMware […]