Stories by: Denise Dubie

Recent research shows IT executives worry the challenges associated with implementing and maintaining next-generation data center technologies such as virtualization and power consumption controls could outweigh the potential benefits.

The rush to virtualize data-center resources has players across the entire IT landscape working to deliver virtualization products and win customer favor. Management and automation vendors see the technology as an opportunity to improve current tools and create news ones designed to help enterprise IT shops optimize their virtual environments.

Buying faster switches might not be the only way to amp up performance across data center networks, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, who this week proposed a network architecture that would enable commodity Ethernet switches to deliver better performance at a lower cost than their 10 Gigabit Ethernet counterparts.

IT professionals who want to become irreplaceable to their organizations should cultivate existing skills and pick up a few new ones, according to Forrester Research, which recently identified 16 IT roles that CIOs will need to fill in the near term.

Network performance-management vendor Fluke Networks this week expanded its product portfolio when it acquired for an undisclosed sum the intellectual property of VoIP management player Viola Networks.

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.