What's going on in networking, operating systems, servers, storage and data centres?
Editor, journalist, analyst, presenter and blogger. As well as blogging and writing news & features here on ZDNet, I work as a cloud analyst with STL Partners, and write for a number of other news and feature sites. I also provide research and analysis services, video and audio production, white papers, event photography, voiceovers, event moderation, you name it... Back story An IT journalist for 25+ years, I worked for Ziff-Davis UK for almost 10 years on PC Magazine, reaching editor-in-chief. Before that, I worked for a number of other business & technology publications and was published in national and international titles.
Servers of tomorrow will be optically powered, and consume a fraction of the power they do today. This means less heat, less energy consumption and, of course, data centres whose compute power is -- well, not infinitely -- but orders of magnitude better than today's.
Storage in the cloud. Has a nice cosy feel to it doesn't it?
When it comes to document collaboration, things can only get better. We've seen Google Wave make a splash (sorry) and, together with collaboration tool Google Docs, you could live and work without ever loading any software.
I spent some time talking to Dell recently about data deduping: it appears the company is moving into that market.Backing up has always been hard to do.
I've noted in a previous blog that no-one has yet appeared to have built the nirvana of data centres: a totally automated, virtualised system where the top level of management is the data centre rather than the server.However, if cutting energy is the end-game, there's a couple of initiatives that are worth noting: according to this story, IBM is reportedly building what's described as one of the greenest datacentres that will use 50 percent less energy than a typical datacentre.
Google Wave, the all-in-one browser-based communications technology, looks like it could revolutionise communications. The company's clearly thought about what needs to be done to bring the whole mish-mash of email, IM, and other daily comms systems under a single roof.
VMware's vSphere 4.0, released just over a month ago, is aimed at helping VMware stay at least two steps ahead of Microsoft, now its biggest competitor in the virtualisation market; VMware's previous move in this perpetual dance was to make its core hypervisor ESX a free download.
Just got back from Interop -- brain's still a bit foggy for the usual trans-Atlantic reasons -- but one thing that sticks with me is the emphasis put on cloud computing. Everyone I spoke to had an angle on it, whether they're wireless vendors, networking vendors, or server vendors.
Just finished a day at HP's advanced data centre – er, centre – at Isle d'Abeau, near Lyon. It was useful to catch-up with HP's thinking with respect to data centres, and a chance to talk to one of its key customers, agri-business company Syngenta.
So Oracle, having bought Sun, wants to retain Sun's hardware portfolio. How much sense does that make?