A Flash in the Pan or the Future of Data Storage?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM's Hursley development lab in England and its Almaden Research Center in California are known for a lot of different innovations, particularly in the area of disk storage. Before IBM sold off its disk drive business to Hitachi a few years back, the labs in Minnesota and outside of San Jose in California were also hotbeds of disk development. IBM invented disk drives, and has a lot of knowledge about data storage in its institutional memory. READ MORE >

Server Buyers Shop Like It's 1999 in the Second Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If the economies of the Western countries are heading into recession, the purchase orders for servers at companies sure don't seem to be a reflection of this yet. And the Asia/Pacific, Eastern European, and South American markets still seem to be booming, despite more than a year of jittery economies where their indigenous companies have their own customers. And so, the second quarter looked pretty good in terms of server sales, according to research from box counter Gartner, with server sales up 5.7 percent to $13.8 billion and shipments up 12.2 percent to 2.34 million units. READ MORE >

IBM Expects Customers to Build Security Best Practices Through SaaS
by Dan Burger

Never let them see you sweat. That's easier said than done if you're in charge of corporate security. You're watching those X64 boxes like a cat watching for a mouse. What about the System i? No worries, right? It's not even top 10 on your security priorities list. It's been that way for years, but that doesn't make it the right way. The bright lights of regulatory compliance can make things hot for you, and suddenly that looks like sweat on your forehead. Tsk-tsk. READ MORE >

The X Factor: Why Maintenance Is Worth the Money--Sometimes
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a lot of checks that IT managers and chief financing officers do not like to write when it comes to the IT budget, and hardware maintenance is one of the checks they increasingly dislike writing. There are good reasons for this--and there are also good reasons for writing that check. Equally important, IT shops have to be smart about what they put on hardware maintenance, and how they deal with break-fix issues in general as they relate to hardware. READ MORE >