Stories by: James Niccolai

IBM spruced up its Unix servers on Tuesday with faster processors and new management software, targeting customers who want to use its hardware for virtualization and server consolidation.

Oracle and SAP held settlement talks Monday in their TomorrowNow lawsuit but failed to reach an agreement that would end the case, an SAP spokeswoman said.

Many companies are stepping up their data center investments even as they try to make cutbacks in other parts of their business, according to survey released Monday by AFCOM, the association for data center professionals.

Tiring of its mission to "organize the world's information," Google has set itself a new objective: save the planet.

Google's leadership on the Web stems partly from its powerful data centers, which allow it to provide lightning-fast search results while keeping energy costs to a minimum. The company has been mostly secretive about what goes on inside these giant computing factories, but on Wednesday it offered a peek at what it has been able to achieve -- on the energy side at least.

Advanced Micro Devices said its Shanghai processor is on track to ship in servers by the end of the year and sought to reassure customers that the problems that delayed its previous server chip, Barcelona, are a thing of the past.

Managed hosting provider Savvis has rolled out a service that allows (ISVs) independent software vendors to offer their applications in a software-as-a-service model.

Microsoft may be the only company in a position to provide "any real competition" for Google in the online search business, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday. But first it will need to figure out a way to do it.

VMware has taken a beating in the press and on Wall Street lately over its management upheaval, slower growth rate and competition from Microsoft, but customers at the VMworld conference here said they were either unaware of or unconcerned by the mounting pressure.

VMware CTO Stephen Herrod drew a cheer at the VMworld conference Wednesday by announcing plans to bring the next version of VMware's VirtualCenter management software to Linux and the iPhone.

VMware's CEO made his pitch on Tuesday for a new type of operating system for the data center, and in the process assigned the "traditional OS" to the dustbin of history.