Like a growing number of enterprise IT executives, Craig Baughn, vice president of hosting operations at Concur Technologies, a corporate travel and expense management company in Redmond, Wash., is carefully studying how to transition from a virtual environment to a private cloud.

If vendors including Cisco and HP succeed, in a few years you may buy more bundled chunks of infrastructure, and fewer individual server, storage and network pieces. Here's a look at how virtualization is significantly changing server purchases.

Like a growing number of enterprise IT executives, Craig Baughn, vice president of hosting operations at Concur Technologies, a corporate travel and expense management company in Redmond, Wash., is carefully studying how to transition from a virtual environment to a private cloud.

By HP Networking

Safety Tip that you may not have thought about when installing new kit into racks.

By Ivan Pepelnjak
As you might have noticed, everyone is talking about Data Centers lately and all the new “revolutionary” networking technologies are targeted at this segment. The reason is simple: server virtualization (not to mention the vapor-word) will forever change the networking landscape and the networking engineers might get badly hurt if caught unprepared.

If you’ve been tracking the licensing and reselling of Oracle’s Solaris operating system you can be forgiven for being a tad confused. HP, Dell are in, but IBM looks out.

Cisco this week expanded its data center arsenal with software, switches, modules and services all designed to scale the infrastructure to meet the demanding needs of virtualization, application complexity and cloud computing.

HP this week unveiled data center switching and security products designed to simplify server connectivity and protect data in a converged infrastructure.

It hasn’t been since the mid 1990s that the networking industry was focused on multi-protocol integration or convergence. The industry is gearing up for a major innovation and competitive cycle fueled by the multi-billion dollar addressable market for data center network fabrics. Over the last eighteen months, every major Ethernet infrastructure provider has been talking about two and three tier network fabrics for high-end data centers.