The i5 515 and 525 Versus the Unix Competition
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, I walked through a performance and price/performance comparison that pitted the new user-priced i5 515 and 525 System i servers against various Windows-X64 servers. Windows, as we all know, is the main competition in the small and medium business space when it comes to server platforms. Windows, of course, only runs on X64 and Itanium platforms--even though it was originally intended to run on IBM, MIPS, and NEC RISC processors. These alternative RISC platforms spawned the Unix revolution nearly two decades ago, and while Windows may dominate the SMB space, there are plenty of Unix shops among these smaller businesses. READ MORE >

Vision Solutions Acquires HA Rival Lakeview Technology
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Tectonic shifts continue a-pace in what was formerly the quiet land of the OS/400 and i5/OS ecosystem as Vision Solutions, the dominant supplier of high availability software for the System i platform, announced last Wednesday that it has acquired rival Lakeview Technology. Thoma Cressey Bravo, the private equity firm that bought Vision Solutions late last year and then followed it up by acquiring HA rival iTera, is funding the Lakeview Technology acquisition. READ MORE >

Adoption of VoIP Tied to Relief from Phone Expenses
by Dan Burger

Figuring out what to do with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is still in the noodling process. There are several milestone installations up and running and the spot light is on them to prove the worthiness of this technology. IBM executives, like System i general manager Mark Shearer, are very pro VoIP because it is an application-oriented technology that provides another workload for his application-oriented server line. However, for most people, thinking about voice communications in terms of applications and databases instead of wires leading to the phone company brings on brain cramps. READ MORE >

The Web Runtime Tax: The Tax Man Cometh, Again
by Brian Kelly

On February 5, I had the pleasure of applying for a U.S. passport for an exotic cruise I am taking this summer, but I was hoping that I might expedite the process so that I could use the passport to fly into Toronto, Canada, for a one-day IBM pre-announcement briefing on iSeries Application Development-the WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) in particular. READ MORE >