Clint Boulton

Oracle, whose database software has made the company billions, released a free version of its database to compete with the increasingly popular free products from MySQL. The free beta version of Oracle Database 10g Express Edition, or Oracle Database XE, is available for download today, the company said in a statement. XE was created to […]

HP is sticking to its storage management guns in the face of the Aperi open source consortium IBM launched last week. The Palo Alto, Calif., company has released Storage Essentials 5.0, the latest version of its storage resource management (SRM) software, as an alternative to Aperi, a group formed to work on a common storage […]

Grids that commission several computers to work together on one task are great, but if you don’t have the software to manage the snarl of data traffic, they can be an absolute nightmare. To mitigate those issues, Oracle has updated its Release 2 of Enterprise Manager Grid 10g Control. Also called Oracle Grid Control, it […]

Egenera wouldn’t mind being the next VMware, a company that became so popular for its server virtualization software that EMC decided to scoop it up at a premium. Though considering the ink has recently dried on a $300 million contract with Fujitsu Siemens, Egenera may soon become too big a target for companies looking to […]

Blue Gene/L just keeps getting faster. Officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today said the IBM-built BlueGene/L supercomputer performed at 280.6 trillion operations per second (teraflop) on the Linpack benchmark, the standard by which major supercomputers are measured. This shatters the previous high mark of performing at 135.3 teraflops . At the Lawrence […]

UPDATED: Purveyors of Web services are so concerned with security that they have formed a technical committee to improve the work of the WS-Security standard created by OASIS. Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems and other top software makers will lead Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX), a group to improve the way users safely exchange SOAP messages […]

UPDATED: To lure customers from its rivals’ software, Sun Microsystems is making it possible for customers to run its latest Java Enterprise Systems (JES) middleware on operating systems from competing vendors. JES 4.0 now supports Windows 2000, Linux and HP-UX operating systems, and plans are under way to support Windows 2003 within the next 90 […]

Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla. this week is the launching pad for plenty of new storage products. While the Aperia open source storage management group stole the lion’s share of attention, rivals Brocade Communications Systems and Cisco Systems are continuing to duke it out in the underappreciated, but important, storage fabric space. Cisco today […]

UPDATED: A consortium of some of the biggest vendors in the high-tech industry has formed to work on a common storage software management platform, something of a Holy Grail in the space to date. Called Aperi, a Latin expression meaning “to open,” the group includes Brocade Communication Systems, Cisco Systems, Computer Associates, Engenio Information Technologies, […]

NEW YORK — Oracle is going after the market for in-house software development in an effort to replace corporations’ proprietary systems and offer niche applications built on its middleware lines. During a meeting with financial analysts Monday, Oracle President Chuck Phillips, citing stats from Forrester Research, said applications for smaller verticals represent approximately 38 percent […]

UPDATED: Microsoft believes business intelligence should be added to a suite that employees use to collaborate and manage their workflow — Office. The Redmond, Wash., company today unveiled Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, a business performance management server application to improve the user experience of corporate workers. Jeff Raikes, group president of Microsoft’s information […]

EMC will become the latest major vendor to the continuous data protection (CDP) market later today when it introduces its RecoverPoint software at Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla. The concept of CDP is simple. Corporations have traditionally backed up once a day, only to leave data that was created after the back-up period on […]