Jennifer Mears

Nay-sayers have leveled plenty of criticism at applications delivered over the Web. The rap has been that customization limitations and integration challenges make software-as-a-service unsuitable for companies with complex application environments.

Here is yet more evidence that the virtualization market is maturing as VMware competitors advance their technology: The open-source Xen virtualization project will soon support Windows.

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IBM on Thursday announced that Harvard University is using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, which holds the title as the fastest supercomputer in the world, to support research into the human heart and circulatory system.

As IT managers continue to wrangle with creating and managing service-oriented architectures

HP has introduced two servers and announced a refresh of its entire Integrity server line with the first dual-core Itanium processor, a chip that promises better performance, improved energy efficiency and advanced features such as hardware-based virtualization.

For the IT staff at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., the focus for the last couple of years has been on consolidation. The first goal was to centralize servers that had been scattered across the campus into two physical locations, and the next step was to use virtualization technologies to consolidate things even more.

This may be the year that blade servers finally cast off their bad rap. Introduced in 2001, blade servers were supposed to change the computing landscape, but questions about reliability, power consumption and heat output put a damper on adoption.