Struggling to marry your company's environmental concerns with the right IT management philosophies? The Business Performance Management Forum BPM Forum and hosting company Rackable Systems have started a new "thought leadership" program, Think Eco-Logical, to help companies share ideas and data that can serve as the foundation for industry best...

The Microsoft "Big Brains" series, via which I am profiling Microsoft's roughly two dozen Technical Fellows, continues. This week's fellow is Dave Campbell, the head of strategy and architecture for SQL Services. by Mary Jo Foley

A MySQL file containing contact information, founder bios, business plans, demos and financial information for 588 applicants to Kleiner Perkins's iFund – a $100 million fund to invest in startups building applications for the iPhone – was accidentally posted to the Web and indexed by Google. Kleiner...

* Ryan Naraine is traveling. Guest editorial by Slavik Markovich Every quarter, around the time of the Oracle Critical Patch Update CPU or the Microsoft "Patch Tuesday," rituals take place – some behind closed doors, others in the media. Web sites report of the...

The enterprise-software company has collaborated with networking-hardware company Emulex to produce Linux kernel data-integrity code. Oracle has announced that it has contributed data-integrity code to the Linux kernel. The open-source code, which has been accepted into the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, is designed to reduce data corruption...

Richard Whitehead, one of the interesting people from Novell I speak with on an irregular basis, contacted me to tell me about an update to the PlateSpin portfolio and how Novell the PlateSpin product family and the former ZenWorks Orchestrator have been rebranded. Novell's products in the area of virtualization...

Here are today's notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily: Adam O'Donnell: Despite what blogs and Apple say, Macs will eventually have malware Ed Bott: Windows 7 Beta 1 to arrive January 13? Andrew...

Sometimes, I SWEAR that companies put out green IT-ish press releases on the same day just to divert attention from their rivals. So, here's the thing, after writing about Dell's latest data center proclamations and new optimization services this morning, I would be remiss not to point to some of...

Microsoft has begun rolling out the Windows Live Wave 3 services it announced last month. The company also went public today with its "Generation 4 Datacenter" strategy. by Mary Jo Foley

News started leaking late last week that Sage, the UK's largest software company, will release an on-demand accounting application called SageLive aimed at the SMB market. Details are sketchy beyond a blog post by competitor KashFlow but it seems the company is finally getting serious about the on-demand space after...

As a business society, we've been pretty much used to thinking of information technology as a disposable asset. Even data centers were built with a 10-year lifespan in mind, which means a lot of the work done and systems deployed around the year 2000 is quickly reaching that maturity point....

Zoho on Tuesday launched CloudSQL, a middleware layer that gives developers access to Zoho Applications data via a SQL database call. With the move, Zoho is playing an anti-lock-in card. One of the biggest worries about software as a service is that your data--and your business--can be...

Zoho just can't stop churning out software. Today it is launching the Zoho CloudSQL. Put simply, this is the first step to providing a cloud based integration framework that allows developers to pass data between Zoho applications and their own. This is exciting stuff.  For the...

MySQL's founder has released version 5.1 of the open-source database software, but simultaneously warned of a number of bugs present in the new features that still need to be fixed. Sun has released version 5.1 of the open-source MySQL database software, but the software's founder simultaneously warned...

It seems appropriate as I hunker down in my rather chilly office that I pen this post about the ongoing data center "Chill-Off" projects being run by the Association For Computer Operations Management AFCOM in Northern California. The intention of the Chill-Off demonstrations/tests is to monitor the effect of modular...

I've poked around some during the past two months, trying to get a read on whether or not companies are actually buying the data center containers or "pods" that several of the larger high-tech systems vendors have been piloting this year. So far, the biggest evangelist on the customer side...

A crew of folks from Cassatt presented Active Profiling Service, a new service offering, and Active Response 5.2, a product update for the company's orchestration and automation product. I was very interested in learning more because Cassatt has long been helping organizations discover and then make best use of their...

Last week, I received a notice from IBM's PR company that IBM was going to acquire Transitive, that clever supplier of operating system and hardware virtualization technology. It's clearly a move to strengthen IBM's claim on being the premier supplier of systems for the next generation datacenter. ...

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Nick Portolese, Senior Manager of Data Center Operations for Nielsen Mobile, an Altor Networks customer. He spent a few moments sharing his experiences with their software. Nick's comments follow. Please tell me who you are and what...

The history of Windows, from 3.11 to Vista, is one of ad hoc adaptation to market conditions and expectational change among customers. To a large extent it's been about playing catch up to Unix and the Mac - with fascinating devolutions along the way. by Paul Murphy