Sonia R. Lelii

As one of the nations top oil refining companies, Valero Energy Corp. is no stranger to acquisition fever. A Fortune 500 company with approximately 20,000 employees and expected revenues this year of $55 billion, it has an extensive refining system that generates more than 2.5 million barrels of fuel per day. Valero has approximately 4,700 […]

Oracle Corp. is touting real Application Clusters as one of the key enhancements in the companys 9i database software, which is being readied for release in the next few months. But even this feature may not be enough to persuade users—some of whom are still implementing Oracle8i—to upgrade. Real Application Clusters enables nodes to simultaneously […]

IBMs $1 billion acquisition last week of Informix Software—and its 100,000-customer base—will give IBM added ammunition in its war with database giant Oracle Corp. But the challenge facing IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., is finding ways to keep Informix customers in the fold and convincing them to put their future projects on its flagship DB2 database. […]

Some of the storage industrys new kids on the block are building products on IP storage as well as NAS and SAN convergence, technologies that challenge more traditional storage methods. Officially launched last week, Pirus Networks Inc., of Acton, Mass., has developed a family of switches that can handle block-level and file-level transfers. The first […]

The storage management arena got a little more crowded this month as BMC Software Inc. announced a software suite that gives IT managers a broader view of how their hardware is affecting applications. BMC, of Houston, will make available its ACSM (Application-Centric Storage Management) suite, which comprises four separate software pieces linked together to provide […]

Online storage companies, which have been luring millions of consumers to their sites primarily through free services such as faxing and file sharing, are now changing their business models to help shore up their bottom lines. Some main online storage players such as Xdrive Technologies Inc., FreeDrive Inc., My Docs Online Inc., I-drive.com and Driveway […]

As more companies jump into the storage management software space, customers are seeing less difference in the range of products being offered. Fujitsu Ltd. became the latest company to join a market that is expected to grow to about $16 billion in 2004. Last week, the Tokyo-based vendor announced it was forming Fujitsu Software Technology […]

When it comes to heterogeneous storage support, Hewlett-Packard Co. is going it alone. The Palo Alto, Calif., company next month will release a software family that gives IT administrators the ability to consolidate disparate storage systems under one management console—despite whatever hardware the storage resides on. But while companies such as Compaq Computer Corp. and […]

With both demand and revenue rapidly growing, the staid data storage industry is witnessing an unprecedented level of entrepreneurial interest. Dozens of startups have come out of the woodwork in recent months, hoping to capture some of the lucrative market that has been dominated by giants such as EMC Corp., Compaq Computer Corp. and Network […]

According to Larry Ellison, Oracle Corp.s missed projections for its third-fiscal-quarter earnings were a result of the uncertain U.S. economy and not competitive pressures. Oracle earnings for the quarter ended Feb. 28 came in at 10 cents per share, slashing by nearly 20 percent analysts expectations of 12 cents per share. Ellison, Oracles chairman and […]