Stories by: Jon Brodkin

Brocade's pending acquisition of Foundry Networks and its IP network technology will give Brocade a shot in the arm in the area of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), a technology expected to make major data center inroads in the next few years.

Oracle, IBM, SAP and Adobe Systems are the latest targets of patent lawsuits filed by Implicit Networks.

Storage costs eat up at least 11 per cent of IT hardware budgets, but there are plenty of ways to save money without sacrificing performance or security. In a new report called "Five Key Storage Strategies for a Down Economy," Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman provides a road map for smart purchasing and maximizing the resources you already have. Here's a summary.

The fruits of three EMC acquisitions are coming together with an integration involving Retrospect backup software, the Mozy online backup service, and Iomega external hard drives.

Both IBM and Sun this week claim to have developed the "first one terabyte storage tape drive," but Sun will get its drive on the market a little bit sooner than IBM.

Network-attached storage vendor OnStor is releasing Cougar, the third generation of its clustered NAS gateway that connects to storage devices from multiple vendors and uses a VMware-like virtualization technology that improves flexibility.

Nearly one in four US businesses block employee access to social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace,according to a survey of about 200 human resources professionals.

In tapping a former Microsoft executive to lead VMware's battle against the Redmond giant, VMware's EMC-controlled board of directors decided co-founder Diane Greene lacked the business savvy to win a struggle for market share, analysts say.

The business potential of social-networking Web sites and various Web 2.0 technologies remains largely untapped, according to separate reports released by the analyst firms Forrester Research and Gartner on Thursday.

VMware ousted co-founder and CEO Diane Greene Tuesday, replacing her with former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz. (Read our recent Q&A with Greene.)

Cloud computing is fraught with security risks, according to analyst firm Gartner. Smart customers will ask tough questions, and consider getting a security assessment from a neutral third party before committing to a cloud vendor, Gartner says in a June report titled "Assessing the Security Risks of Cloud Computing".