http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tugindex.html Description Sometimes, a good idea just doesn't take off. OK, this is information technology, not philosophy, so let me rephrase that more accurately. Sometimes, ideas and habits that were once laudable have an immense inertia that prevents a new and perhaps better idea from building momentum in the market; sometimes, a standard however begrudgingly adopted by IT vendors can overcome that inertia. Such is the case with the wonderful idea of blade servers. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story01.html Since waking up after being asleep for enough years to let Advanced Micro Devices have the driver's seat in the X64 chip market, in terms of design elegance, the top brass at Intel have been espousing their so-called 'tick-tock' rhythm of process and microarchitecture developments for Xeon and Itanium server processors. Maybe 'left jab-right hook' would be a more accurate description, since Intel is in position to keep pounding on a substantially weakened AMD. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story02.html If the economies of the Western countries are heading into recession, the purchase orders for servers at companies sure don't seem to be a reflection of this yet. And the Asia/Pacific, Eastern European, and South American markets still seem to be booming, despite more than a year of jittery economies where their indigenous companies have their own customers. And so, the second quarter looked pretty good in terms of server sales, according to research from box counter Gartner, with server sales up 5.7 percent to $13.8 billion and shipments up 12.2 percent to 2.34 million units. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story03.html Technology is a canvas painted in broad strokes. It tends to be discussed as an abstraction, serving as a one-word synopsis for the diverse exertions of scientists and engineers. Technology is a verb without a definitive object. It has become an end in itself, many steps removed from the lives of end users. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story04.html Remember that report out of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses I told you about a few weeks ago that said IT jobs were growing in the United States despite the wobbly economy? Maybe it is time to get a second opinion about how IT jobs are lining up this year. That's why the analysts at Gartner did their own surveys, and the news suggests that the IT job market is weakening a bit in the States. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story05.html My dicing and slicing of the demographics of the midrange server market last week elicited an interesting response from a reader, suggesting a much cleaner way of thinking about how to separate small, medium, and large enterprises and their IT departments from each other. Check it out. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story06.html This bit of news will come as no surprise to any IT Jungle readers who have run their own businesses or who work for small companies where money is a lot tighter than at larger enterprises, which always seem to have a lot more dough to spare for IT projects that may or may not pan out. According to research performed recently by IDC, SMB shops, which have IT budgets that are growing at least twice as fast as spending among larger companies, are more worried about the state of the economy than all the latest gadgetry or hot buzzword ideas. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story07.html As we are all well aware, patent laws can be as much of a problem for innovation as they can be a boon for it. A patent is only as good as the clerk's understanding of the technology field they are issuing patents for, and unfortunately, not everyone can be as smart as Albert Einstein, perhaps the smartest patent clerk in the world. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story08.html IT distributor Avnet has been battling with rival Arrow Electronics to make acquisitions to build out its business on a global scale, particularly in fast-growing sub-markets in Europe and Asia. Last week, it was Avnet's turn to make a deal, and in this case, the Phoenix, Arizona, company acquired Ontrack Solutions, a systems integrator and reseller based in Mumbai, India. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story09.html With the onslaught of identity theft and the increase in instances of corporate data loss these days, forensics is becoming a word more IT administrators are becoming familiar with. In the world of log management solutions, however, most vendors make users choose between speedy log collection and the capability to forensically mine for important system events. With the addition of 'forensics on the fly' to its Security Information Event Management (SEIM) system, ArcSight claims users can now do both without compromise. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug082808-story10.html