Stories by: Alan Zeichick

With its new eServer OpenPower 710 and eServer p5 510, IBM has delivered two state-of-the-art enterprise servers that can handle transactions galore.

Solaris 10 is nothing like Solaris 9. When it comes to support for x86 processors, that's good.

Eight hardware threads in a four-processor system - that's the innovation behind the Sun Fire V490, one of the first two models to use Sun Microsystems' new dual-core UltraSparc IV chip. (The other is the eight-processor Sun Fire V890, released at the same time.)

Sun has been taking it on the chin for the past few months — OK, longer than that — what with flagging financials, management turmoil, disappointing market share, and even a tug-of-war regarding Java technology.

RLX Technologies latest offering is what the company calls a “modular computing” solution, containing blade servers and Fibre Channel (FC) storage arrays, plus an enhanced version of its Control Tower management software for provisioning the storage system. These additional products — some of which are manufactured by partners — better position RLX to compete against other major blade companies. That’s because it’s often advantageous to purchase a single integrated computing ecosystem of processors and storage, which provides better interoperability as well as “one call” support.

Network Appliance’s NearStore R150 storage server can solve a problem that many data centres face — even if they don’t realise they have it yet: How do you back-up, archive, replicate and protect the terabytes of data passing through databases, mail servers and transaction systems? Mirroring servers requires duplicating expensive processors and applications, and doing so won’t protect against tampering. Using tape or optical is slow and not suitable for temporary back-ups. The R150 presents a practical and attractive option: Simply copy the data over the LAN to a huge network-attached file server that’s optimised for that purpose and dedicated to making highly secured file back-ups.

Looking for a surefire way to simplify SAN administration and make integration a snap? Look no further than virtualization, the secret sauce in the Fujitsu Software Technology (Fujitsu Softek) and IBM solutions.

When it comes to Unix, Sun’s Solaris operating system shines on the company’s 64-bit SPARC processors. Unfortunately, the picture is less bright for the version of Solaris written for Intel’s 32-bit Pentium family.

Computer Associates’ eTrust Antivirus 7.0 is similar to enterprise antivirus solutions from other leading vendors such as McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro. But CA’s solution distinguishes itself in several important ways, making it worthy of serious consideration to protect your company’s systems.

File sharing remains one of the key benefits of networking, and a file server may be the single most widely used application on the LAN.

While clustered or load-balanced servers can be an architecturally elegant way of scaling new applications, they present significant challenges for deployment and administration, ranging from ease of software deployment and monitoring to such mundane issues as cable management, power consumption, and heat dissipation. That’s where server blades, such as Hewlett-Packard’s ProLiant BL10e and BL20p Server Blades, fill an important niche while proving less expensive to buy, install, and manage than their conventional counterparts.