Jeff Burt

NEW YORK—IBM is adding another layer to the shared infrastructure of its blade server architecture. The Armonk, N.Y., company on Wednesday is unveiling integrated Fibre Channel and SAN (storage area network) connectivity via internal switches to its line of BladeCenter ultradense servers. Currently, the BladeCenter and BladeCenter HS20 offer two external 80GB SCSI drives or […]

Dell Computer Corp. has ended a seven-year, $16 billion contract to buy hardware components from IBM, and is cutting back on a $6 billion services deal. The deals, struck in 1999, called for Dell to buy everything from disk drives and chips to flat-panel monitors. But over the past year, IBM has sold off several […]

Sun Microsystems Inc. this week will introduce the first products related to its N1 business strategy, the centerpiece of which is a new blade server architecture. At an event in San Francisco, Sun officials will unveil an entry-level server, power upgrades to some high-end systems and new storage arrays. But it will be the Sun […]

IBM is speeding up its line of eServer xSeries systems with Intel Corp.s fastest Pentium 4 and Xeon processors. The single-processor x205 and x305 systems will be equipped with 2.8GHz Pentium 4 chips; the two-processor x225, x235, x335 and x345 servers will be upgraded with 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz Xeons, said Jeff Benck, director of the […]

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. continued its aggressive first-quarter rollout of new processors on Monday, unveiling its long-awaited Athlon XP 3000+ desktop chip. The 32-bit chip, code-named Barton, is part of AMDs push to chip away at Intel Corp.s dominance. The 3000+, with a 333MHz front-side bus, 640KB of on-die cache memory—512KB of Level 2 cache […]

Larger cache sizes will continue to be a driver as the 64-bit Itanium chip continues to evolve, according to Intel Corp. officials. The next generation of the Itanium 2 chip will come in three versions with either 3MB, 4MB or 6MB of Level 3 cache, and the two cores in the Itanium chip set for […]

MPC Computers LLC—formerly MicronPC—on Monday unveiled new designs for its ClientPro business desktop PCs and Millennia consumer systems designed to make configuration and maintenance easier. The systems also come in two-tone gray, with matching monitors and peripherals, according to officials with the Nampa, Idaho, company. Key among the improvements is tool-free access to the internal […]

Hewlett-Packard Co. is launching a program that will give consumers up to $50 toward the purchase of new products on the companys Web site in exchange for recycling their old computer equipment through HPs recycling service. The HP Planet Partners e-Coupon program, which started this week and will run through April 30, will accept used […]

Dell Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have both begun advertising workstations featuring Intel Corp.s yet-to-be-released 3.06GHz Xeon chip. Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, is offering on its Web site its dual-processor Precision 450 and 650 workstations with the chip, which features a 533MHz front-side bus. In addition, HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., is offering the […]

Sun Microsystems Inc. is planning to roll out a 12-processor Unix server, the Sun Fire v1280, powered by the companys 64-bit 900MHz UltraSparc III chip. The mid-range server, which would come in four- to 12-way configurations, could debut at a Sun event on Feb. 10 in San Francisco. Among those scheduled to speak at the […]

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Tuesday rolled out its most powerful high-end server and workstation chip to date, the Athlon MP 2600+. The chip, aimed at such environments as high-performance computing sites and research institutions, comes two months after the Sunnyvale, Calif., company unveiled the 2GHz 2400+. The 2600+, which runs at 2.133GHz, outperforms Intel […]

A Toronto-based company this week relaunched its high-availability software for small and mid-sized businesses using IBMs eServer iSeries systems. DataMirrors Simple HA (high availability) for $60K program includes the companys iCluster technology, which iSeries businesses can use to mirror data in real-time from the systems to multiple recovery systems. In case of an outage, it […]