Servers & business storage

IBM muddying the Cloud?

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

IBM aims $400 million at cloud computing

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

Sun shares fall sharply on quarterly results

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

HP, Intel, Yahoo join forces on cloud computing research

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

Google App Engine sort of getting Perl support

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it's not really an official project.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he's not a member of the App Engine team, and Google isn't promising Perl support, he said. By going public with the project, he hopes to intercept other Perl fans' work in the area.

"I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on … Read more

Amazon offers automatic credit for S3 outage

Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.

"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This … Read more

Amazon S3: For now at least, sometimes you have to reboot the cloud

Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service, S3, spent a few hours Sunday in a big pothole on the road to the glorious cloud computing future, with an outage taking the storage system offline for several hours Sunday. Should we be surprised?

No. In short, the computing industry is making up what's called cloud computing as it goes along, often with a server and networking architecture that's one part improvisation to two parts proven best practice. Frankly, it's notable to me that some services are as reliable as they are.

Computing practices tend to gravitate toward one of … Read more

Sun issues upbeat fourth-quarter forecast

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday announced preliminary fourth-quarter results that were higher than Wall Street's expectations, sending its shares up more than 11 percent in after-hours trading.

Shares of Sun climbed as high as $9.83 per share in after-hours trading, up from a close of $8.80 a share during the regular session.

"In these difficult economic times, we continue to see customers across the world look to open software and hardware as a source of savings," Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive, said in a statement.

Sun said it expects to report fourth-quarter revenue between $3.… Read more