Shelley Solheim

The Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released Wednesday, with IBM Corp.'s BlueGene continuing to reign and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) Opteron processor powering more systems on the list than last year.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. are poised to launch new servers based on Intel Corp.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. are poised to launch new servers based on Intel Corp.'s latest dual-core Xeon processors. The servers will use Intel's new "Bensley" server platform, which supports the chip maker's dual-core Xeon 5000 series, code-named "Dempsey," which started shipping in March, and Xeon 5100 chips, code-named "Woodcrest," expected to ship in June. The platform will also support Intel's quad-core "Clovertown" chips slated to ship next year.

Continuing its multiyear shopping spree of software vendors, EMC Corp. said it will acquire data-replication and protection software company Kashya Inc. for about US$153 million in cash. The acquisition is part of EMC's ongoing efforts to expand from a storage hardware provider into a one-stop shop for storing, managing, accessing and securing data throughout the enterprise, or what EMC calls ILM (information lifecycle management).

Vodafone Group PLC Thursday announced a restructuring of its business operations and senior management, aimed at cutting costs and driving growth in emerging markets and new services.

Two virtualization software startups will vie for the spotlight at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston next week with competing offerings based on the open-source Xen hypervisor. Startup XenSource Inc., which also manages the development of the open-source hypervisor, will launch a commercial virtualization platform, XenEnterprise, based on the latest version of the hypervisor. Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. are both integrating the open-source Xen hypervisor technology into the next versions of their Linux operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10, shipping this year.

Palm Beach Community College is going virtual: virtual servers, virtual network and virtual storage. The college, which has 49,000 students and 2,000 employees, has nearly completed the rollout of a server and storage consolidation project that will eventually replace scores of servers with a new mainframe and two blade systems.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is rolling out a chipset for its Integrity midrange and high-end servers that it says will boost performance by 30 percent over its current "Pinnacles" chipset.