Servers: Interviews

Solaris has been Sun Microsystems's bread-and-butter Unix system since 1992. While Unix platforms such as Solaris now are up against the open source Linux juggernaut, Sun maintains it has the technological advantages and accommodations for open source to keep Solaris in the game. The company also cites important customer wins as evidence of the platform's continued strength. To hash out the state of Solaris in today's marketplace, InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill recently met with Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing at Sun, at the company's California campus.

Bob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of infrastructure server marketing, gave the morning keynote speech at Monday's "Get Virtualization" event in the US. The event had 1,000 attendees and kicks off a series of worldwide shows that may eventually have 175,000 attendees total. Kelly spoke to Computerworld about his company's virtualization efforts; excerpts from that interview follow.

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26 percent per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200 percent annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

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.

VeriSign is in many ways synonymous with managing the Web, thanks to its handling of key DNS root servers and of name resolution for .com, .net, and other domains. In recent years, it's had both strong ups and strong downs.

The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop/s, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Patrick Gelsinger is an electrical engineer. He joined Intel in 1979, worked on the design of the 80286 and 80386 microprocessors, and was the chief architect for the 80486 chip.

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in the US. Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of global services and CIO at Dell, outlined his company's plan to deliver a hosted remote-management offering that it calls "IT as a service." In the following interview, Schuckenbrock spoke about the plan and what Dell is doing to polish its tarnished customer-service reputation.

Intel is embracing the trend to virtualize across a broad range of business facets, from security to multiple core CPU's. The company currently has teams working on hardware features to assist with virtualized environments, and is embracing an open approach to the technology by partnering with major ISV's such as VMWare and Microsoft, as well as open source communities.

Linux and High Performance Computing go hand in hand. So to see what Australian users have been doing with Linux and HPC, this year's linux.conf.au is holding a Birds of a Feather session on the topic. Before the session kicks off we take time to speak to the BoF coordinator Anthony David. During the working day David works for SGI as the onsite engineer for the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC). Here, we ask him about the state of HPC in Australia and where it is heading. The following responses are his own personal beliefs and not that of his employer.