OpenSolaris: One Year Down, Participation Up
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The OpenSolaris project that Sun Microsystems created to foster a development community around its Solaris variant of the Unix operating system is celebrating its first birthday this week--assuming you call a birthday the day that source code was actually made available to developers to play with. While the OpenSolaris project has come far in the past year, but there is still work that needs to be done to allow more significant participation in the project from techies outside of Sun itself. READ MORE >

Merrill Lynch Cases IT Spending, Server Buying Patterns
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The analysts at brokerage house Merrill Lynch have been taking the pulse of data center managers to get a sense of how things are going out there in IT Land. A couple times a year, Merrill Lynch polls 75 chief information officers in the United States and 25 in Europe to pick their brains on various issues. According to those polled, IT spending among these large enterprises is expected to rise by an average of 5.2 percent in 2006 and by an average of 4.8 in 2007. READ MORE >

HP Says It Will "Blade Everything" As Next Gen Boxes Launch
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard yesterday launched the next generation of its BladeSystem blade servers at an event in its Palo Alto, California, headquarters, and Ann Livermore, who is essentially third in command at HP (after chairman Patricia Dunne and chief executive officer Mark Hurd), was on hand to put the announcement into a much larger perspective. While the new BladeCenter c-Class machines might be able to give HP the pole position in the blade server market, HP laid it on a bit thick in trying to position a server launch as something much larger than that. READ MORE >

The X Factor: Is Memory-Based Software Pricing the Answer?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A year and a half ago, the IT industry was just beginning to come to the realization that the advent of multiple cores on processor chips was going to wreak havoc on software pricing. Since that time, vendors have been wrestling with how to price software on products where more and more processing elements, virtual threads, and even whole virtualized machines are zooming around dynamically inside of a single physical machine. But the answer might have been there all along: The 1s and 0s of main memory. READ MORE >