Dell assembles Virtual Integrated System

In today's podcast: Dell assembles Virtual Integrated System; Nintendo 3DS launch date; and Amazon Web Services PHP SDK.

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Dell hopes to expand its role in data centers beyond that of a low-cost hardware provider by offering a set of products for managing a virtual infrastructure. Through acquisitions, partnerships and development work, Dell has assembled a set of software products called the Virtual Integrated System, which it says will make it easier for companies to provision and manage physical and virtual servers and storage. It released new products for VIS on Wednesday, including a graphical interface for its infrastructure manager, and a self-service creator tool.

Nintendo's 3DS, the first portable game device with a 3D screen, will go on sale in Japan on February 26, and in Europe, Australia and the U.S. in March. Like Nintendo's DS handheld console, it has a 3-inch touchscreen in the lower half, but the upper screen is a 3.5-inch 3D screen that gives an impression of depth without the need for special goggles. Headline software titles for the 3DS will include Capcom's "Resident Evil: Revelations," Konami's "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater," and Nintendo's "Nintendogs + cats."

Amazon Web Services has released an SDK to make it easier to develop applications in PHP that will run on Amazon's cloud. It works with PHP 5.2 or later, and will help developers build applications that use different parts of Amazon's cloud infrastructure, including S3 Simple Storage Service , the EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud or the SimpleDB database. Amazon's cloud has a language-agnostic web service API that can be used by any number of programming languages, although Amazon offers developer kits for Java and Microsoft .NET in addition to the new PHP SDK.

Android's growing success as a smartphone operating system is bringing a long-simmering problem to light: A lot of Android applications are being pirated, as the openness of the platform and the rudimentary copy protection used has made it easy for people to steal applications without paying for them. Until very recently it was easy to strip copy protection from applications offered on the Android Market Web site, and then use, offer or even sell the software as your own. Google is starting to crack down on the problem.

And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.