State of New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel. The suit charges that Intel “violated state and federal anti-monopoly laws by engaging in a worldwide, systematic campaign of illegal conduct” in order to monopolize the processor market, and that they have the emails to prove it.

Hmmm… The EU is suing Intel; Asia is suing Intel; AMD is suing Intel. Any particular reason for the State of New York to jump atop the dogpile? (Besides the press coverage, that is.) Probably not. The state doesn’t have any special standing, nor any particular damage to claim. Maybe it puts them in line for some settlement money. It also might prod the US Attorney General to take another look into the matter – a complainant with unlimited resources who could drag Intel through legal procedures for years.

Being sued, and pouring money into lawyers’ pockets, is never a good thing. But this won’t impact Intel on the technology front at all.

Continuity is not an option, and it’s not just backup, either. But for SMBs, implementing true business continuity is elusive. Sure, it can be done; the technology exists and is used by large enterprises every day. But these large enterprise…

The newest press release on our site announces the results of our 2008-2009 Unix Vendor Preference Survey. This time, our survey period spanned two calendar years (late 4Q08 – early 1Q09). We delayed it a bit in order to avoid…

As all of IT has surely noticed – or not – GCG has been absent from the blogosphere for a long time. Some extremely persistent hackers chose our site for enlistment into their global jihad. Oh, and they were also…

Quick, what would you rather do – undergo a very personal medical procedure, or listen to a vendor-sponsored webcast? Before you say, “Bring on the latex gloves,” give a listen to our own Dan Olds going toe-to-toe with executives from…

Today HP announced its new Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio, a modular architecture designed to address Web 2.0-type horizontal scalability needs.  Of course every major vendor announcement touts ground-breaking cost savings (absolute lowest CapEx and OpEx!), energy savings (100% fewer watts consumed!), and density (more sockets, less space!). But we think this really is a very interesting product, and a particularly well-timed strategic move for HP.

Instead of putting a slightly new spin on blades or their existing rack-mount servers, HP took a clean-sheet approach. The result is an extremely lightweight rail and tray design that replaces the usual chassis + rack – a significant advantage over existing gear. HP also is offering servers in three different flavors to handle different needs. The first is the SL 160z, which sports two sockets, 18 memory slots, and room for two drives. The 170z trades memory slots (it has 16 rather than 18) for storage, upping the drive count to a max of 6 3.5” SATA or SAS spindles. The third server is the 2x170z, which is the most computationally dense configuration – two 170z servers on a single tray, each with 16 DIMM slots and a single drive.

Extreme x86 computing, marked by very lower power systems packed into very small spaces, is the low-cost answer for large-scale Web 2.0 (and ‘old’ Web 1.0) customers. More and more traditional corporate customers will find systems like these to be the low-cost solution for their scale-out needs as well. Another interesting market is HPC, where cycles per sq/ft and cycles per watt are increasingly important – and the HPC market is the highest growth computing segment right now. It’s obvious that HP did quite a bit of work devoted to really understanding the unique needs of this market. The impulse for most vendors is to put more and more stuff into their servers to, for example, increase hardware RAS. However, the usage model for these customers is rip and replace, meaning that their solution to a HW failure is to simply replace the entire server.

NVIDIA and Dell announced today that NVIDIA’s Tesla GPU computing processor is now available pre-integrated in several of Dell’s Precision Workstations. This gives supercomputing aficionados – or folks who just like to crank a lot of numbers – some serious…

Throughout every sort of economic turmoil in recent memory – the deep recession in the early 80s, business downturns in the early and mid-1990s, and even the dot-com crash in 2000, there’s been one constant that you could take to…

Most observers believed that Oracle’s main goal in buying Sun was to secure Java, MySQL, and other Sun software assets. However, Larry Ellison’s recent pronouncement that Oracle is “in the hardware business to stay” has rocked the industry. Ellison clearly indicated that Oracle will be looking to optimize Sun hardware (including SPARC, CMT, and x64 platforms) to better run Oracle products. The implications of this are profound. Oracle would be competing head-to-head with their system vendor partners Dell, HP, and IBM.

At this point, all we know is what Ellison said. We don’t know if they truly intend to keep all of Sun’s products or how long it will take Oracle and Sun engineers to come up with a new integrated server offering. Right now, I’m pretty sure that not even Oracle knows the answers to those questions. However, they will certainly be coming out with something, whether it’s a roadmap, a promise for new hardware, or actual new boxes. My industry contacts are almost universal in their belief that Oracle doesn’t really want anything to do with Sun hardware, and that the bad economy has thwarted their intentions to sell off Sun’s gear and associated businesses. There is certainly some support for this position, given that Oracle and HP were rumoured to be looking to tag-team Sun, with Oracle taking some SW and HP grabbing the gear. That deal, assumedly, fell apart and won’t be resurrected anytime soon.

Industry folks, particularly other server vendors, typically say that they don’t see Oracle sticking with Sun’s hardware; or, if they do, they see Oracle being successful enough to warrant the investment. I’m not so sure. I think there is a case to be made for what Oracle is talking about with integrated HW/SW bundles – as long as the integration provides some compelling value to customers.