PC World Business

Oracle recently halted work on a green data center project in a suburb of Salt Lake City, but it is not clear why.

U.S. government IT spending is projected to grow to US$90 billion in 2014, up from $76 billion in 2009, with cloud computing and cybersecurity being high-growth areas, according to Input, an analysis and consulting firm focused on government contracting.

Surging prices for NAND flash memory have hurt what was a promising market for solid-state disk (SSD) drives in laptops this year, according to market research by iSupply Corp.

LaCie has announced a range of storage solutions for video professionals. The LaCie 12big Rack product range is an enterprise class 2U rack-mounted portfolio.

When it comes to storage, Western Digital and Seagate are perhaps the two most recognisable brands in the market. They rival each other in nearly every segment of the storage market and try to outdo each other with innovations in ease of use and power efficiency. We've pitched these two storage giants against each other and taken a look at some of the key differences between their products.

Signifying a formless haze of computing power and storage that is somewhere "out there," computerdom's current buzzword is as difficult to get one's arms around as a real cloud. A seemingly limitless pool of processors and memory and disk space, and you just scoop out what you need. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Seeking to cater to more customer tastes in the increasingly crowded market for large-scale data warehousing and analysis, startup Aster Data Systems on Monday announced a new series of appliances that combine Aster's nCluster database and hardware in a preconfigured package.

There was a time when it looked like HD-DVD would be winner in the battle to bring high-definition to computers and video players. Then the momentum suddenly swung to a competing standard called Blu-ray. Now, it looks like Blu-Ray is in trouble, but not from HD-DVD.

It looks like an old friend of mine, Sun Microsystems, may be going the way of the dinosaur. Sort of, anyway. Or maybe just transformed. We all have to wait and see.

We suppose it happens in families too, where one twin seems charmed from the start while the other lives under a shadow. Certainly that's the case with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the one almost universally heralded and the other widely snubbed. Still, isn't it odd? How do two operating systems, born together and sharing so much DNA, arrive to such different fates?

Why is Sony bothering with entertainment when it could be using flash drives to dramatically improve laptop data security?

There comes a point in the life of any hard-core Linux user when the idea of digging about to find yet another obscure piece of software, compiling the code, and integrating it into your daily routine just seems annoying, not compelling. This is where Fedora comes through. Because more of the popular and necessary packages "just work" with Fedora, less time is burned spinning wheels and more time is available for productive tasks.

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

September is usually too early to draw year-end conclusions, but I'll go out on a limb to say that 2008 will be remembered as a key year for SSDs (solid-state drives) -- not so much for sales figures, which won't likely reflect the hype surrounding flash SSDs this year, but for the technology itself, which remains one of the most controversial to hit storage in recent times.

Bob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of infrastructure server marketing, gave the morning keynote speech at Monday's "Get Virtualization" event in the US. The event had 1,000 attendees and kicks off a series of worldwide shows that may eventually have 175,000 attendees total. Kelly spoke to Computerworld about his company's virtualization efforts; excerpts from that interview follow.

Paul Cormier is Red Hat's executive VP and head of Red Hat products and technologies divisions. His experienced thumb is firmly planted in many Red Hat pies; including engineering, product management and product marketing. The company credits the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Cormier's leadership and experience in enterprise technology. Cormier has returned Down Under on another visit to Red Hat's research and development team in Brisbane, and took some time out to chat with Computerworld about the anticipated boom in virtualisation, cloud computing, Microsoft's open source initiatives, CentOS, JBoss Application Server 5.0, how open source software can aid the current economic downturn, and of course, the growing role of Linux and RHEL in the enterprise.

How often have you had to repeatedly copy files from one place to another either to create a backup or to synchronize two locations, and finally resorted to writing some dumb batch files to do the job? Of course, as your batch files have no real intelligence, you could well find your ad hoc solution has failed you.

In some situations, you might need multiple computers, so you'll just need to get a new keyboard, mouse, and display each time, right? Instead, try a more effective--and cost-effective--ways to use two systems. Here area few ways to get multiple-system benefits without the full multiple-system cost.

Any business of any size runs on information, whether it's keeping track of accounting data or managing the flow of proposals and orders. Over the past 25 years, computers have transformed the way that small businesses operate, making it possible to organize and manage information in ways that simply was not possible in the days of paper ledgers and index cards.

If you are part of a business, sooner or later you want to be able to collaborate on a database with a colleague or customer. In the past, the easiest way to share a small database was to create a spreadsheet and email it to your collaborators. While this isn't the best method, it has withstood more sophisticated competition for several reasons:

Before you install a database, you need to grapple with concepts like database servers, relational and object databases, and the thorny question of why apparently similar products range in price from free to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Read this guide to understand how e-mail works and how it folds into the broader capabilities of today's messaging and collaboration platforms.