Microsoft, when it’s not tweaking operating systems, releasing security patches, or dissing open source, has another project it’s bringing to the fore: it’s first data center in a box. (Uh, sorry, I meant “containerized datacenter facility.”) The idea is that these data centers, literally housed in portable shipping containers, can be trucked and parked at [...]

HP has just announced it is delivering a range of virtualization and cloud-computing capabilities it brands as “Next Generation DataCenter (NGDC).” The crux of the announcement is that capacity will be organized into a more abstract service layer, whether it comes from within the enterprise itself, or from HP’s latest on-demand offerings. This is a [...]

We just wrapped a survey of members of the Oracle Applications Users Group — which includes IT directors, CIOs, IT operations managers, and developers — on the extent to which they’re able to employ automated processes to manage multi-application workloads. In other words, are there processes in place in handle the management and movement of [...]