Red Hat Taps New CEO As It Reports Solid Third Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While IT Jungle was on holiday in late December, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat gave customers and investors something of a surprise when it reported its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 ended November 30. No, the company's sales were not impacted in any way by the mortgage crisis and the related IT slump in the financial services sector that some vendors are seeing. Sales and profits were up smartly. The surprise was the Matthew Szulik, who has been at the helm of Red Hat for the past eight years, was stepping down as president and chief executive officer. READ MORE >

Supermicro Preps for Quad-Socket Blade Push
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and motherboard maker Supermicro Computer, is gearing up its SuperBlade blade server platform to take on the high performance computing and data centers of the world with the 'Barcelona' quad-core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Specifically, Supermicro has launched a four-socket blade that crams more cores into smaller spaces than blade server alternatives from IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who utterly dominate the market for commercial blade servers. READ MORE >

IDC 2008: It's Post Disruption, the Aftermath of Webification
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Art had post modern. Politics and economics had post history. Naturalist Euell Gibbons had Post Grape Nuts, at least until he died in 1975, when he became, like all of us, compost. And now information technology in 2008 appears to have something that the propellerheads at IDC are labeling post disruption. This seems to be another way of saying cleaning up the loose ends in Web-style computing, which is what IDC expects for IT vendors and IT buyers to worry about this year. READ MORE >

Servers Get Their First Power and Performance Benchmark
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the first 40 years of the systems and server market, price/performance was basically the only metric that mattered within a given class of machines. But in the 21st century, when power and cooling issues are thwarting the attempts of companies to continue adding computing capacity at the rates they did in years gone by, there will be a new metric that people will start to pay attention to: performance/watt. To that end, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has just release its first benchmark that gauges the performance and power consumption of servers. READ MORE >