Clint Boulton

Virtualization will get another lift next week when Microsoft rolls out its Virtual Server 2005, a product geared to help companies efficiently pool computing resources. Virtualization is a hallmark of the movement to consolidate servers by allowing multiple instances of an operating system to run on a single machine. The Redmond, Wash., software giant hopes […]

IBM announced its first major database refresh in almost two years with new features from the company’s autonomic computing vault. Fresh out of beta testing, DB2 Universal Database 8.2 is loaded with automatic self-managing and self-tuning features that promise to go beyond what rivals Oracle and Microsoft currently provide in their database products. According to […]

Hoping to improve the way mobile devices handle the nuances of human communications, a leading standards body has approved a language for synthesized speech in Web interactions as a standard. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) 1.0, an important stepping stone along the path to improving communications […]

Hitachi Data Systems’ TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform was designed to grab market share from high-end competitors EMC and IBM . But rivals aren’t convinced that HDS has the right approach. The company unveiled the system and new technologies to a few hundred journalists and analysts in New York Tuesday. It wowed attendees with a comprehensive […]

NEW YORK — Angling to cast aside doubt about its position in the market for large storage systems, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) launched an ambitious new platform with the most advanced virtualization software in the space to date, as well as logical partitioning features and new data replication software. The HDS TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform […]

With the interest in using supercomputing to advance medical science still on the rise, IBM said a Japanese research laboratory will use its Blue Gene/L machine to study proteins, hoping to create better drugs to treat human diseases. Big Blue Tuesday said the Tokyo-based Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC) of The National Institute of Advanced […]

Armed with new technology that pares the cost of power and board space in server clusters, Mellanox Technologies launched the first single-chip InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters (HCA) running at 10 gigabits per second. Introduced Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the InfiniHost III Ex HCA devices are geared to work with InfiniBand […]

Fueled by demand in the Asia/Pacific region and Japan, external disk storage systems revenues grew 8 percent year over year to $3.5 billion in the second quarter of 2004, according to IDC. The Framingham, Mass., research firm, which defines a disk storage system as a set of controllers, cables, and host bus adapters associated with […]

In a case of executive poaching from a rival, information systems giant EMC has hired former IBM Fellow Jeffrey M. Nick to the position of senior vice president and CTO. Nick will become the Hopkinton, Mass., company’s first CTO since Mark Lewis vacated the position in 2003 to head EMC’s software division, a role that […]

IBM moved to undercut its rivals Friday by offering an entry-level storage server for about a third less than the street cost of EMC’s and HP’s comparable products. IBM’s new TotalStorage DS300 is an entry-level disk server, based on iSCSI , that costs less than $3,000 for mid-sized businesses. The Armonk, N.Y., company also trotted […]

Record retention regulations and the desire for low-cost infrastructure from small businesses will fuel consolidation in the storage sector through 2006, according to a third-quarter market update from Gartner Dataquest. Moreover, despite an improvement in capital spending on IT, executives are exercising caution by limiting storage infrastructure purchases to projects that decrease operational costs and […]

UPDATED: Is it altruistic if two companies open up their intellectual property so that others might create products based on their work? IBM and Intel think so. The companies said Thursday they agreed to free up their blade server specifications in the hopes of luring third-party companies to develop thin computing machines based on their […]