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A “small percentage” of MacBook owners whose hard drives fail will be eligible for a free replacement under a warranty extension announced by Apple this week. The laptops in questions are both black and white MacBooks models bought between May 2006 and December 2007;  according to a page on the company’s support site, the hard drive failures can be diagnosed through a simple, yet despair-inducing method: your computer simply stops working and, upon boot, displays a folder icon with a superimposed question mark

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Apple announces MacBook hard drive repair program

EMC will add a data protection mechanism to the next version of its Atmos internal cloud storage platform , along with using more powerful and efficient chips and more dense disk drives in its Atmos infrastructure. Atmos is a hardware and software system, used mostly by service providers, for storing unstructured data across many locations. AT&T uses Atmos for the infrastructure of its Synaptic hosting service.

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EMC’s Atmos cloud storage gains more efficient data protection

Texas network services provider Michael Pulk has made tech behemoths SAP and Oracle bend to his will with nothing more than a phone, paper and a lot of persistence. For months, loud alarms on a numbers of servers used by former SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow had been driving Pulk bananas as he worked on his own machines, which are located at the same data center in Bryan, Texas.

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Vexed techie gets peace at last from SAP and Oracle

From the outside, Hewlett-Packard ’s newest data center looks like a massive, well-secured loading dock, devoid of logos and surrounded by a robust barbed-wired fence in a nondescript industrial park.

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HP opens first ever wind-cooled data center

IBM has opened a football field-size data center in North Carolina it says will rely heavily on outside air for cooling as it turns up the heat inside, gradually. This new data center, about 60,000 square-feet in the Research Triangle Park N.C., incorporates IBM’s latest approaches to energy

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IBM inches up heat in new data center to reduce energy usage

The Green Grid Consortium will release two free tools in the coming months to help companies measure and improve the energy efficiency of their data centers. The new tools are both Web-based and will be available through the Green Grid’s Web site by the end of March. The consortium is presenting them at its third annual conference on Thursday in San Jose, California

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Green Grid to release new data center efficiency tools

Hewlett-Packard has released a smaller version of its portable data center, this time based on a standard 20-foot shipping container, half the size of its first model. HP hopes the lower entry price of the smaller system will help it to attract more customers. It will also be easier to ship, since roads in some parts of the world can’t handle the 100,000-pound weight of a fully loaded 40-foot container, said Jean Brandau, an HP product manager

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HP offers a smaller containerized data center

For the second time in six weeks, Apple yesterday delivered a firmware fix designed to stop 27-inch iMac screens from flickering. Initial reports from users who installed the update were mixed, with more saying that the flickering continued than saying Apple ’s second try had resolved their iMac’s flaky display.

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Apple issues second firmware fix for iMac screen flickering

Scalability has been the buzzword for data warehousing vendors over the past several years, with the standout questions being, how many petabytes of data can I store? And how many servers and nodes?

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Data warehousing vendors squabble over flash memory