Stories about: Server Technology

Microsoft and content delivery network services provider Akamai are collaborating to produce a new video service that promises to deliver high-speed video streaming that will not require any buffering.

Gartner has ranked virtualization as the No. 1 strategic technology for next year, not for its "tremendously obvious" ability to virtualize servers, but for its increasing capability to virtualize just about everything else in a data center.

The state of today's economy has triggered many economists, job experts and hiring managers to warn of layoffs and hiring contractions, and tech pros themselves have become skeptical about job security and future opportunities. Despite these concerns, the outlook for US employment, particularly in the tech sector, is not as dismal as some fortunetellers would lead us to believe.

Saving on energy costs is obviously a good thing, but to Larry Quinlan, CIO at the consulting firm Deloitte, green IT simply makes good business sense. "If you run green IT right, you will end up with a vastly superior IT organization," Quinlan said during his keynote address at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in the US, in which he described green IT as one of five technologies that will change IT. From reducing demand for IT resources to thin laptops, Quinlan has no shortage of ideas on how to make green IT deliver on multiple fronts.

I couldn't make it to OSCON last week, but I have read the announcements that Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, made at this open-source software show. They were the friendliest things I've ever seen come out of Microsoft towards open source.

Microsoft's release this week of Hyper-V means there's one more hypervisor in the game -- and one more reason management capabilities will play a large part in determining which vendor will win long-term customer favor by providing the tools to optimize virtual server environments.

Hyper-V is finally here -- almost. With the recent delivery of Release Candidate 1, Microsoft is shifting from major engineering operations mode to cross-the-i's-and-dot-the-t's mode. The majority of the Hyper-V bits, including an ever-expanding list of supported guest operating systems, are now in place, and Microsoft customers can start migrating their test VMs into preproduction and production roles with a fair degree of confidence.

As part of an expanded outreach to university IT students, IBM is releasing a set of Web-based tools and resources to help them hone marketable skills in the fastest-growing IT job opportunities.

We asked IT executives and industry experts to dream big and tell us about their ultimate wish lists for a brand-new, built-from-scratch data center -- if money were no object. Here's what they had to say:

Mike Milinkovich is the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, a nonprofit that oversees an open source community focused on application development tools. Founded by IBM in 2001, Eclipse became independently managed in 2004 and now boasts that more than 4 million people worldwide use Eclipse and Eclipse-based products. EBay, for example, used Eclipse to build much of its online architecture. Milinkovich this week discussed the Eclipse organization and its goals with Senior Writer Jon Brodkin.

Swimmers in Zurich, Switzerland, will enjoy a nice toasty pool this summer, thanks to a most unusual power source. Excess heat from an underground data center built inside a former military bunker is being collected and transferred to the nearby pool as part of an innovative energy efficiency project undertaken by GIB-Services, a Swiss IT co-location company.