Jennifer Mears

Two years ago, Jim Barry was scratching his head over Dell Inc.'s decision to enter the switching market. Today, the CIO at OneUnited Bank in Boston has deployed a number of Dell switches to complement the Dell servers and storage arrays he has had in place for about four years.

MedSite Inc. figured it could save money by using offshore resources to bulk up its IT staff, but the online marketing and education services firm also knew it had to think carefully about which jobs would make sense to push overseas.

It's a hot-button issue to be sure, but business customers using offshore services say the decision to move jobs overseas stems from some real pragmatic concerns.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is pushing a processor technology that it says will let single chips within servers handle multiple tasks at the same time. This will increase system performance by as much as 30 times of today's boxes, the company says.

In a move aimed at small and midsize businesses, Dell Inc. Tuesday said it will sell Oracle Corp.

IBM Corp. this week announced an expansion of its blade server lineup with a system designed specifically for telecommunications providers that must adhere to rigorous uptime requirements.

A recent SG Cowen Securities Corp. survey of more than 500 North American IT users found that more than 80 per cent of respondents were currently using Linux and that more than half planned to increase their use of the open source operating system within the next two years.

Continuing its progression toward an Intel-only server portfolio, Hewlett-Packard Co. Monday is expected to round out its Itanium-based server line and unveil a two-processor Xeon-based box designed to be a low-cost node in high-performance computing clusters.