What does Steve Wozniak know about solid-state drives that we don't? David Flynn, the chief technology officer of SSD start-up Fusion-io, provides some insight into why the Apple co-founder is joining the company as chief scientist.

I talked with Flynn on the phone about what the Salt Lake City start-up, founded in 2006, does and what attracted Wozniak.

Enterprise solid-state drives typically offer much better performance than even the fastest hard-disk drives. Fusion-io claims that its IoDrive improves storage performance by as much as 1,000 times over traditional disk arrays while operating at a fraction of the power … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices will announce Wednesday that its first six-core processor in on track to launch later this year.

AMD's "Istanbul" processor will be targeted at server computers. With the release, AMD will be playing catch up to Intel, which began offering its six-core "Dunnington" processor for servers last fall. Intel's first Nehalem-architecture server processor is also due soon, which, on a per-core basis, is expected to offer better performance than Dunnington.

"The silicon is healthy and we're targeting a launch in 2H09," AMD spokesperson Jake Whitman said Tuesday.

"The … Read more

ESG virtualization guru Mark Bowker is keeping me abreast of the goings-on at VMworld Europe in Cannes. In between the merlot and brie, Microsoft and Citrix announced an interesting and potentially lucrative partnership for server virtualization and virtualization management dubbed "Project Encore."

Here's the deal. In spite of its recent release of Hyper-V, Microsoft remains behind VMware in terms of enterprise management features. To bridge this gap, Microsoft is teaming with Citrix to offer advanced server virtualization management through Citrix Essentials. Citrix Essentials builds on Hyper-V with management capabilities for storage management, physical/virtual server provisioning, and … Read more

CANNES, France--Virtualization specialist VMware has introduced its next generation of data center virtualization tools, called vSphere.

Speaking on Tuesday at the VMworld Europe 2009 conference here, VMware president Paul Maritz said vSphere would let companies virtualize all their workloads.

"VMware vSphere will gradually replace our existing generation of infrastructure products," Maritz said, adding that the first elements of the new suite will be delivered later this year. "On top of vSphere will be the new vCenter Suite. The idea is in a series of steps to move closer and closer to the management of service levels."… Read more

Google App Engine is growing a step more mature, with Google planning on Tuesday to begin allowing people using the cloud-computing foundation to pay for heavy use.

When Google launched App Engine last April, it was available only as a free service with caps on computing and network resource usage. Free use is still available for lower-traffic sites, but Google now lets users pay for higher access as needed.

"It's been one of our biggest developer requests," said Pete Koomen, Google App Engine product manager.

The billing feature makes Google App Engine useful for those who want … Read more

When I reviewed Fabrik's SimpleTech Signature Mini and SimpleTech (re)drive external hard drives a while ago, I liked its tasteful designs. As it turns out, my taste wasn't so peculiar.

Hitachi on Monday announced its decision to acquire Fabrik, a privately held supplier of personal and professional storage solutions.

If you haven't heard of Fabrik, this is because it has been selling external storage under two better-known brands: G-Technology and SimpleTech. CNET has reviewed several products launched under each brand.

Although the financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, Hitachi made it clear that Fabrik'… Read more

Updated 6:44 a.m. PST to reflect that Gmail service was restored.

Business and personal users of Gmail suffered an outage starting about 1:30 a.m. PST Tuesday, but Google said it's fixed the problem.

"If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email," said Acacio Cruz, Google's Gmail site reliability manager, in a blog posting … Read more

Micron Technology is cutting as many as 2,000 more jobs because of slumping demand for its products, as the shakeout in the memory chip business continues.

The largest U.S. maker of memory chips said Monday afternoon that decreased demand for specialty DRAM products has "created additional challenges" for its Boise, Idaho, manufacturing operations. As a result, Micron said it will phase out 200 millimeter (mm) wafer manufacturing operations at the company's Boise facility.

"This action will reduce employment at Micron's Idaho sites by approximately 500 employees in the near term and as many … Read more

Intel said in its annual report that Hewlett-Packard accounted for 20 percent of Intel's revenue, up from 17 percent in 2007. Dell accounted for 18 percent in 2008, flat with 2007.

No other customer accounted for more than 10 percent of sales, according to Intel's annual regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The annual report didn't hold many surprises-especially about how netbooks and Intel's Atom chip would affect profit margins in the future.

Here's a look at the highlights from Intel's report.