Sine Nomine Shows Off Solaris on System z
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the wake of their landmark agreement to have Solaris certified and distributed on Big Blue's server lines, IBM and Sun Microsystems have given their blessing to Sine Nomine Associates for a prototype of the OpenSolaris open source variant of Solaris--which is not quite yet a full distribution--acting as a guest operating system on the mainframe's z/VM virtual environment. That prototype, which predates the Sun-IBM agreement, was demonstrated recently at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. READ MORE >

Q&A with Jim Herring: The View from the Top
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For every generation of AS/400, iSeries, or System i servers and the related OS/400 and i5/OS operating systems, there is a person who, more than anyone else, is associated with the technology that IBM delivers. This person has historically been in charge of steering the development of the hardware and software for the product line and managing the operations of the factories that made the AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers and the supply chains that fed them. This is a big job, and for my money, a much tougher job perhaps than that performed by divisional general managers at Big Blue. READ MORE >

Sun to Release xVM Virtualization Under GPL v3 License
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of its 'rolling thunder' development and marketing campaign to become a powerhouse in server virtualization, Sun Microsystems this week has announced some more details on its xVM server virtualization products and the related tools to manage them. The company has also announced that the programs that comprise the xVM suite will be available as an open source project under the GNU General Public License v3--the first such Sun product to adopt the new license. READ MORE >

Be My Guest
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Like most people who have been following the server racket for a long time, I have been singing the praises of server virtualization as a means to make servers more efficient and thereby help companies not only get more for their money, but hopefully--if not now, then in future years--to actually save some money that they can spend on other things. While virtualization is a great advancement in server technology, it is breaking down a lot of barriers even as it erects virtual ones inside servers of all stripes and sizes. READ MORE >