• Disk Array Sales Still Humming Along, Says IDC

  June 18, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Few things in the world exhibit such perfect elasticity of price and demand as the appetite that corporations have had over the past 50 years for disk storage. As disk technology has progressed and the cost of a unit of capacity has come down dramatically, this has fueled an even larger demand for capacity. This has remained so in the first quarter of 2007, according to statistics compiled by IDC. Sales worldwide of external disk arrays rose by 5.9 percent in the first quarter to $4.3 billion. Total disk array sales, which includes internal arrays that are popular for

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• The i5 515 and 525 Versus the Unix Competition

  June 18, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I walked through a performance and price/performance comparison that pitted the new user-priced i5 515 and 525 System i servers against various Windows-X64 servers. Windows, as we all know, is the main competition in the small and medium business space when it comes to server platforms. Windows, of course, only runs on X64 and Itanium platforms–even though it was originally intended to run on IBM, MIPS, and NEC RISC processors. These alternative RISC platforms spawned the Unix revolution nearly two decades ago, and while Windows may dominate the SMB space, there are plenty of Unix shops among

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• Azul Systems Upgrades Java Appliances

  June 18, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Java co-processor appliance maker Azul Systems has made good on its promise to roll out more scalable Java appliances this year based on its “Vega 2” 48-core processor for hosting Java Virtual Machines. Last December, Azul launched the Vega 2 chip, which had twice as many cores per chip as its predecessor, the Vega 1, and therefore can do about twice as much Java work. The two Compute Appliance machines launched back in December had two or four Vega 2 chips, which supported either 96 cores (the model 3210) or 192 cores (the model 3220). At the time, Azul said

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• Vision Solutions Acquires HA Rival Lakeview Technology

  June 18, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tectonic shifts continue a-pace in what was formerly the quiet land of the OS/400 and i5/OS ecosystem as Vision Solutions, the dominant supplier of high availability software for the System i platform, announced last Wednesday that it has acquired rival Lakeview Technology. Thoma Cressey Bravo, the private equity firm that bought Vision Solutions late last year and then followed it up by acquiring HA rival iTera, is funding the Lakeview Technology acquisition. Given that Vision Solutions and Lakeview Technology are privately held firms, financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. You might have noticed that the

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• ‘Catch the Wave’ OCEAN Tech Conference Returns to SoCal

  June 18, 2007 Dan Burger

  One of the largest and most active local user groups in the United States, the OCEAN User Group of Southern California, is hosting its annual “Catch the Wave” technical conference Monday, July 16. The event focuses on the IBM System i, iSeries, and AS/400 platform as well as the i5/OS and OS/400 operating systems. The one-day event will feature 30 educational sessions, which are divided into six tracks comprised of five sessions. Attendees can choose to remain in one track for the entire five sessions or pick sessions from any number of tracks. The following tracks are on the

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• Adoption of VoIP Tied to Relief from Phone Expenses

  June 18, 2007 Dan Burger

  Figuring out what to do with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is still in the noodling process. There are several milestone installations up and running and the spot light is on them to prove the worthiness of this technology. IBM executives, like System i general manager Mark Shearer, are very pro VoIP because it is an application-oriented technology that provides another workload for his application-oriented server line. However, for most people, thinking about voice communications in terms of applications and databases instead of wires leading to the phone company brings on brain cramps. Terry Boulais has been on the front

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• The i5 515 and 525 Versus the Unix Competition

  June 18, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I walked through a performance and price/performance comparison that pitted the new user-priced i5 515 and 525 System i servers against various Windows-X64 servers. Windows, as we all know, is the main competition in the small and medium business space when it comes to server platforms. Windows, of course, only runs on X64 and Itanium platforms–even though it was originally intended to run on IBM, MIPS, and NEC RISC processors. These alternative RISC platforms spawned the Unix revolution nearly two decades ago, and while Windows may dominate the SMB space, there are plenty of Unix shops among

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• The Web Runtime Tax: The Tax Man Cometh, Again

  June 18, 2007 Brian Kelly

  On February 5, I had the pleasure of applying for a U.S. passport for an exotic cruise I am taking this summer, but I was hoping that I might expedite the process so that I could use the passport to fly into Toronto, Canada, for a one-day IBM pre-announcement briefing on iSeries Application Development-the WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) in particular. Unfortunately for me, without a trip to Philadelphia or Harrisburg, the time for which I could ill afford, my passport would not arrive in time to fly to the February 22, 2007, event. In mid-January, the rules changed and

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• Vision Solutions Acquires HA Rival Lakeview Technology

  June 18, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tectonic shifts continue a-pace in what was formerly the quiet land of the OS/400 and i5/OS ecosystem as Vision Solutions, the dominant supplier of high availability software for the System i platform, announced last Wednesday that it has acquired rival Lakeview Technology. Thoma Cressey Bravo, the private equity firm that bought Vision Solutions late last year and then followed it up by acquiring HA rival iTera, is funding the Lakeview Technology acquisition. Given that Vision Solutions and Lakeview Technology are privately held firms, financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. You might have noticed that the

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• New Efficiency Goals Set by Climate Savers Computing Initiative

  June 18, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Intel and Google last week joined dozens of other top tech companies and competitors in the creation of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a new organization dedicated to making PCs and servers more energy efficient and, hopefully, better for the environment. They were joined by Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and about 35 other technology vendors in founding the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. The group and its goals are modeled after the World Wildlife Fund’s Climate Savers program. The group’s initial goal is to encourage computer and component manufacturers to build products that meet or surpass

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