Sun Enters the Blade Server Fray
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems jumped onto the commercial blade server bandwagon this week with the announcement of it Sun Fire Blade Platform, which consists of the BL1600 blade chassis and the BL100 blade servers. Sun has been selling blade servers based on the Compact PCI (cPCI) standard for years, in its Netra line of specialized servers for telecommunications companies and other service providers. The new Sun Fire blades are, like blades from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, based on non-cPCI, proprietary designs. READ MORE >

AMD, Intel Float New Server, Workstation Chips
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Advanced Micro Devices last week announced a speed bump on its Athlon MP 2600+ processor for two-way workstations and servers and debuted the forthcoming Athlon XP 3000+ processor, based on the new "Barton" core. These new processors are aimed squarely at keeping the heat on Intel's Pentium 4 and Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors, which are still the dominant chips for workstations and entry servers. And while Intel hasn't officially announced a beefed up Xeon DP, a 3.06 GHz version of the chip is out there for sale, unofficially. READ MORE >

U.S. Server Sales Up 5.1 Percent in Q4, Says Gartner
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Analysts at Gartner's Dataquest market research unit released shipment statistics a few weeks ago for the server market for 2002, which this newsletter went through in detail last week. This week, Dataquest has announced revenue figures for the U.S. market, which show sales were up 5.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2002, and up 10.6 percent sequentially from Q3 2002. Sales of Intel-based machines are soon going to surpass sales of RISC/Unix servers, and Linux sales doubled. READ MORE >

Shaking IT Up: The Application Development Death Cycle
by Kevin Vandever

How many of you perform specification reviews, code walk-throughs, and quality assurance testing in your organization? Have you looked closely at those processes lately? You may want to, because most of them have been infected with a terrible disease and it could be killing your ability to provide quality software to your customers and users. Simply having a process in place could cause this disease. So what's the cure? READ MORE >

ASNApalooza Contest Winner Announced!

OS/400 programmer Richard Brown is about to find out what it's like to program in the Microsoft .NET environment. Next month, in San Antonio, Brown will attend ASNApalooza, the best place for OS/400 programmers to learn about Microsoft's .NET, Visual Studio environment, and database connectivity.
During the month of January, Guild Companies and ASNA cosponsored the educational gateway leading up to the conference, scheduled for March 5 through 7. Brown, of Reno, Nevada, was randomly chosen from a list of Guild Companies newsletter subscribers who expressed an interest in the free educational opportunity. He has attended ASNA's annual users conference in the past but had not planned to attend this year because of budgetary cutbacks.
Much of the 2003 ASNApalooza will focus on the underpinnings of .NET, and what it offers OS/400 programmers, through using ASNA Visual RPG. ASNA Visual RPG for .NET is an RPG development environment for the .NET platform. ASNApalooza session topics include XML, DLL, SQL, .NET coding exercises for Windows and the Web, and browser-based user interfaces. Click here for more information on ASNApalooza.

Reader Feedback and Insights

We value your feedback and your insights into the OS/400 market. Feel free to send a letter to the editor. We will consider your letter a candidate for the reader feedback column associated with this newsletter, but we will contact you before we make your email public. READ MORE >