Avnet Buys GE's Access Server Distribution Biz for $412.5 Million
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Electronics and IT infrastructure distributor Avnet is one of the largest such distributors in the world, and this week it got quite a bit larger as it acquired one of the jewels of the IT distribution business: General Electric's Access Distribution business. Access may not be a brand name that a lot of end users know, but it is projected to have over $2 billion in sales in 2006 and is the largest distributor of servers made by Sun Microsystems. READ MORE >

HP Taps Fink to Run Business Critical Systems Division
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Hewlett-Packard has announced that one of the most senior executives to hail from the Compaq/Digital side of the HP-Compaq merger has stepped down. Rich Marcello, who has been senior vice president and general manager of HP's Business Critical Systemss division for the past three and a half years, is stepping down from that post to devote his efforts to community service. He will be replaced by Martin Fink, who ran HP's NonStop fault tolerant server business as well as its company-wide Open Source and Linux Organization. Both Fink and Marcello reported to Scott Stollard, who runs the Enterprise Storage and Servers Group. READ MORE >

Sun Chases Web 2.0 Boom with Discounts for Startups
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Philosopher George Santayana famously said that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Sun is now run by Jonathan Schwartz, who is something of a young philosopher king in Silicon Valley, and it is safe to say that he has studied history and that there is some history that Sun wants to avoid--the hubris of the late 1990s, and the lack of planning for a possible downturn, for instance. But there is also some history that Sun would like to repeat. Like, for instance, the next build-out of Internet technologies, which is vaguely--and perhaps disingenuously--called Web 2.0. READ MORE >

IBM Creates Virtualization Dashboard, Merges Server and Storage Management
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Just about everyone in the server, operating system, and server virtualization hypervisor racket has come to the conclusion that hypervisors will be commoditized soon--if not already--and that the real differentiation in the market--and hence the money--will come from the tools that manage virtualized server and storage resources. This is why IBM is working on merging its Director server management tools and its TotalStorage Productivity Center, the equivalent tool for its storage arrays. The first product to come out of this united effort is a tool called the Virtualization Manager. READ MORE >