Appreciation Rising for Web Serving on IBM i
by Dan Burger

Web serving using the IBM i platform is uncharted territory for most of the companies running their core applications on this often under utilized box. They don't go there. They don't think to go there. Or they think they don't want to go there. No one knows how many shops are serving Web apps on their i boxes, but it's likely the number is growing. It's also likely the number is less than 20 percent of the installed base. READ MORE >

Aussies And Kiwis Get Killer Power 720 Bundle
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The exploding Chinese economy has been a boon for both Australia and New Zealand, which sit close together and are packed with food and raw materials that the Chinese economy needs. New Zealand has suffered an earthquake that has literally and economically rattled the country, but it is running trade surpluses according to The Economist. Like its larger neighbor, Australia, and the United States, New Zealand has its own deficit spending and housing bubble, too. But both Australia and New Zealand managed to escape the clutches of the Great Recession. READ MORE >

Second Quarter Server Sales Humming Right Along
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

We were deep into the third quarter of 2011, but the data about how well or poorly different systems did in the second quarter had just come out while The Four Hundred was on its Labor Day hiatus. The good news is that the server business--a bellwether for the national and global economies--continues to grow and looks to be back to something close to normal. READ MORE >

As I See It: Going Silent
by Victor Rozek

My first IT job was working swing shift computer operations for a Silicon Valley wafer manufacturer. In those days, disc packs were removable and resembled layered cakes consisting of a stack of platters coated with oxide icing. Each evening I would run a long series of sequential jobs. The process needed to be expeditious if there was any hope of finishing by shift's end, which meant starting the next job as soon as the preceding one ended. READ MORE >