Infrastructure

Oracle threw a punch that left HP's knees wobbling with the announcement that it's going to stop developing software to run on Intel's Itanium processor family. Intel's future roadmap focuses on x86 processors, Oracle explained. Intel promptly reiterated its support for the Itanium processor. HP war...

Annual summing-ups are common currency during this season, but for some industries and some years they seem particularly valuable, such as business IT in 2010. Following 2009's devastating financial meltdown, many in IT hoped the new year might spark a partial recovery or at least provide some badly...

When Larry Ellison introduced new servers and clusters at the old Sun Microsystems auditorium in Santa Clara, Calif., on Thursday, he poked fun at competitors IBM and HP, depicting Oracle as a cheetah, IBM as a stallion and HP as a turtle. He noted that HP products are slow and the company is vulner...

With the announcement of its PlayBook device, Research In Motion this week joined the ever-growing list of companies rushing to bring out tablets of their very own. The company seems to be focusing on the enterprise, with the hope that corporate users will love their PlayBooks so much that it will s...

Tech circles are buzzing about a pilot project Intel is trying out at select Best Buy stores, initially brought to light by Engadget. Intel is apparently marketing a $50 "upgrade" card for the Pentium G6951 dual-core LGA1156 Clarkdale processor that powers the Gateway SX2841-09e. The card offers the...

Chipmaker Intel on Thursday announced that it will acquire computer security vendor McAfee for about $7.8 billion. The deal will create a behemoth that may improve the semiconductor's position in the burgeoning mobile and cloud computing fields. "Security now joins our more well-known strategic focu...

The $1.15 billion that Dell has pledged to spend for data storage vendor 3Par could turn out to be a wise investment if Dell is able to use 3Par's assets -- its product line and its sales and support staff -- to carve out a position at the high end of the storage market. Dell announced its intent to...

Microsoft's tablet project is a top priority for the company, CEO Steve Baller told financial analysts at a presentation Thursday. However, he remained coy on the details. Redmond is working with several OEM partners, and the new tablet will run Windows, Ballmer said. Several vendors, including Tosh...

For most systems vendors, the launch of a next-generation server platform qualifies as a pretty big deal. After all, such occasions provide vendors multiple opportunities to strut their visionary stuff, roll out a host of satisfied customers, and highlight their current/future strategies. However, s...

Gut-wrenching recessions have a way of changing things ... for people, families and companies. They can also, perhaps like no other event, provoke change in large IT vendors like HP, IBM, TIBCO and Oracle. Based on recent HP announcements and IBM's Impact conference, these two of the very largest, f...

The ongoing buzz surrounding cloud computing -- particularly public clouds -- is far outpacing actual deployments by mainstream users. To date, only 14 percent of companies have deployed or plan to deploy a private cloud infrastructure within the next two calendar quarters. Instead, as businesses sl...

Intel seems to have delivered the goods with its next-gen Atom processor-based platform. On the technical side, it includes Intel's Atom processor Z6xx Series Family, the Platform Controller Hub MP20 and a dedicated Mixed Signal IC. It adds 3-D graphics, video encode and decode, and memory and displ...

Turn on an Android OS phone, and that little yellow robot pops up all over the touchscreen like R2D2 on bionic steroids. A mini-chorus line of them shows up first, then just one robot decides to play hide and seek with you; there he is peeking out from the left side of the screen. Now he's upside do...

Companies have often focused on projects that save costs -- both operational and capital -- across a wide range of IT functions. The one area where companies have generally shied away from making any drastic changes has been in the area of data center buildout and operations. This area, in most case...

The discussion so far about the iPad -- a discussion that has officially engulfed the mainstream media and leaped the shark tank to include appearances on David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon's late-night shows -- has focused on the potential for joining media-hungry consumers as a third screen on their...