FastScale Takes a Different Approach to Virtualization and Provisioning
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It would be hard to find a single person in any IT organization in the world that didn't think that the enterprise software stack--different virtualization hypervisors, dozens of operating systems, myriad database management systems, disparate middleware layers, and untold homegrown and third-party applications--is not too complex and too costly to support. There are a lot of ways to try to fix this problem, and a Silicon Valley startup called FastScale Technology, which has just come out of stealth mode, thinks that it has come up with a new way to make infrastructure simpler and easier to maintain. READ MORE >

Sun, Canonical Integrate Java, GlassFish, and NetBeans into Ubuntu
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Sun Microsystems might think that its Solaris version of Unix is the greatest operating system on the planet, but the company is also practical enough to know that Linux is ascending and driving a lot of server iron these days. The company is also savvy enough to have made best friends with Canonical, the commercial force behind the Ubuntu variant of Linux. So there is little surprise that the two announced that Ubuntu 7.04, the new Linux release announced this week by Canonical, will be the first Linux variant to offer an integrated set of Java development tools. READ MORE >

Round Two: Intel's Fortunes Rise, and AMD's Fall
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The two engines of the X64 server and desktop market, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, reported within the past few days their financial results for the first quarter of 2007, and a reinvigorated and reorganized Intel is hammering on AMD pretty hard in a price and technology war that began in 2003 when the Opteron processors were first announced. In the latest round of fighting, Intel is clearly winning back some lost ground, and that is pushing AMD into posting a loss. READ MORE >

Slowing U.S. Sales Hurt IBM's First Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2007 last Tuesday, kicking off the earnings season for the year for the major players in the IT market. Big Blue's sales were just a hair over $22 billion, up 6.6 percent, with net income of $1.8 billion, up 8 percent. The interesting news is that sales were flat in the United States, and as you might expect, sales in the booming Asia/Pacific region helped give IBM growth. Europe, which is often a problem area when it comes to growth for IBM, helped out this time, too, thanks in large part to the strength of the euro against the dollar. READ MORE >