Project Indiana to Create an OpenSolaris Distro
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When Sun Microsystems took its Solaris operating system open source nearly two years ago, the company was without question trying to emulate the success of Linux in order to keep Solaris from becoming largely irrelevant in modern data centers. Sun has been hinting about something called Project Indiana for some time, and it turns out to be another page from the Linux playbook. READ MORE >

Sun Broadens Its Blade Server Lineup
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For all of the talk about the blade server form factor in the server space, blades have not grown anywhere near as fast as many had expected and after the failures of a number of players, the market is dominated in a disproportionate fashion by Hewlett-Packard and IBM. While Dell, Fujitsu, NEC, Sun Microsystems, and a number of players are trying to get into the game--some for the second time, in fact--none has broken out sufficiently in blades to make this a three horse race. With the "Constellation" blade server announcements that Sun made yesterday, the company hopes to change that. READ MORE >

HP Tweaks Home-Grown Virtualization for Integrity Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When server maker Hewlett-Packard bet the high-end server farm on the Itanium architecture more than a decade ago, it was also betting that the industry would, too. And, given the slew of endorsements that the industry gave for Itanium way back then, this all seemed reasonable. But Itanium has not gone mainstream--not like X64 processors have, anyway--and one of the side effects of this is that neither the Xen hypervisor from XenSource or the ESX Server hypervisor from VMware support the Itanium architecture. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Missing Inaction
by Hesh Wiener

IBM, which is neck-and-neck in the server trade with Hewlett-Packard, formerly made typewriters, disk drives, printers, and personal computers. Over the past two decades it shed many of the products it used to manufacture, by continued to grow by creating a huge services group and absorbing a number of software companies. Except for its typewriters, none of the products IBM dropped have disappeared, the way DB Cooper, Jimmy Hoffa, or Judge Crater vanished. Today, IBM still manufactures some servers and storage devices, and perhaps it doesn't have to manufacture anything at all. READ MORE >