In Formation: Q&A with Infor Chairman Jim Schaper
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Because servers and operating systems are the backbone of the data centers of the world, IT Jungle spends a lot of time talking to the vendors of these products. But ultimately, if these products are working correctly in the data center, end users do not even know they exist. (This is obviously an idealized situation, given that operating systems are cranky and servers sometimes fail.) What end users think of as "the computer" for their company is actually the application software that runs on top of it, whether it was built in-house by company programmers, bought off the shelf from a third party, or is comprised of a mix of the two. READ MORE >

GST Says Buy Cheaper i5 Disk Controllers and Lots of Disks
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Any time IBM puts new disk controller or disk drive technology into the field, that is a time when IT managers have to start looking at their iSeries and System i5 machines and figure out if the new offerings can be deployed to improve system capacity or responsiveness--either immediately, if disk usage is an issue, or during the next budget cycle when funds will be available for upgrading storage as well as other parts of the systems. Two weeks ago, Big Blue launched a new RAID 5 disk controller and new extended SCSI enclosures, and I talked to GST, one of the few makers of disk gear that is compatible with iSeries and i5 machines. READ MORE >

Chip Makers Strut Their Stuff at ISSCC
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Chip geeks and semiconductor mavens from around the world converged on San Francisco last week to show off their latest innovations at the annual IEEE's International Solid State Circuits Conference. This is one of the two annual events where a lot of advances in chip design are first revealed to the world--the other being the Hot Chips conference hosted in the summer. At last week's event, Intel, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems, and PA Semi showed off future server microprocessors. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Paved With Good Intentions
by Hesh Wiener

It's a milestone. By midyear, Seagate Technology and Hitachi will offer 3.5-inch disk drives that store a terabyte of data. Other disk makers are right on their heels. Processor makers with multicore offerings will reach other technology milestones, as will network gear providers whose products will foster ever-faster communications. It's hard to think of so many metaphorical milestones without recalling the originals, stone pillars that marked thousand-pace distances on the vast web of Roman Empire roads. These highways linked Rome to the rest of Europe, spanned Britain, and even crossed Asia Minor, producing dramatic consequences, both intended and unintended. READ MORE >