Expanded Power Systems i Boxes on the Horizon?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been a quiet summer in Lake Woebegone, er, rather Rochester, Minnesota, and its Silver Lake. The run from late June through September is traditionally a quiet one, with a few nips and tucks here and there in the Power Systems lineup. But as we all know from reading The Four Hundred, IBM still has a little unfinished Power Systems business for 2008. And the word on the street is that some tweaked gear might be coming down the pike any day now. READ MORE >

Entry Power System i Boxes Compete Well with Windows Boxes
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the key reasons why IBM merged the System i and System p product lines this year was to get the i platform more competitive with the rest of the system market. By converging the Power server family and stopping its practice of overcharging System i customers for hardware and software, Big Blue has made the entry Power Systems i Edition lineup--that's the Power 520 and the BladeCenter S with JS12 blade servers--absolutely competitive with equivalent Windows boxes running online transaction processing workloads. READ MORE >

X64 Servers See Pricing Pressure in Q2, Big Box Sales Grow
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The urge to virtualize servers and a resurgence in mainframe sales has helped buoy overall server sales in the second quarter, according to statistics compiled by IDC, which reckons that the corporations and organizations of the world bought an aggregate of $13.9 billion worth of iron. Compared to the prior year's quarter, sales rose by 6.4 percent, hitting the highest revenue level in a second quarter since 2000, the peak of the dot-com boom. Server shipment growth in the quarter rose by 11.1 percent, driven substantially by 2 million X64 servers that went out the door in the quarter--a rise of 12.4 percent. READ MORE >

The Law of Attraction
by Doug Mewmaw

This year, I was introduced to a concept called the law of attraction. For those who have never heard of the LOA, my laymen's interpretation of the concept is the following: Based on the science of quantum physics, the law of attraction explains how everything in our universe is made up of energy. The net affect of this energy is that every person has the ability to manifest things into their lives based on the negative or positive energy they project. READ MORE >