Sun Debuts New Sparc, Opteron Workstations
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the servers made by Sun Microsystems have accounted for most of the noise that the Unix system supplier has made in the past decade, Sun got its start as a Unix workstation maker and it still believes that the workstation market is a key part of its product portfolio. While many Unix workstation customers have moved on to high-powered Wintel and Lintel PCs with beefed up graphics, some still need or prefer Unix machines, and a subset of these customers prefer or need a Sparc box. READ MORE >

HP Partners to Create Water Cooling for Server Racks
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Unless you are a supermodel or a rock star, it is not cool to be hot anymore--particularly in the data center. Things have always been hot and heavy in the data center--think IBM mainframes, 3390 disk drives, and whirring tape drives and you'll get the right image--but the heat density of data centers is reaching an all-time high. How high? Try a factor of 10 explosion in power consumption and heat in 10 years. And this is causing a lot of problems. READ MORE >

AMR Sees 'Huge Surge' in ERP Spending, Most Likely at Microsoft
by Alex Woodie

The glory days of ERP spending may not just be a fond pre-Y2K memory in your brain, but could return to claim its rightful place in the sun, suggests a recent report by the enterprise software experts at AMR Research. In a November report, the Boston analyst group found that 71 percent of the companies it surveyed expected their ERP budget to grow in 2006, with the average increase "an astounding 14 percent." What's more, Microsoft topped the list of ERP vendors companies are considering doing business with. READ MORE >

As I See It: My Place Or Yours
by Victor Rozek

Not all that long ago, IT organizations were grappling with one of the most vexing question since the first Neanderthal pondered "how high the moon?" And like all great eternal questions, this one had no single answer that would satisfy everyone. More elusive than the meaning or life; more volatile than debating the existence of God; more daunting than the Sophie's choice of paper or plastic; the question straining the stout minds of IT managers everywhere was: centralized or distributed? READ MORE >