IBM's System i Priorities for 2007
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As the holiday season approached last December, two key people at IBM's System i division took some time out of their schedules to talk about the technology and marketing areas that they would focus on in 2007 with the i5/OS platform. Many of the priorities that Big Blue has for the platform have been talked about in 2006, such as Voice Over IP telephony and the PHP language running on the platform. But these key IBMers did offer some more insight as well as an initial reaction to my own suggestion that IBM fully embrace user-based capacity pricing for the System i5 line. READ MORE >

Arrow Buys Agilysys' IT Distribution Business for $485 Million
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The consolidation in the server and storage distribution business continues apace in 2007 as Arrow Electronics announced last week that it would pay $485 million in cash to buy the KeyLink Systems Group distribution business from rival Agilysys. With this deal, Arrow positions itself to better compete against Avnet, its remaining big rival in the enterprise server, storage, and software distribution business. Both Arrow and Avnet have been doing acquisitions in recent months to build up their IT distributorships. READ MORE >

Uncle Sam Pushes Energy Star Ratings for Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Whenever the government gets involved in a problem, then we know we are in big trouble and that it is probably a worse situation than we imagined. Just as the year was ended, two events in the political arena in the United States indicated that the problem of energy consumption in the data center is, well, heating up. While the entry of the government and its regulations is not generally perceived as a good thing by many people, in this case, some government regulation and encouragement is just what the data center manager ordered. READ MORE >

As I See It: Questioning Retirement
by Victor Rozek

Another year begins. Perhaps this will be your final year of formal employment, or perhaps you have many more to go before confronting retirement. Regardless, there's never a bad time to do some serious thinking about survival after the paychecks stop. But thinking is not unlike computing: stuff the brain with garbage, and garbage will emerge. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, many Americans are filling their heads with unfounded hope and betting their future on a set of risky assumptions. READ MORE >