News

• Blade servers: Big power for small businesses

  Many small businesses with larger server needs are turning to blade servers to pack big power into a small space. But what exactly is a blade server, and how do you know if it's right for your small business?

• Piston Cloud has made the tough private cloud decisions for you

  Joshua McKenty, co-founder and chief executive officer of Piston Cloud, what he calls The Enterprise OpenStack Company, was in on the ground floor of OpenStack's creation, working as he was on the Anso Labs team at NASA to build a compute cloud on top of open source platform Eucalyptus. The team eventually gave up on that and wrote Nova, which NASA uses today to power its Nebula Cloud environment, and Nova was ultimately contributed to the OpenStack project, which it formed with Rackspace. McKenty left NASA after Anso was acquired by Rackspace in 2010, and formed Piston Cloud in 2011 with co-founders Gretchen Curtis (also of NASA) and Christopher MacGown of Rackspace. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with McKenty for a deep dive on why OpenStack matters and where Piston Cloud fits in.

• HP moves high-end Superdome to blade platform

  Hewlett-Packard has unveiled some major updates to its Integrity line of Itanium-based servers, including a new edition of its top-end Superdome system based on HP's blade server architecture.

• Australian Plant Phenomics Facility rolls out new IT infrastructure

  The Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF) has deployed a new IT infrastructure aimed at supporting its research into new varieties of food crops.

• Forecast 2010: Servers get a makeover in 2010

  The recession may have forced Media General Inc. to scale back its grand plans for server virtualization in 2009, but like many other businesses, the communications company is planning a major push to make up lost ground this year.

• Cisco will be hard pressed to match 2009

  2009 started with a bang and ended with a bash for Cisco.  

• Blades are server market's bright spot, says IDC

  While total 2009 server sales still remain below last year's totals, IDC's quarterly tracker report released today indicates that worldwide demand for the systems among enterprise customers may finally be increasing.

• HP pushes thin clients with new hardware, tools

  Hewlett-Packard is trying to tackle concerns about the cost and complexity of thin-client computing with new products and tools announced Tuesday.

• HP unveils new scale-out servers

  Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced a pair of servers aimed at companies that want to build large-scale computing clusters while maximizing data center space.

• Cisco unveils data center blade switch

  Cisco this week unveiled a blade addition to its Nexus line of data center switches that’s designed to aggregate multiple physical x86 blade servers from various vendors into a 10G Ethernet fabric.

• Water cooling, virtualisation saves Uni data centre

  Explosive business growth has caught up with Open Universities Australia which has used a combination of blade servers, water cooling and virtualisation to save its in-house data centre and a million dollar outsourcing contract.

• Credit checker halves server count with virtualisation

  Financial services firm Veda Advantage has halved the number of x86 servers with a consolidation and virtualisation project.

• China's chips to power blade servers this year

  Blade servers based on microprocessors designed in China will power a supercomputer prototype to be revealed by a government-backed Chinese firm in September, the company said Tuesday.

• IBM to resell Brocade's Foundry switches

  Brocade has extended an OEM relationship with IBM to include its recently acquired Foundry switches in a deal that appears to be in retaliation for Cisco's recent entry into the blade server market.

• BladeSystem Matrix takes aim at Cisco

  HP has rolled out BladeSystem Matrix, a converged software, server, storage and network platform designed to compete against Cisco's Unified Computing System.