Stories about: IDC

Sun Microsystems has doubled the capacity of its Niagara servers with the four-socket Sparc Enterprise T5440 system, designed for running corporate databases and ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.

The full depth of IT's involvement in Wall Street's meltdown is unknown, but one plan to stop it from happening again calls upon a growing IT trend: open source.

Expanding Linux adoption beyond key vertical markets is an important driver for Red Hat's growth, which remains steady even as one of its strongest customer sectors, financial services, is getting hit hard by the U.S. crisis, the company's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said Tuesday.

IBM spruced up its Unix servers on Tuesday with faster processors and new management software, targeting customers who want to use its hardware for virtualization and server consolidation.

SQL Server may be one of the most popular databases today, but Microsoft nevertheless remains a laggard in the business intelligence market. It ranked just fifth among BI vendors last year, according to research firm IDC.

Investing in desktop virtualisation systems can save organisations swathes of money, according to a recent IDC case study.

The Unified Threat Management (UTM) market has already started to outgrow the point security solution segment, said analyst firm IDC.

There's an age-old choice in IT -- whether to adopt a "best of breed" strategy for the power and flexibility it can bring, or go with a single vendor for accountability and simplicity. J. Craig Venter Institute Inc. (JCVI) believes in best of breed. The genomic research company runs Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS in its data center. For storage, it draws on technology from EMC, NetApp, Isilon, DataDomain and Symantec.

As companies are diving deeper into virtualized storage projects, IT managers are getting a better understanding of the staff skills they need to make those projects succeed. The exact talents required depend on the type of storage implementation, but most employers say they're in the market for two kinds of IT worker: technicians with vendor-specific SAN or NAS knowledge, and systems administrators and IT architects who understand the complexities and interdependencies among applications, operating systems and I/O, all of which affect storage requirements.

Fujitsu is in talks to sell its hard-disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a report in the Thursday morning edition of the Nikkei business daily.

Facing uncertain economic times, enterprises may be more likely to turn to cloud computing services -- such as SaaS (software as a service), Amazon-style utility computing, and managed service providers -- for the lower up-front costs, the faster time to market, and the ability to add capabilities quickly without investing in new hardware.