IBM Readies Big Power6 Boxes, New X64 Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM may be mostly a services and software company, but most of the services and software it sells are still, despite all the changes in the IT industry in the past three decades, driven by its own server platforms and the operating systems that IBM creates for them. So in that regard, if you think of services as the extra goodies you used to get when you spent 10 or 100 times as much for a server than you do today and if you think of software as the stuff that used to come with the hardware more or less for free, than maybe Big Blue hasn't changed as much as the financial results might lead us all to believe. READ MORE >

System i Security: Lots of Room for Improvement
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

System i security software supplier PowerTech hosted its first iNSIGHT 2008 security and compliance conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and one of the main events at the show was the fifth annual State of System i Security report that the company put together to give people an understanding of the real security issues that real AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops are coping with in their production environments. READ MORE >

Server Virtualization and Consolidation Require More Resiliency
by Bill Hammond

Server consolidation will be a top priority for many IT departments in the coming year. In a recent research study conducted by Gartner, 61 percent of the companies polled were already paring their server count, and 28 percent were planning to do so in the near future. The back story on consolidation is interesting. Life often smacks of irony and the renewed interest in centralization is certainly ironic for those of us who know the history of mainframes and minicomputers. READ MORE >

Thermometer Money: Changing a Business Partner Paradigm
by Doug Mewmaw

Living in Chicago, the cold hard winter weather tends to take its toll on my family. Recently my family was really sick with all of us experiencing a high temperature. During this recent bout with the flu, I started to chuckle as I was in line at our local Walgreen's buying a thermometer. Why was I laughing? Because this would be the fifth thermometer I have purchased in the last five years! For some reason, my family can't seem to have the discipline to put the thermometer back in the medicine cabinet. As someone that is responsible for the family budget, it drives me absolutely crazy that my kids do not understand the impact of their actions. READ MORE >