Data Center

Wed, August 19, 2009 - It's unclear exactly how the Sun will set this month or what Oracle will be doing with the hardware side of Sun. Will Sun servers soon get a coat of Oracle Red and an "Unbreakable" stamp? Whatever happens, it seems that Oracle will be inheriting a hardware engineering group that's firing on all cylinders. The new Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4270 servers are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced.

Mon, August 10, 2009 - Optimizing power consumption, CPU performance, and form factor is a never-ending battle in server design and IBM's Bladecenter HS22 succeeds on all counts.

Wed, July 22, 2009 - Green is the name of the game today, and both Seagate and Western Digital have released environmentally friendly drives that use less power but are also slower than typical hard drives.

Thu, July 09, 2009 - Sun's VirtualBox lets you install multiple operating systems, offering greater speed and ease of use than its competitors.

Thu, July 09, 2009 - Last May, InfoWorld presented a comparative roundup of workstations built on the then-new quad-core processors. In that review, I examined an entry-level machine, two midranges, and a high-end system. While impressed by their muscle, I still felt the need to explain how those workstations were a category separate from high-end desktop systems. The Nehalem workstations I examine this year, however, require no such explanation. They move the flag forward so far that few people would consider purchasing them for standard business applications, where a good desktop or laptop would be sufficient.

Mon, June 15, 2009 - VMware's vSphere 4.0 is a massive update to VMware's flagship hypervisor and management toolset that will put significant pressure on Microsoft and the Xen development community.

Wed, June 10, 2009 - Whereas higher-end telepresence products do come with large price tag, some vendors also offer alternatives that deliver a similar, if not identical, face-to-face experience -- far more affordably.

Wed, June 10, 2009 - No question, telepresence tools greatly reduce costly, productivity-sapping travel, with the added benefit of lowering a company's carbon footprint. Yet scratchy audio quality, out-of-sync slides, and tiny, Webcam-quality video often diminish these solutions' usefulness.

Tue, June 02, 2009 - From the start, Apple's Xserve has ranked best-in-class in build quality, engineering, durability, and serviceability among 1U x86 rack servers. The newest Xserve, redesigned around Intel's Nehalem Xeon quad-core CPU, adds performance to the list of Xserve's leadership criteria.

Mon, June 01, 2009 - Ubuntu Server is a fast, free, no-frills Linux distribution that fills a niche between utilitarian Debian and the GUI-driven and, some would argue, over-featured Novell SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.