LIMELIGHT                                                      

In addition to the turbulence Vista is causing on the network and desktop, it now has the laptop industry jumping through some hoops as well. A consortium of leading vendors is uniting behind hybrid storage technology, basically a combination of flash and rotating memory, with an aim to boost durability and battery life. Microsoft is said to be thinking of joining the group.

Terabyte Wars: Hitachi Aims to Beat Seagate to Market with 1-Tbyte Drive

Hitachi and Seagate are likely to be the primary choices for 1TB external drives this year. Both firms are due to ship products within the next few months. This piece includes numerous details on the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000, such as its SATA 2.0 Gbps and PATA-133 interfaces and power-saving idling technology.

Google Search Appliance Gets New Technology 

Application fabrics are in use today  by some of the savviest enterprises in the world, who understand that technology -related advantages can enable powerful business agility. A great example of a company that is reaping the benefits of its technology advantages  is Google. Google is a company known for many things, not the least of which is its ability to keep up with the dramatic growth of its core search engine business while also developing and launching new services. The agility of Google’s business is powered by what can be characterized as an application fabric that Google developed in-house to support its CPU-intensive , time-critical core applications. 

Google Search Appliance users will get some nifty enhancements with the next upgrade, including new search clustering tools and a way to lend certain documents more weight when prioritizing query results. Users will also be able to export SiteMaps XML files and enjoy tighter integration with SharePoint 2003 and 2007. 

Will Grid and Virtualization Converge? 

Grid computing is likely to turn into a form of wide area virtualization in the near future, according to these experts. Once grid technology becomes part of the enterprise, it will be largely indistinguishable from any other network function. Some manufacturers are already dropping the term "grid." But as long as it provides the dream of distributed, on-demand computer resources, what's really in a name?

Oracle's 'Unbreakable Linux' Will Threaten Red Hat 

On 25 October 2006 at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle announced "Unbreakable Linux." Oracle will provide full support for the Red Hat Linux distribution and will compete against Red Hat's support. It will offer discounts until 31 January 2007 and claims its list prices, on average, will be 50% lower than Red Hat’s list prices. Oracle promised to indemnify users against Linux patent infringements.

Oracle's Linux support offering is a more complete solution than Red Hat's. Oracle aims to assert more influence on Linux adoption, accelerate Oracle DBMS acceptance and bolster Linux against Windows.