Lucas Mearian

Installing encryption and fraud-detection software on computers seemed like a good idea to Bank Rhode Island's CEO after a laptop containing the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of about 43,000 customers was stolen last December from its principle data-processing provider, Fiserv Inc.

IT managers at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. are weighing a multimillion-dollar project to deploy intelligent switches that could virtualize the brokerage's storage-area networks and give its technology staffers central control of the data stored on the SANs.

EMC Corp. announced on Monday its first service provider partnership with Oracle Corp. to sell and install EMC's DatabaseXtender suite of products, which analyze databases and then migrate older or inactive records off expensive primary storage and onto online secondary disk systems.

The U.S. federal government's General Accounting Office said in late December that sloppy accounting practices by the U.S. Department of Defense led to a US$1.6 billion discrepancy between two key IT budget reports for fiscal 2004.

Charles Schwab & Co. last month went live with a Linux-based grid computing system in an effort to speed up some of its compute-intensive investment management applications.

A multi-year project by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to upgrade its financial management and supporting IT systems lacks a basic enterprise architecture that would rein in costs and define best practices, according to a U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) report.

EMC Corp. officials said last week that the company will move quickly to release products that incorporate VMware Inc.'s server virtualization technology, once EMC's US$635 million acquisition of VMware is completed early next year.

Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to start shipping 2.5-inch disk drives with enterprise-class features in its ProLiant servers next year and later will add the space-saving technology to its disk subsystems and arrays.