IBM has announced new Power7 systems designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system that offers markedly better energy efficiency than competitive systems from HP and Oracle.

HP has introduced a new way for clients to cut capital investment requirements for the design and build of data centres in half while significantly decreasing their carbon footprint.

Fujitsu’s Primergy TX100 S2, is a new, very energy-efficient entry-level server, that will be marketed at a similar price point to that of a PC.

Fujitsu has announced the global availability of three new server blades for its flagship Primergy BX900 ‘Dynamic Cube’ x86 blade system.

Fujitsu has launched the Primergy "Dynamic Cube Starter Kit" in South Africa. The promotion is designed to convincingly demonstrate to medium-sized and large businesses, the benefits delivered by Fujitsu Dynamic Infrastructures and server virtualisation in driving their business effectiveness and cutting their IT costs.

Oracle has announced its next-generation Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems, including rackmount servers, blades and a 10 GbE cluster fabric.

Whether it is in-house or, in keeping with modern trends – outsourced - the data centre is a critical part of every business.

Data centre networking has not traditionally been a topic with too much relevance for business managers. It is, however, essentially the lynchpin on which technology needs of information workers turns.

In its report on the top ten technologies and trends for 2010, research firm, Gartner stated that one of the strategic technologies that will have an impact on businesses for the next three years is the reshaping of the data centre. Rodney Callaghan, APC by Schneider Electric’s MD for Southern Africa, believes that this type of approach is even more critical now, in the wake of the global recession.

It is no secret that businesses – regardless of whether they live in the online realm or in the bricks-and-mortar world – are relying more heavily on their IT systems and technology in general than ever before to deliver more agile business processes and simplified administration.

Companies need their infrastructures to be just as dynamic as today’s business climate so that they can respond to changes swiftly and effectively, without missing a beat.

With demands on the processing power, memory and overall performance of today's servers showing no evidence of letting up, the move towards 64-bit computing is in full swing.