OS/400 Servers Over Time: Stacking Up the Big Boxes
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, we took a walk down Memory Lane for OS/400 server price/performance as it relates to small and midrange OS/400 servers in various power ranges, and this week, I wanted to examine how the biggest, baddest boxes match up across the past six years of the iSeries and System i5 product lines. As has been the case for years, the improvements in price/performance for the OS/400 line are slowing--particularly for large machines supporting large green-screen workloads. READ MORE >

Hosting is Increasingly Popular at OS/400 Shops
by Mary Lou Roberts

Most of the analysts agree: Outsourcing (defined here as turning over all or part of the delivery of an IT service to a third party) is continuing to grow at a steady pace, in virtually all of its permutations. While the specifics of the projections may differ somewhat, no one seems to challenge the notion that, more and more, businesses are focusing on their core competencies--making and shipping goods, investing money, healing the sick, and selling products--and farming out the responsibilities for running increasing complex IT infrastructures. While OS/400 shops are not on the front end of this trend, they are not immune to it, either. READ MORE >

The Balance of Server Powers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past couple of decades, when people talked about computing power, it was understood that what they meant was the ability of a computer to do work of some sort--number crunching, database churning, transaction processing, or, more recently, data streaming. Power is work over time, and when you invest in a server platform, processing power was by and large what you were investing in. READ MORE >

Lincoln to Open SQL
by Hesh Wiener

In 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. Today, one of his relatives, Cherie Booth (Blair), is the First Lady of the United Kingdom. In its youth, IBM was insanely jealous of its rivals. But by the mid-1970s, the mature IBM was so secure in its dominance of information processing that it felt it could, without risk, tell the world one all about one of its ideas, a database language called SEQUEL, later dubbed SQL. Today, competitors' implementations of relational database engines built around SQL threaten to do to even more harm to IBM than the nearly fatal PC. READ MORE >