Sun Casts a $1 Billion Net to Catch MySQL
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 2008 IT market was looking a little boring so far this year, but server and operating system maker and software powerhouse wannabee Sun Microsystems woke everybody up early Wednesday morning with the news that it would spend $1 billion to acquire open source database maker MySQL. This is arguably one of the smartest moves Sun has made in a decade, and probably rivals the decision it made in the mid-1990s to buy the carcasses from Thinking Machines, Kendall Square, and the Cray Sparc-based server business. READ MORE >

HP Revamps ProLiant Rack and Tower Servers with New X64 Chips
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Hewlett-Packard is the dominant supplier of X64-based servers in the world, and keeping the technology current inside its ProLiant server lines and giving customers a choice of processor technology from both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices has served the company well in maintaining its lead in the X64 server space. This week, HP is putting new quad-core processors into its entry and midrange products. READ MORE >

IBM Gets Clustered Storage and EMC Founder with XIV Buy
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The company's name is pronounced 'Ex Eye Vee,' and it stands for the Roman numeral for 'fourteen,' in honor of the fourteenth class of the Talpiot technical university, run by the Israeli military, that XIV Limited's founders all hail. And now the Israeli startup specializing in clustered disk storage is part of IBM's System Storage unit, which has its hands on the small company's substantial expertise in block-level, virtualized, clustered storage arrays. READ MORE >

As I See It: Weighty Matters
by Victor Rozek

The package arrived the day before Christmas. It came all the way from the East coast courtesy of my in-laws. As soon as my wife saw it, she got a sly look on her face and urged me to open it because, she said, it was "time sensitive." But my father-in-law is to packaging what Madonna is to restraint, so opening one of his packages requires a great deal of patience and resolve. Having a modest cache of explosives wouldn't hurt either. So I gathered a chisel, a hammer, a sharp knife, and a sturdy pair of pruning shears and set about penetrating the sedimentary layers of packaging. READ MORE >