Stories about: SEC

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.

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.

Since 2005, Oracle has spent at least US$32 billion on acquisitions -- turning itself into the vendor of a top-to-bottom enterprise software stack that is arguably broader in scope than any rival suite.

Oracle's annual OpenWorld show is usually a showcase for its enterprise software. This year, however, it was all about hardware, as CEO Larry Ellison introduced a new family of database/storage products last week that it had been working on with partner Hewlett-Packard for three years.

A lot of solid-state disk (SSD) drive reviews and features have been circulating around the Internet lately, and I've noticed that the speeds of those products are increasing remarkably, even as manufacturers use more multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash memory in their products, which is innately slower than single-level cell (SLC) NAND.

Imation Wednesday announced the first 6x Blu-ray recordable (BD-R) and Blu-ray recordable double layer (BD-R DL) media for the US retail market.

Enterasys will roll out this week at Interop New York a line of stackable switches that feature integral 10Gbps Ethernet ports, IPv6 support and increased bandwidth and throughput vs. its earlier models.

The National Innovation Review was released this week, attacking Howard governments of the past 12 years for stymieing innovation through reduced R&D and public education spending. The review itself took flak from the Australian Computer Society, frustrated at the lack of acknowledgement of ICT as a foundation for innovation in the recommendations.

Solid state drives (SSDs) are finally coming into their own -- they're faster, more durable, and use less power than traditional mechanical hard drives. However, the strongest indicator that this may be the storage tech of the future is Intel's release of its X18 and X25 solid state drives.

How much would you pay for a portable hard drive that lets you tote around 160GB in a shirt pocket -- with no need for a power brick? Apricorn is betting you'll be willing to spring for upward of US$260 for its 160GB Aegis Mini. However, it remains to be seen how many are willing to pay that price for portability.

The New York Mets will have new networking and unified communications systems in their new home, Citi Field, when they start playing baseball there next spring.