Servers & business storage

Worldwide IT spending should top $3.4 trillion in 2008, up 8 percent from 2007, research firm Gartner is predicting.

But much of that growth is due to the decline in the U.S. dollar. When adjusted for currency issues, worldwide spending is predicted to grow only 4.5 percent.

Software spending and IT services are expected to see the biggest gain, up 10 percent and 9.4 percent respectively in 2008.

Analysts attributed some of the software growth to replacement cycles, but noted that "the replacement of systems does not automatically equate to new software market growth."… Read more

Lenovo Group reported a 10.5 percent increase in its fiscal first quarter revenues, despite a weakening global economy.

The computer maker reported revenues climbed to $4.2 billion in the quarter ending June 30, up from $3.8 billion a year ago. Shipments of PCs climbed 14.6 percent for the quarter.

"Despite a softening global economy, we delivered solid gains in worldwide sales," Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo chairman, said in a statement.

Sales in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, for example, increased by 26 percent, while Asia Pacific shipments grew 11 percent.

The Americas, however, … Read more

German conglomerate Siemens AG is looking to end its participation in Fujitsu Siemens Computer, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter."

The joint venture did $10.3 billion in sales last year, but Siemens CEO Peter Loscher apparently isn't pleased overall with the performance of FSC, which never found a real foothold in the U.S. in the face of competition with Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

"We have said that we want to focus on the three sectors--industry, energy, health care--and that we want to concentrate on them," a spokesman for … Read more

Google has expanded the capacity of its Search Appliance and made other improvements to the customized server that lets people search their companies' documents.

The earlier incarnation of the device could index as many as 3 million documents, but the newer model can handle 10 million, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for enterprise at Google. Other changes include the ability to present search results based on descriptive metadata associated with documents and the ability for administrators to customize search results for different categories of employees, he said.

Google makes the vast majority of its revenue and profit by … Read more

Update, 8:32 a.m. PDT Tuesday: Makes note of actual AT&T announcement.

AT&T is joining the burgeoning field of cloud-computing service providers that offer networking and storage services, according to a report late Monday on The Wall Street Journal site.

Cloud computing, which has attracted such heavyweight players as Google, IBM, and Amazon.com, relieves companies of the burden of managing their own data centers. One of AT&T's first customers will be the U.S. Olympic Committee, which runs Teamusa.org and other Olympics Web sites, according to the newspaper. AT&… Read more

One key missing piece from all of the press around IBM's Cloud building initiatives is what exactly they are going to offer. So far, it just seems like new data centers being built around the world. There have been few mentions of what will be available--for example, will there be VMs, on-demand deployment, Java environments, databases or is just hosting?

And while the data center physical infrastructure is obviously the first step, vendors seem to be confusing the physical with the meta-physical in the Cloud discussion. I pointed this out in the past when IBM announced a Cloud initiative … Read more

Who knew cloud computing could also clean the air?

IBM announced Friday that it's spending nearly $400 million on new cloud computing data centers in North Carolina and Tokyo. Big Blue will spend nearly $360 million to renovate an existing building at its Research Triangle Park campus in North Carolina. The goal is to reuse 95 percent of the existing building's "shell," recycle 90 percent of the old building's material, and make sure 20 percent of the new material is recycled. The new center is expected to be completed by late 2009.

Big Blue also … Read more

Update at 7:55 a.m. PDT: Stock's decline has been updated.

Sun Microsystems posted a fiscal fourth-quarter decline in revenue and earnings early Friday, amid what it described as slowing U.S. growth.

Sun shares fell as far as 14 percent to $9.10 in morning trading, despite the company's announcement that it will expand its stock buyback program by $1 billion and the fact that it beat Wall Street's revised expectations.

During the quarter that ended June 30, Sun generated revenue of $3.78 billion, down 1.4 percent from a year ago. Sun's … Read more

This post was updated at 10 a.m. PDT to include further comments from the companies.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they've teamed up to create a "test bed" project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally.

With the rather dry name of The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open-source project will consist of data centers around the globe "to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in … Read more