Servers & business storage

The beleaguered Dow Jones Industrial Index surged back up above 9,000 in its largest single-day point gain ever Monday, while Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and other tech companies captured double-digit gains.

After taking investors on a hellacious ride last week, Wall Street didn't disappoint expectations of a better week with the Dow soaring 936.42 points to close at 9,9387.61, after suffering eight consecutive days of losses from its previous post of 10,850.66 on September 30.

Investors … Read more

Growth in information technology spending next year is expected to go from a modest uptick to a virtual blip, according to a report released Monday by Gartner Research. Meanwhile UBS Securities predicts a more dire outcome.

IT spending is expected to grow 2.3 percent next year, a figure that's down from earlier projections of 5.8 percent growth, according to Gartner. The lowered forecast comes as the markets have been whacked particularly hard over the past two weeks and the credit market has tightened.

"Developed economies, especially in the United States and Western Europe, will be the … Read more

IBM, which expects to unveil better-than-expected quarterly figures, has announced it will spend some of its cash on incentives to encourage some of its largest partners to invest more in training and other areas.

On Wednesday, the company introduced a scheme to help its business partners who are cooperating on its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. The scheme involves incentives for IBM partners to improve their knowledge in three specific areas: virtualization and consolidation; energy efficiency; and business resiliency.

And Mike Bernard, general business and channels marketing leader at IBM, told ZDNet.co.uk that there is also a fourth … Read more

Update 11:50 a.m. PDT, with additional M&A data from investment banking services firm The Jordan, Edmiston Group.

Tech mergers and acquisitions took a dive in the third quarter, with spending falling by a third compared with the same period last year, as Wall Street investment banks and financial institutions were rocked to the core, according to a report released Wednesday by The 451 Group.

Tech deals fell to 691 transactions with a total value of $37 billion in the third quarter, down from 822 deals and a value of $58 billion a year ago. That marked … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled its first ever hardware product--a storage server with embedded software designed to work with the company's databases and be used in a grid. The Exadata programmable storage server aims to put database intelligence next to each drive.

The hardware roll-out, which was cooked up in a partnership with Hewlett-Packard, is aimed at the emerging problem of moving data from hard drives to database servers. The storage server took three years of development with HP and has been tested for about a year with key customers such as Google.

Ellison, speaking at … Read more

Fresh air could save millions in data center cooling costs, Intel has claimed, after a successful experiment in the New Mexico desert.

Replacing air conditioning by piping in outside air saved power costs, with no appreciable increase in server failure rates, Intel concluded in a research paper (PDF). Despite a lot of dust and major temperature changes--both long considered undesirable in data centers--the equipment wasn't affected, Intel said.

"Servers...were subjected to considerable variation in temperature and humidity, as well as poor air quality; however, there was no significant increase in server failures," the paper said. "… Read more

My networking-savvy colleague Bob Laliberte and I just got back from Interop in New York City. While at the show, we met with a number of leading networking vendors to discuss trends in the data center. Why the data center focus? Between data center consolidation, server virtualization, Web 2.0 applications, the convergence of storage and data, and power/cooling concerns, data center networks are rapidly changing.

Aside from these macro trends, there is something else going on. In connecting specific applications/services to specific users and groups, high-bandwidth data center networks are actually made up of numerous subsegments that … Read more

LAS VEGAS--VMware's forthcoming ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor update will allow users to change the amount of RAM allocated to virtual machines without rebooting them, VMworld 2008 attendees here heard Tuesday.

In addition, the new hypervisor will enable businesses to configure virtual machines with eight virtual CPUs and a maximum of 256GB RAM, VMware product manager Carter Shanklin said in a technical briefing at the Las Vegas conference. The current version of ESX Server supports a maximum of 64GB RAM and four CPUs per virtual machine.

Although there have been several rumors about ESX 4.0 published by bloggers, … Read more

Not to be outdone by Microsoft's virtualization coming-out party this week, or next week's VMworld, Sun Microsystems made a whole bunch of virtualization announcements on Wednesday.

The announcements included server virtualization (xVM 1.0, based on the Xen open source project), desktop virtualization xVM VDI), and virtualization management/operations (xVM OpsCenter 2.0).

My colleague Mark Bowker (aka Mr. Virtualization) and I met up with Sun to discuss these pending announcements in August. We arrived at Sun's Menlo Park campus with some skepticism, thinking: "What could Sun possibly bring to this already-crowded party?" By the … Read more