David Needle

AMD plans to announce new models of its dual-core Opteron processor for servers Monday, in a bit of timing that is likely not incidental. On the eve of Intel’s semi-annual developer forum, the chipmaker announced upgrades to its dual-core Opteron with two new models. The news comes one day before the Intel Developer Forum in […]

In a move designed to facilitate fast adoption of its virtualization technology, AMD announced it is offering royalty-free licenses to hardware and software developers. The chip maker sees desktops as well as server applications for virtualization. “The idea is to make [virtualization] easy for anyone to implement,” Steve McDowell, director of emerging technology at AMD, […]

Dual-core processors are fast becoming the next big wave in computing. AMD more than got Intel’s attention when AMD’s dual-core Opteron started making big inroads in Intel’s server business. Competitors howl as Sun touts big power savings and eco-friendliness of new UltraSparc T1 chip line. Intel has since committed to moving its whole line of […]

In a major embarrassment to the world’s biggest chipmaker, Intel plans to delay the release of new versions of its ballyhooed Itanium processor until next year. Intel’s high-end Montecito processor has been put off until mid-2006, but a new Xeon MP platform is in the works. An Intel spokesman said Montecito, its first dual-core Itanium […]

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship for Oracle and IBM. The middleware and database competitors make peace. Maybe not a beautiful friendship, but the two arch rivals announced an agreement at Oracle OpenWorld today in San Francisco to make key parts of their software architectures work together. Company co-president Charles Phillips said […]

HP is enhancing the value of its Itanium-based Integrity servers and HP 9000 series based on PA-RISC with several new virtualization features. Additions to Integrity Servers, also planned for HP-UX, Windows Server 2003 and Linux. The new releases are designed to simplify the management of virtual servers and speed implementation of virtualized environments, which give […]

Vendors readily talk the talk in promoting the “value proposition” of server blades: Just add a blade to the chassis and scale to as much processing as you need. But do blades walk the walk in delivering the goods? Are the benefits of blade deployments overblown? “Many users are clearly disappointed in blades’ failure to […]

Cloud computing offers a potentially great way for IT to offload and expand infrastructure resources outside of the data center, but managing those cloud resources can be tricky. The purchase of Cloudkick means Rackspace Hosting can offer what it calls a cockpit for navigating complex environments. Enter Rackspace Hosting, which on Thursday announced the acquisition […]

More server hardware coverage Despite continued economic doldrums, the server hardware market saw a healthy revenue increase in the third quarter of 2010, according to research released Monday by IDC. Worldwide server hardware revenue in the latest quarter increased 13.2 percent from 2009, according to IDC. The research firm also reports HP and IBM remain […]

More on cloud computing CA Technologies has acquired 4Base technology, a privately-held consulting firm specializing in virtualization and cloud infrastructure. The virtualization and cloud computing infrastructure consulting firm will enhance CA’s services division. With the purchase, CA (NASDAQ: CA) said it will use 4Base to create a new virtualization and cloud strategy group within its […]

More on Oracle Oracle is ramping up its push to get its hardware and software systems front and center to prospective IT buyers. Next week’s event will tout Oracle’s systems approach, Sun hardware and the benefits of private clouds. With Sun Microsystems now firmly in Oracle’s (NASDAQ: ORCL) fold, the database giant is kicking off […]

HP Thursday bolstered its Integrity line with the addition of an r2660 entry class server and the Integrity BL860c Server Blade, the first Integrity model for HP’s BladeSystem c-Class, which was introduced last summer. HP unveiled a new server and blade aimed at mission-critical apps. HP shares most of the market for blade systems, a […]