Maureen O'Gara

Another continent – or most of it – has reportedly just fallen to Apple in its quest to drive Samsung’s iPad-aping Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 off the face of the earth. Sammy agreed last week not to put the widget on the Australian market until a court tells it otherwise and now Apple has gotten a preliminary injunction based on alleged infringement from a German court that immediately bans the Tab’s distribution in all of the countries of the European Union except Holland. FOSS Patents, which explains that German and Dutch competition laws are difference, says Apple has a separate lawsuit lodged in the Netherlands charging infringement of the same IP, Community design no. 000181607- 0001. Florian Mueller, who writes the FOSS Patents blog, compared the Düsseldorf court that gave Apple its injunction to the Eastern District of Texas. It tilts in favor of the plai... (more)

Tier 3 Expands to Equinix

Come the fall Tier 3, which styles itself the enterprise cloud house, is going to have two new data centers inside Equinix, where it expects to attract some of Equinix’ enterprise customers to its hybrid platform. And some of those customers may want access to a public cloud too and handily Amazon is also moving into Equinix for its Direct Connect widgetry, which will deliver data to and from AWS and Equinix customers through dedicated private links. Anyway, Tier 3 currently operates two data centers out west and, unlike Amazon, it doesn’t expect its users to supply their own con... (more)

Google’s Attempt to ‘Sandbag’ Oracle Fails

District Court Judge William Alsup told Google Monday that it can't come in at this late date - after facts discovery has pretty much closed - with what he called an "entire fleet" of additional claims that Oracle's Java patents are invalid. Oracle was ordered to winnow its beloved 132 claims down to 50 by June 1. Google was supposed to take its best shot at them by June 15. The judge didn't much care how long Google dithered around saying it "suggests a lack of diligence." "It is possible," he wrote, "that Google simply did not have that many good invalidity theories and is now... (more)

Lightning Downs Amazon and Microsoft Clouds

Its data center in Dublin was downed by a lightning strike Sunday night So was Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) but Amazon was still struggling to re-inflate its cloud Monday and had warned that some EC2 users could be down 48 hours and counting before everything gets put back together again. Microsoft seemed to crawl back in a few hours. Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) was also hit. It's unclear if there will be any data loss like there was when its data center in Virginia got all bollixed up because of a screwed-up upgrade a few months ago. Amazo... (more)

Telx Sold to New Private Equity Partners

Telx Group, the big US data center and collocation operator, is going to private equity houses ABRY Partners and Berkshire Partners rather than try an IPO. The preference seemed an eminently good idea Monday when Wall Street was burning a hole through the sidewalk. What current owner GI Partners, which brought Telx in 2006, gets out of the deal wasn't disclosed. Telx wanted to raise about $100 million in an IPO to accelerate growth and make acquisitions. It currently claims about 900 customers and 34,000 interconnections that connect to telecom companies, web site operators, fi... (more)