2/26/2008
This week in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems is bringing together thought leaders in education from more than 30 countries for its annual Worldwide Education and Research Conference, this year themed, "The Power of Communities." Conference organizers are maximizing the reach of the conference through live broadcasts and blogs...
2/26/2008
Pasadena City College in Los Angeles County has signed a contract with Verizon Business to implement a voice over IP (VoIP) communications and wireless Internet access under a two-year, $6.7 million agreement.
2/22/2008
The University of Arizona (UA) has completed two major phases of its wireless LAN deployments for voice and data, according to the company managing the project. Today, UA's wireless network--dubbed UAWiFi--spans more than 7 million square feet, 4,500 wireless access points, and 22 buildings. Upon completion, the initiative, which is being managed by systems integrator NEC Unified Solutions and using Cisco equipment, will comprise more than 6,000 access points and 12 million square feet on two campuses.
2/13/2008
Recently Sun Microsystems announced that it would open source both the hardware and operating system for Sun SPOTs, its sensor networking product based on Java technology. CT talked with Arshan Poursohi, a staff researcher in the Sun SPOTs lab on Sun's Menlo Park, CA campus to find out how higher education institutions can incorporate Sun SPOTs in research and instruction.
2/7/2008
Although the research environment in which he works is highly complex, systems administrator Justin King has an uncomplicated goal for his infrastructure: "To simplify it as much as possible from an end user standpoint." King works as the sole IT person for the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in the Department of Neuroscience in Houston, TX. This private medical school is one of the few places on earth where scientists can have access to more than a single functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanner simultaneously for their research.
2/7/2008
Lockdown Networks has upgraded its network access control (NAC) solution, Lockdown Enforcer, implementing new features that simplify initial setup and user and device registration. A NAC ensures that only authorized users and policy-compliant devices can be added to an enterprise networks and provides a centralized mechanism for responding to malware outbreaks and other security events.
2/1/2008
IBM announced Wednesday the release of PowerVM Express and a new Power6 microprocessor which, when combined, will bring new efficiencies to virtualization for small- and medium-size businesses, it said.
1/31/2008
Client by client, iSCSI is claiming ground against fibre channel in the external storage wars. For Queensborough Community College in Bayside, NY, that day of reckoning came a week or so before Thanksgiving 2006 when the school's fibre channel storage system went down.
1/31/2008
Yesterday VMware announced it has released a live version of Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2 and integrated it with its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure management product.
1/30/2008
Perhaps more than anything else, the sight of a group of students clustered around a single computer screen, jostling for space and a better view, made Karalee Woody aware of the need for better collaborative computing tools at the University of Washington.
1/28/2008
Virtualization pioneer VMware has released the public beta of its new deployment management product, VMware Stage Manager. The application is based on the company's flagship virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure 3.
1/21/2008
DataSynapse has upgraded its FabricServer application virtualization product, which is part of the company's suite of solutions that help businesses attain high availability for their applications.
1/15/2008
At the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage Tuesday to introduce the company's latest technologies. As rumored, Apple launched a new, super-slim version of the MacBook laptop computer, known as the MacBook Air. Jobs also introduced a new version of the AirPort Extreme Base Station known as Time Capsule, which combines an 802.11n router with a wireless backup storage solution.
1/15/2008
A Syracuse University associate professor introduced a new program that gives people a simple way to do file sharing among digital devices. Syracuse University School of Information Studies Associate Professor Lee McKnight debuted Innovaticus during the International Consumer Electronics Show last week. The software lets users set up a grid of devices--computers, cell phones, printers, and even MP3 players--to collaborate and share files and hardware using devices across multiple networks, wired and wireless. Users with access to that grid could drag and drop files from one device to another, whether it was local or around the world.
1/2/2008
The rise of virtual machines may prove to be somewhat of a nightmare for entrenched purveyors of closed operating systems, but it may become a boon for independent software vendors (ISVs) and end users--so a recent Yankee Group report suggests.
12/13/2007
Managing the network on a university campus may not be the most glamorous of jobs, but it's certainly a critical one. Just listen to the howls should the network go down. At Ball State University, 18,000 students and 3,000 faculty rely on some 50 routers, upwards of 400 switches, and 800 access points to use the wired and wireless network.
12/7/2007
Microsoft Wednesday continued its hand in hand development of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista's first service pack, publishing release candidates (RC) for each product. The big updates in Windows 2008 RC1 revolve around enhancements to Group Policy, a management framework first introduced in Windows 2000 Server. Group Policy Preferences, as it has been renamed, was formerly known as PolicyMaker Standard Edition and Policy Share Manager.
12/5/2007
Sun Microsystems this week announced the availability of the first component of its new virtualization platform, and laid out a roadmap for opening the platform's source code. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based systems company bills its xVM Ops Center virtualization management tool as a "highly scalable datacenter automation tool for complete management of heterogeneous global IT environments."
11/29/2007
Telelogic has improved components of its overall "enterprise lifecycle management" software product suite, which combines model-driven development with application lifecycle management.
11/29/2007
Higher education mobile services provider Rave Wireless has joined the SunGard Higher Education Collaborative and said it will provide mobile services, including alerts and collaborative technologies, for SunGard customers. The SunGard HE Collaborative is a network of companies whose stated aim is to help "colleges and universities build and manage reliable, integrated solutions that extend and enhance a unified digital campus."
11/28/2007
With a sprawling campus of more than 10,000 acres and century-old buildings, the University of the South in Tennessee, also known as Sewanee, needed an expansive and flexible wireless solution to connect students, faculty, and members of the community. The school had been using a combination of wired and wireless systems to serve select portions of the campus; but in order to improve service and make wireless access available everywhere, Sewanee has initiated an overhaul using gear from Colubris Networks that will eventually bring 100 percent wireless access to the buildings on the campus.
11/28/2007
The National Science Foundation recently awarded grants to five high performance computing centers for their participation in the TeraGrid.
11/27/2007
Bryant University in Smithfield, RI is expanding its emergency notification system for students, staff, and faculty. The university has adapted its Campus Manager NAC solution to provide alerts to its campus population through the system's messaging capability. The NAC-based solution is a supplement to the university's existing notification system, which includes voice and e-mail alerts.
11/19/2007
This year's Oracle OpenWorld user conference, which wrapped up Nov. 15 in San Francisco, drew an estimated 43,000 attendees for five days of keynotes, technical sessions, vendor exhibits and rock 'n' roll.
11/15/2007
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz gave attendees at the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference a look at his company's new virtualization management platform. First announced last September, the Sun xVM is built on the Xen open source hypervisor (the Sun xVM Server) and includes the xVM Ops Center virtualization management tool. The xVM supports Windows, Red Hat Linux, and Solaris as guest operating systems.