Dan Orzech

Anyone who’s bought a computer lately knows that the price of storage has been falling rapidly. And as disk drives get cheaper, databases are getting bigger, which is enabling companies to do things they couldn’t do a few years ago, according to Richard Winter, president of Waltham, Mass.-based Winter Corp., a consulting shop that specializes […]

Imagine a server with 110 Terabytes of hard disk. That’s roughly what the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, better known as NCSA, has developed. NCSA, a government-funded research center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been on the frontiers of computing since it was founded in 1986. NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical Web […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an IT Management Special Report on infrastructure and outsourcing. Today’s world of managed services and hosted applications is moving towards an IT world where computing power is available on demand from a public utility-like grid. It may seem like exotic, bleeding-edge technology, but grid computing is poised to […]

With its large multinational customers demanding a single point of contact for support contracts, HP today signed an agreement with Linux distributor Red Hat to support the entire line of Red Hat enterprise Linux solutions. The deal allows HP to offer end-to-end support for mission-critical applications running on Linux, similar to what it currently offers […]

IBM customers have placed orders as of this week for 5,000 of Big Blue’s new Xeon-powered blade servers, according to the company. That’s just two and a half months after the product was introduced. The reception to IBM’s blade server “surpasses anything we have seen in the industry standard server marketplace at IBM,” says Jeff […]

The application hosting world has seen its share of ups and downs. Just last month, two major players — Intel, and LoudCloud, the startup founded by Netscape Communications co-founder Marc Andreessen — exited the Web hosting business. But while the turmoil has left customers cautious, it hasn’t kept them from hosting their applications outside company […]

In the 14 years that she’s worked at Sun Microsystems, Susan Bickford has accumulated a lot of company cards. There’s the card that gets her in the door of her office building. Her corporate credit card. The company phone card. A Sun health benefits plan card. But if Bickford has her way, instead of a […]

One can hardly imagine two more different groups of people in the world of computing. In the glass house, where the mainframe reigns in air-conditioned splendor, mainframe jockeys running Cobol batch jobs keep the core business of banks, airlines and other large enterprises humming, as they have for decades. Meanwhile, down the hall, Unix hackers […]

Only a few short blocks from the site of ground zero in lower Manhattan, and in an economy struggling to fight its way out of a recession, last week’s LinuxWorld conference was a more subdued event than in previous years. But the quieter atmosphere could not hide the fact that Linux has achieved a level […]

Linux — the open source operating system which started out as a college student’s hobby 10 years ago — is rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the mainframe data centers of corporate America. Two years after a handful of IBM programmers in Germany first ported Linux to the IBM S/390, thousands of […]