State of the System i: How 2007 Went for Tool Vendors, and How 2008 Is Looking
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in October, I did two stories that gauged the pulse of the System i business among resellers of new equipment and then dealers of second-hand servers. In this third installment of the State of the System i series, I want to look at how one of the bedrocks of the IBM midrange--application development tool providers--are faring in 2007 and how they expect to do in the coming year. (This story, by necessity, offers the viewpoints of several of the dozens of dominant application development tool providers, which are but a subset of the hundreds of companies that provide some kind of application development tools that interact with the i5/OS and OS/400 platform.) READ MORE >

Emerging Markets and Virtualization Drive Q3 Server Sales
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server lines, perhaps with the exception of IBM's System z and System i servers, did pretty well in the third quarter, according to the latest market share statistics from Gartner. The upgrade cycle in data centers and departments for 64-bit, energy-efficient, and virtualization-capable servers, coupled with raw growth in processing capacity in emerging markets like China, India, and Russia, boosted both server shipments and revenues in the third quarter on a global basis. READ MORE >

IBM Readies Power Management for Power Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It used to be called PowerExecutive, but the power consumption monitoring and management software that IBM created for X64, Power, and at some point in the future System z mainframes is now called Systems Director Active Energy Manager. Starting on December 14, AEM for Power V3.1, is an update to the March PowerExecutive V2.0 release, which was the first to support Power-based systems. The V3.1 update includes new features, many of them in particular to exploit power saving and power management features in the Power6 processors that will be spread across the System i and System p server lines in 2008. READ MORE >

Bleak Outlook for Information Security, According to Researchers
by Alex Woodie

Hackers, thieves, and malware writers continued to circumvent security measures and compromise the world's computers in creative new ways during 2007, according to security researchers at the SANS Institute, which released its seventh-annual SANS Top 20 list of the most pressing security vulnerabilities yesterday. And next year doesn't look a whole lot better, with an expected increase in parasitic crimeware, botnets, and targeted attacks on virtualization products, VoIP, and Vista, according to McAfee's Avert Labs, which released its Top 10 Threat Predictions for 2008. READ MORE >