Defending Microsoft's mega Chicago data center Want to tick off a mechanical engineer? Tell him he thinks like a programmer, says Microsoft's man in charge of building Microsoft's new mega Chicago data center.

Can you trust your data to a storage cloud provider? Amazon, Nirvanix and others promote cloud storage services for ease of management, infinite scalability and quick data delivery – but security and performance concern some users.

Utility storage: Ready for a long haul? Storage virtualization is a good first step toward full-out utility storage — for those willing to tough out rocky architectural, interoperability and management challenges.

Podcast: Cloud or utility? Knowing the difference could mean smarter server provisioning, cost-savings, speedier time to market and improved security.

Want to use a supercomputer? The Department of Energy (DOE) this week said it is offering over 680 million supercomputer processor-hours to run advanced scientific projects on its supercomputers. Through its sixth annual Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, DOE’s Office of Science plans to award the supercomputer processor-hours at its labs in Berkeley, CA; Chicago, IL; Oak Ridge, TN; and Richland, WA for large-scale, computationally-intensive science projects in 2009.

Cisco data center chief steps down Cisco's senior official in charge of data center, switching and services is leaving after 15 years at the networking company to pursue other opportunities.

Cisco departure latest sign of transformation The departure of a longtime Cisco executive last week is the latest sign that the company is transforming itself from a pure networking vendor into more of an overall provider of IT systems.

XP confirmed on the OLPC After over a year of speculation, The One Laptop Per Child foundation announced they will begin to offer Microsoft Windows XP on the OLPC, reports blogger Alex Lewis.

SQL Server Integration Services SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has superseded DTS in SQL 2005 and has some great new features, writes Microsoft Subnet blogger Brian Egler.

Gates to show off vertical Surface at CEO Summit Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is expected to show off new technology on Wednesday that is designed for the board room and is a spin-off of Microsoft's Surface computer.

Installation and Use of Server 2008 Backup Windows Server Backup is available on all versions of Server 2008, including 64-bit versions. Install it as a feature via Server Manager.

MAY GIVEAWAYS: May giveaways from Microsoft Subnet and Cisco Subnet
Win a Microsoft training course worth up to $2,500 from New Horizons; a Cisco training course worth up to $3,995 from Global Knowledge; one of 15 copies of the SharePoint training video, WSS and MOSS 3.0 Development (video training) published by Sams; one of 15 copies of the Cisco Press book CCNA Practice Questions (Exam 640-802), 3rd Edition, or a Cool Stuff techno-toy worth up to $500 from Global Knowledge. Hurry! Deadline for entries is May 31.