Dell on Monday announced it has agreed to acquire virtualized storage provider 3PAR for about US$1.15 billion, a move that will boost its capabilities for building public and private cloud computing environments. The deal is expected to close later this year.

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.

By Virtual Geek

Well – in a nutshell – more, for less.

The vStorage APIs for Array integration (or VAAI) have been something that we previewed back at VMworld 2009.

Now that vSphere 4.1 is officially out, we can now talk about it without tapdancing around a lot of stuff.

I did a webcast on this topic the week before last.  I needed to step carefully around not saying “vSphere 4.1” or committed dates/functions, but now you know…  

Brocade this week unveiled data center products available from OEM HP that are designed to support next-generation Fibre Channel rollouts anchored to optimizing application performance and scaling virtual machines.

HP executives touted the company's 'converged infrastructure' plan to users at a tech conference this week, but some feared it could led to the much -feared vendor lock-in.

Great news in Atmos land! First of all – what is Atmos? Atmos may seem like something new to many, but you use Atmos-like stuff every day.  If you think about YouTube, or your Facebook pictures, or Twitpics – or the type of storage used for these new funky scale-out noSQL based applications, it ain’t your usual SAN/NAS stuff.   Those are all examples of next gen apps that leverage this class of storage platform.

Brocade this week rolled out 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 8Gbps FibreChannel modules for its routers and storage-area network switches designed to increase the wire-speed density of both platforms to better support network consolidation and improve service levels.

By Alex Williams

Google's announcement to offer cloud-based storage is in many respects an exciting development but it also illuminates the lock-in issue and why many an enterprise is reticent about adopting cloud computing.

We heard one of the clearest discussions on the issue today at the Webvisions conference in Portland by two senior engineers from Yahoo! and Facebook. [..]

EMC and Cisco are raising the profile of their VCE Coalition to combine storage, server, networking, and virtualization resources into an integrated offering, a move causing many solution providers to question the value of VMware as an independent entity....

Virtual Instruments has upgraded the humble patch panel to improve monitoring.