Stories by Paul Venezia

The new Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4270 servers are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced.

During the Big Dig, the city of Boston erected a sign saying, "Rome wasn't built in a day. If it was, we would have hired their contractor." That's a good way to describe the general state of affairs regarding the ideal of divorcing services from hardware and pushing server management away from the physical layer.

VMware vSphere 4, out today, is a big release, with plenty of new features and changes, but it's not your run-of-the-mill major update. The new features, which range from VM clustering to agentless VM backup, are especially significant in that they may mark the moment when virtualisation shifted from the effort to provide a stable replica of a traditional infrastructure to significantly enhancing the capabilities of a virtual environment.

VMware's VDI solution makes virtual desktops real, but not particularly easy to manage

Not so long ago, I tested the Sun Fire X4500 Storage Server, aka Thumper, This wass a dual-CPU, dual-core Opteron-based server running OpenSolaris and housing a whopping 48 3.5-inch SATA drives, all within a 4U chassis. The sheer size and scale of that storage server could only be handled by Sun's own ZFS file system. Thumper was a tank in every sense of the word and carved a niche for itself in a wide variety of infrastructures.

Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra marks an important first step for rectifying the nation's concerns about IT.

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." -- Joseph Stalin

It's been nearly three weeks since Terry Childs was arrested on four counts of computer tampering and sent to jail on US$5 million bail. In those three weeks, this event has taken turns to the strange, and wound up firmly in the land of the absurd. From bombastic claims in the press to midnight visits by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to pages of functional usernames and passwords entered into the public record, this case has certainly proven engaging.

Last Sunday, Terry Childs, a network administrator employed by the City of San Francisco, was arrested and taken into custody, charged with four counts of computer tampering. He remains in jail, held on US$5 million bail. News reports have depicted a rogue admin taking a network hostage for reasons unknown, but new information from a source close to the situation presents a different picture.

Nearly three years since Jon "maddog" Hall predicted that "VOIP using an open source solution, such as Asterisk, will generate more business than the entire Linux marketplace today," open source VOIP for the enterprise remains a wild frontier. SMB uptake has been considerable, as open source VOIP's promise of control and cost savings make it a natural fit. But when it comes to large-scale implementations, open source voice has yet to get most enterprises to listen.