More Power Transitions Are on the Way
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The ink is not dry on the latest round of Power6-based Power Systems servers and IBM, its reseller and distributor partners, and soon its customers are already thinking about the next and final transitions coming to the converged Power Systems product line. Even though IBM has, for all practical purposes, merged the somewhat independent System i and System p server lines, they are still distinct in many ways. But apparently, according to my sources, that is going to change, once and for all, later this year. READ MORE >

U.S. Drags Down Server Sales in Q1, But Weak Dollar Helps
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Depending on how you want to look at it, the United States both helped and hurt sales in the global server market in the first quarter of 2008, according to statistics compiled by the box counters at IDC. The jittery economy in the United States has caused companies large and small to pull back on server spending, but at the same time the weak dollar compared to currencies in overseas markets that are experiencing decent growth in server sales as their economies build up and are amplifying the revenues as those sales are booked back in the States for the major server players. READ MORE >

Server Branding 101: Big Name, Big Game?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For kicks and giggles a few weeks ago, I spent some time monkeying around on the three top search engines seeing how many pages out there on the Internet relating to various IBM server brands and operating systems were being indexed with those terms. As I fully admit, this is a thoroughly unscientific way to try to gauge the relative importance of brands, but it seems to me to be as valid as doing a random poll by telephone--and has the virtue of being done in a few minutes. Now, let's compare all the big server brands and their vendors. READ MORE >

Java Compute Appliances Upgraded by Azul Systems
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Azul Systems, the maker of hardware appliances that have been specifically designed to run Java virtual machines that are offloaded from general purpose servers and their applications, has announced the third generation of its Java processors, the Vega-3. With this new chip, Azul is adding more cores to the chip and adding other tweaks to make its Compute Appliances even more appealing to IT shops running Java applications who are sick of paying high prices for servers just to run JVMs. READ MORE >