Infrastructure Business Monopoly
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As the largest provider of goods and services for enterprise data centers and midrange data closets, it usually takes a long time for IBM to shift steer its vastness toward a new opportunity. But when the economy is heading for the rocks, it is surprising how quickly Big Blue moves these days compared to the IBM Company of old. Rather than try to remold the world in its own image, IBM is more interested in trying to take advantage of the world as it is transforming itself. READ MORE >

Power6+ Blade Performance: IBM's Competitive Analysis
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the computer racket, sometimes you can learn as much from what IT vendors choose to say as you can from what they don't choose to say. All I know for sure, in my two decades of watching this complex industry, is that you have to look at as much data as you can stomach if you want to try to come out with something that even remotely approximates the truth. And so it is with the updated Power6+ lineup that came out in late April from IBM. READ MORE >

PowerVM Hypervisor Gets Active Memory Sharing
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I'll admit it. I like hardware, and I like to learn about new hardware features first. But in an increasingly virtualized computing environment, many of the cooler functions are not, strictly speaking, being implemented in hardware, but rather deep in the hypervisor and system microcode. And so it is with one neat--and little discussed--feature that was just announced by IBM for logical partitions on Power-based servers called active memory sharing. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Playing For Keeps in Peoria
by Hesh Wiener

When Chief Pontiac worked out a settlement with his British adversaries in 1766 and retired to what is now southwestern Illinois, he thought his place in history was secure. Three years later, he was murdered by a Peoria. Today Peoria means Caterpillar, not Native Americans, and Pontiac's name has faded, like the eponymous brand of GM automobiles. But no Pontiac suffered the ignominy of Windows Live OneCare computer security software, which, gelded and code-named Morro, will be given away, if it can be, by Microsoft, a company that just ceased making money. READ MORE >