Stories about: Backplane Systems Technology

Cisco and HP last week armed themselves for an impending battle in the data center in which each company will invade the other's turf.

Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Admiral David Farragut's famous American Civil War exclamation could be the rallying cry of the IT executives behind server and virtualization efforts. Rather than cutting and running as they face deepening economic woes, these IT professionals are pushing harder to complete their projects.

Alcatel-Lucent this week is expected to unveil a range of enhancements to its large enterprise product portfolio, including an upgraded data center switch and IP telephony extensions.

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Business customers, get ready for Juniper 2.0 -- more integrated network features and new support packages.

If I'm not otherwise engaged next Thursday morning, I just might spend my economic stimulus check to enter the PC server business. I could go shopping for a wholesale 1U bare-bones rack server, with my primary criteria being that it boot DOS from a floppy and require you to take your server off-line to change basic system settings. I'll stuff that two-socket black box with RAM, CPUs, and disks; charge you for your choice of Windows or Linux; and unless you're buying these things by the gross, stick you with desktop-grade support. Since I had no involvement in your server's design and engineering, I'll rely on BIOS and driver updates from my volume motherboard supplier. I'll selectively pass these on to you, flagged with warnings about how they may render your system unusable if you misapply them, until my supplier stops issuing them. Don't worry, you'll have a solid year before that happens.

Have you spent millions on management software and still struggle to quickly determine the root cause of network performance problems?

Thanks to a massive datacenter consolidation, hardware refresh, and creative, energy-efficient facility design, Sun has reduced power capacity demand by 75 per cent at its California datacenter alone, saving US$1.1 million per year in energy costs, while increasing its datacenter processing power more than four times. Overall, Sun estimates that its consolidation efforts will save 4,100 tons of CO2 per year and cut 1 per cent from its total carbon footprint.

Days after closing its acquisition of iSCSI storage vendor EqualLogic, Dell announced a new series of iSCSI-based storage-area network (SAN) arrays. The Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series offers both virtualization and thin-provisioning capabilities, allowing storage administrators to grow capacity on the fly.

What is it, one might reasonably ask, that separates a SIM (security information manager) from a basic log-file aggregator? Both will, of course, aggregate log files, but a SIM must go further, gathering incident alerts and status conditions from a variety of network security and infrastructure sources. A good SIM will then add some intelligence to the mix, helping the security engineer figure out which information is worth his or her immediate attention and which can be ignored until time to pass a compliance audit.