Dell Launches New, Power-Efficient Blade Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

PC and server maker Dell was getting kicked around in the IT sector throughout 2006 and 2007, but 2008 might be shaping up to be a year of recovery for the company. Dell has competitive market share in the entry X64 server market, but has been an also-ran in the blade server space dominated by IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The new PowerEdge M series blade chassis and related X64 blade servers could get Dell its rightful share of the blade space, which should account for around $5 billion in sales in 2008. READ MORE >

Sun Casts a $1 Billion Net to Catch MySQL
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 2008 IT market was looking a little boring so far this year, but server and operating system maker and software powerhouse wannabee Sun Microsystems woke everybody up early last Wednesday morning with the news that it would spend $1 billion to acquire open source database maker MySQL. This is arguably one of the smartest moves Sun has made in a decade, and probably rivals the decision it made in the mid-1990s to buy the carcasses from Thinking Machines, Kendall Square, and the Cray Sparc-based server business. READ MORE >

Weak Dollar, Services, and Power6 Give IBM a Solid Fourth Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After pre-announcing on last Monday morning that it would have better than expected profits in its fourth quarter, giving Wall Street a helping hand as it tries to climb up the steep cliff it has tumbled off in recent weeks, IBM reported its full and official financial results for the quarter last Thursday afternoon after the market closed. This turns out to be one of the best quarters IBM has turned in during the past decade, in terms of both revenue and profit growth. READ MORE >

IBM Aims for Server Expansion in 2008, Including System i Reincarnation
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past several years, I have ended each work year by attending a server technology conference hosted by UBS, which typically draws the top brass from the major server divisions of the tier one server makers. This year, because of the high cost of putting on the event, UBS decided to not do it. But some of the server makers did attend the Global Technology Conference in San Francisco hosted by Lehman Brothers in December. One of them was IBM, and Bill Zeitler, the senior vice president in charge of Systems and Technology Group, had some interesting things to say. READ MORE >