IBM's Inder Gopal discusses his view that a balanced, high performance, reliable virtualized environment requires a complete array of virtualization technology including virtual processing, virtual storage and virtual networking working in harmony.

In a very long comments document submitted to both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, several companies, including Red Hat, are urging arms of the U.S. government to take stronger action against patent trolls. 

At the Google I/O conference last year, company officials announced a big next step for the company--the public availability of the Google Compute Engine public cloud service (following much beta testing). Compute Engine placed the company in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and represented a strong step into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space. In recent months, many third parties have popped up with services surrounding the platform. Now, after nine months since Compute Engine was announced, Google Compute Engine has become available to all customers who sign up for Google's Gold Support package, which starts at $400 a month. 

Last week, Gartner released a report that had tech bloggers falling over themselves to declare Microsoft obsolete and the PC dead. Two problems. First, it's Gartner. And second, a closer look at the data paints a surprisingly rosy picture for Microsoft.