Stories by: Denise Dubie

The future looks bright for the mainframe as a majority of IT managers report they will continue to use the systems for legacy applications and start moving new workloads that could benefit from the mainframe's availability and scalability onto the platform.

Many VMware customers Tuesday were prevented from logging onto their virtual servers as a bug distributed in a software update effectively stopped the boxes from powering up.

Network traffic data holds a wealth of information about application response time, network usage and bandwidth consumption. Getting at that data in an efficient and inexpensive manner would help network managers better understand and control their networks.

Now more than ever American IT workers fear the weakening US economy will impact their ability to find and keep jobs in high-tech, according to research released Wednesday.

The 1979 film "When a Stranger Calls" portrayed the terror-filled night of a young woman fielding prank and increasingly threatening calls that climaxed when the police determined "the calls are coming from inside the house." Today IT security executives experience a similar chill down their spine when they realize the biggest threat they face comes from internal security attacks and data breaches.

Microsoft's release this week of Hyper-V means there's one more hypervisor in the game -- and one more reason management capabilities will play a large part in determining which vendor will win long-term customer favor by providing the tools to optimize virtual server environments.

Virtual systems management vendor Veeam Software Tuesday announced it had acquired for an undisclosed amount a company called Nworks that makes software enabling HP and Microsoft products to separately manage VMware virtual servers. (Read our Q&A with VMware CEO Diane Greene.)

IT professionals may initially be awestruck by the promises of virtualization, but Gartner analysts warn that awe could turn into upset when organizations start to suffer from seven nasty side effects.

Managing virtual environments became a dominant theme at a Gartner conference this week, and start-up Embotics took the opportunity to launch the second generation of its policy-based management tool that the vendor says tracks virtual machines throughout their entire life cycle.

HP this week at Software Universe offered details about how it plans to build out its software and services business. Here are 10 things we learned that show us HP is serious about software.

HP kept talk of its pending acquisition of IT services vendor EDS to a controlled minimum this week as company executives briefly addressed customer inquiries about the US$13.9 billion deal.