Hewlett-Packard publicly announced on their website on Friday that the two giants of the computing world ,have come to an agreement which sees HP acquire IBRIX services.

IBIRX, a leading supplier of enterprise-class file serving software which includes data protection, high-availability features and data management services. The hardware giants tend to aim their services at large scale consumers where IBRIX’s solutions enable businesses to cache lots of important data, without much work and money.

HP claim that they want IBRIX to add to their growing portfolio in the eventful, high-performance computing storage market, growing at an annual rate of 20%. This comes as no shock to many of us as IBRIX software is already grouped together with HP Storage Area Network, ProLiant, BladeSystem and ProCurve Hardware.

HP’s vice president of Unified Storage, StorageWorks Division, Jeff Hausman said this action will benefit both companies and the growing market,

“Customers need highly scalable storage solutions that efficiently and cost-effectively manage massive amounts of information. This acquisition expands our portfolio to better support the needs of this market segment. In addition, IBRIX’s highly scalable software leverages industry-standard hardware allowing customers to fully maximize their existing investments.”

IBRIX’s CEO, Milan Shetti  later added that it was also in HP’s and its customers interest,

“Joining forces with HP is a natural fit for our customers, resulting in an enhanced storage solution that scales to meet their data growth. The unique combination of IBRIX’s file serving solutions with HP’s portfolio of products and services enables customers to lower the cost of scale-out architectures while easing the process of storing, accessing and moving critical data.”

HP have said that they are very close in ending the proceedings and will legally own IBRIX in 30 days.

Lenovo is the latest candidate in joining the "free windows 7 update" along with Dell and HP

HP was the first PC service to offer a free upgrade to Windows 7 and now has been joined by fellow company Lenovo.

Lenovo have now decided to provide users with a free Windows 7 upgrade with their PC’s and Laptops. The deal has been available for three days now and will come to an end in January 2010. All of the Lenovo systems which have Vista, between then qualify for the free update.

The PC giants have made it clear that companies who purchase more than twenty nine systems will be referred to Microsoft’s volume licensing programme.

Their actions have come after HP, on Thursday announced they would offer a free windows update between 26th June and 22nd October with systems, effectively coming complementary. In addition to HP, Dell are also offering a deal almost identical to Lenovos, starting from 26th June and ending on 31st Jan ‘10. In light of these three companies actions, I am sure other PC services are sure to follow especially as Microsoft are offering a “referral” program to major organizations.

The software giants are adament on helping users out as they said earlier last week that they’d provide discounts to users that pre-ordered Windows 7. This is sure to give Microsoft quite a bit of profit from users becoming obliged to buy a computer system to get the free upgrade, which they really needed!

Is it only a matter of time before all of the major PC companies offer the upgrade just to attract more potential customers? Feel free to comment below!