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E-mail spam on the rise
Spammers seem to be working a little bit harder these days, with unsolicited e-mail making up 90 percent of messages on corporate networks last month, according to Symantec. Almost a fifth of that spam is coming from a single botnet, Donbot, with another two fifths coming from other botnets, Symantec said. Other techniques used by spammers include renting network services and blasting out thousands of messages before filters kick in and they are cut off.
VMware invests in Terremark
VMware is paying 20 million dollars for a 5 percent stake in Terremark, a partner that provides collocation and managed infrastructure services using VMware’s virtualization software. Terremark rents out data-center capacity, allowing customers to manage their own hardware at its facilities or sign up for managed hosting services. VMware is developing software that allows companies to move workloads between their own data centers and those of so-called cloud computing providers. To make that possible, it needs partnerships with companies such as Terremark or its rivals including Savvis and SunGard.
Intel’s Nehalem is virtualization friendly
Intel’s eight-core Nehalem EX server processor will include error-correcting technology borrowed from the company’s high-end Itanium server chips. The MCA Recovery error correction feature should help reduce data corruption and ensure reliable server performance, detecting and fixing errors that could otherwise cause systems to crash. Adding error correction to the Xeon line will become important as workloads are spread across virtual machines in data centers, where data corruption in one virtual machine could spread to other VMs and cause a server to crash. The Nehalem EX will be able to isolate an error and restart individual virtual machines without crashing an entire system.
Greenpeace gives Sun, IBM praise
Greenpeace International gave Sun Microsystems and IBM highest scores in its Cool IT challenge, which rated IT companies on what they are doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sun has the best position on climate advocacy, and also scored well for reducing its own emissions, but needs to provide information on technologies it offers to reduce emissions in other parts of the economy, the campaign group said. IBM has a wide range of climate technologies, but needs to improve on providing net emissions reduction figures for case studies, and has to do more specific political advocacy, Greenpeace said. It compared 14 IT companies that claim to have technologies for climate change. Dell and Cisco were close behind Sun and IBM, with Microsoft, Sony, Sharp and Toshiba clustered near the bottom of the table.
And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Peter Sayer in Paris. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.