China Martens

IBM Corp. gave users an early look at its Tivoli System z9 systems management software Tuesday. The software is due to ship in the fourth quarter of this year, according to an IBM executive. "We're stepping up to a whole new level of integration," said Al Zollar, general manager of Tivoli Software at IBM, in an interview at the Share user group conference taking place in Boston.

IBM Corp. and independent user group Share are teaming up to provide support for young people interested in mainframe computing, the organizations announced. The initiative and its associated community is being dubbed "zNextGen," a reference to IBM's zSeries mainframe brand.

Linux hardware and clustering company Penguin Computing Inc. is releasing two new blade servers in its BladeRunner family, the 4130 and the 4140, based on 64-bit chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) respectively. Penguin showed off the blades at the LinuxWorld show held earlier this month in San Francisco.

EMC Corp. is to acquire Rainfinity Inc., a network file virtualization software vendor, the storage giant announced. The move is part of EMC's ongoing strategy to reposition itself as an information infrastructure company as laid out by the company's executives earlier this month at the firm's annual analyst day in New York. The move also fleshes out EMC's storage virtualization product portfolio.

IBM Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) are planning to extend their technology development partnership for a second time, according to reports. The two companies first signed a collaboration agreement in December 2002. In September 2004, IBM and AMD added a three-year extension onto the arrangement that was set to expire at the end of 2005 so it was due to continue until Dec. 31, 2008. They now expect to extend that agreement to 2011.

A Florida man was found guilty of stealing data from customer information management company Acxiom Corp. Friday. The prosecution estimates that Scott Levine and his defunct bulk e-mail marketing firm Snipermail.com Inc. stole more than 1.6 billion customer records by hacking into an Acxiom server.

IBM Corp. plans to unwrap a bundle of software, hardware and services called Grid and Grow at the LinuxWorld show in San Francisco on Monday. The company hopes the bundle will act as a starter pack for mid-size and large companies wanting to move into grid computing, according to an IBM executive.

Virtualization software vendor VMware Inc. is teaming up with a host of leading IT companies to work on open virtualization standards, the company announced Monday. As part of those efforts, VMware will provide its partners with access to its VMware ESX Server source code and interfaces under a program it's calling VMware Community Source.