Chris Preimesberger

STANFORD, Calif. — Philanthropist Bill Gates is able to take things a little slower these days, since he doesnt have to worry anymore about the day-to-day irritations of running a major multinational corporation. He mostly thinks about how to give his — and colleague-in-cash Warren Buffetts — money away for the betterment of mankind through […]

Storage server maker Rackable Systems on Nov. 14 introduced a new cluster file system storage appliance designed specifically for large-scale Linux computing environments. The RapidScale SA3100 appliance, which attaches directly to the network, is designed to smooth out I/O bottlenecks commonly associated with legacy NAS (network-attached storage) systems and delivers a single file system package […]

Data security and storage provider Symantec announced a new API Nov. 14 that offers enterprise developers a way to connect Symantecs backup software with other companies disk drives. The new interface, called the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage API, will enable high-end, intelligent disk devices from several different companies to integrate natively with NetBackup, Symantecs popular enterprise […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Although it may get some disagreement from IBM, SourceForge.com and Linus Torvalds, Sun Microsystems laid claim to being the worlds largest contributor to the open-source software community Nov. 13 by turning over millions of lines of Java code to the governance of the GNU General Public License, v2.0. And not a moment too […]

To those long-suffering open-source developers who have been waiting for years to venture unencumbered into Java code and tweak it to their hearts content, Sun Microsystems has three things to say: G, P and L. Sun on Nov. 13 released at www.sun.com/java all versions of Java-Standard, Enterprise and Micro Edition-under GNU GPL (General Public License) […]

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Back in May at JavaOne, Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz and Canonical Ltd. Founder and President Mark Shuttleworth—creator of the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux—promised to do a lot of business in the coming months. Their promise is holding quite true six months later. Sun and Canonical, a two-year-old U.K.-based commercial sponsor of the […]

IBM continued its full-court press on the midtier market Nov. 8 with the introduction of two new midrange storage servers designed for companies that use so-called “hardened” infrastructures, due to the industries they serve or the data center environments where the equipment is located. A hardened, or heavy-duty, IT infrastructure is one that utilizes high-end […]

Dell, trying to demonstrate some innovation in a sector where it seeks to pick up market share, introduced Nov. 8 a new removable disk-based storage device for data backup and restore that the company says combines the speed of a hard disk with the portability of tape. Aimed squarely small and midsize businesses, branch offices […]

NetApp revealed Nov. 8 that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company intends to acquire neighboring Topio Software, a privately held Santa Clara, Calif.-based company with R&D in Haifa, Israel, for approximately $160 million in an all-cash transaction. The acquisition is expected to close in December. Topio will become a new business unit within NetApp, and its research […]

Because running several virtual servers on one physical machine can be tricky for administrators, data storage and security provider Symantec introduced on Nov. 7 a new server designed to work in clusters and supply native support to data centers running VMwares trendy virtual-server software. Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 for VMware ESX automates remote failover for […]