• The Costs of Data Breaches Continues to Rise, Says Ponemon

  December 10, 2007 Dan Burger

  There are 215 million stories in the naked city . . . and those are just the stories that have something to do with data breaches. That’s the number, dating back to January 2005, established by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. If you find that surprising, wait until you hear about the financial loss attached to those breaches. According to the study released last week by the Ponemon Institute, data breach incidents cost companies $197 per compromised customer record in 2007. Here are some equally sobering statistics to think about: The average per-incident costs were $6.3 million. The cost

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• MKS Swings to a Profit on Revenue Growth in Fiscal 2008 Second Quarter

  December 10, 2007 Dan Burger

  In its most recent round of quarterly financial reporting, the application lifecycle management (ALM) software company MKS scored a profitable second quarter for its fiscal year 2008. Revenue and income increased and new customers were added to the company’s installed base. For the first six months of its fiscal year, however, the company remains in the red. The following specific figures provide a comparison to the company’s second fiscal quarter of 2007 and begin with a revenue increase of 18 percent that amounted to a record $13.6 million. Net income rose from a $0.7 million loss one year ago to

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• Asia/Pacific Region Bolsters Disk Array Sales in Q3

  December 10, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The booming economies in the Asia/Pacific region are doing their part to help push up sales of external disk arrays, according to recent market statistics compiled by the analysts at Gartner, which just announced the stats for sales in the second quarter of 2007. On a worldwide basis, sales of external disk arrays in the third quarter rose by 3.4 percent to $3.86 billion, essentially mirroring the 3.3 percent growth, to $3.7 billion, that the industry attained during the second quarter of the year. In the third quarter, growth was largest in the Asia/Pacific region, up 22.7 percent compared

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• State of the System i: How 2007 Went for Tool Vendors, and How 2008 Is Looking

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October, I did two stories that gauged the pulse of the System i business among resellers of new equipment and then dealers of second-hand servers. In this third installment of the State of the System i series, I want to look at how one of the bedrocks of the IBM midrange–application development tool providers–are faring in 2007 and how they expect to do in the coming year. (This story, by necessity, offers the viewpoints of several of the dozens of dominant application development tool providers, which are but a subset of the hundreds of companies that provide some

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• Emerging Markets and Virtualization Drive Q3 Server Sales

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server lines, perhaps with the exception of IBM‘s System z and System i servers, did pretty well in the third quarter, according to the latest market share statistics from Gartner. The upgrade cycle in data centers and departments for 64-bit, energy-efficient, and virtualization-capable servers, coupled with raw growth in processing capacity in emerging markets like China, India, and Russia, boosted both server shipments and revenues in the third quarter on a global basis. As previously reported in their financial filings, Hewlett-Packard had a very good quarter for server sales in its fiscal fourth quarter ended October 30, Dell

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• IBM Readies Power Management for Power Servers

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It used to be called PowerExecutive, but the power consumption monitoring and management software that IBM created for X64, Power, and at some point in the future System z mainframes is now called Systems Director Active Energy Manager. Starting on December 14, AEM for Power V3.1, is an update to the March PowerExecutive V2.0 release, which was the first to support Power-based systems. The V3.1 update includes new features, many of them in particular to exploit power saving and power management features in the Power6 processors that will be spread across the System i and System p server lines in

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• Bleak Outlook for Information Security, According to Researchers

  December 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Hackers, thieves, and malware writers continued to circumvent security measures and compromise the world’s computers in creative new ways during 2007, according to security researchers at the SANS Institute, which released its seventh-annual SANS Top 20 list of the most pressing security vulnerabilities yesterday. And next year doesn’t look a whole lot better, with an expected increase in parasitic crimeware, botnets, and targeted attacks on virtualization products, VoIP, and Vista, according to McAfee‘s Avert Labs, which released its Top 10 Threat Predictions for 2008. For the last seven years, the highly respected SANS Institute has published a list

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• Computer Economics Study Predicts ‘Anemic Growth’ for IT in 2008

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s that time of the year again. All of the pundits, pollsters, and analysts are trying to pick the brains of IT managers to try to figure out where their budgets are going–up, down, or the same–in 2008. Computer Economics has been tracking systems and storage equipment pricing and IT budget trends since 1990, and has just put out a report that suggests IT budget growth will not be spectacular in the coming year. The recently released IT budget report is a subset of a larger study from Computer Economics called 2007/2008 IT Spending, Staffing, and Technology Trends, and

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• The CDW IT Holiday Wish List, Budget Forecasts

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT products distributor CDW hosted its Partner Summit in Las Vegas in early November, and at the summit the company did a straw poll of the IT executives in attendance to get a sense of what kinds of products or services they had on their wish lists for 2008; it also did an online straw poll among CDW customers, and in both cases also asked IT personnel about their budgetary expectations for the coming year. Last week, CDW released a report on the findings of the two straw polls. First and foremost, let’s talk about budgets. In the poll at

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• IBM Virtualizes I/O in BladeCenter Servers

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The problem with most physical objects, like the gear in a data center, is that it is not malleable. Over time, successive pieces of this infrastructure has been virtualized to make it easier and faster to reconfigure it for different uses, starting with main memory four decades ago and culminating in the wholesale virtualization of entire server stacks over the last decade using virtual machine hypervisors. The problem is, even in a virtualized server environment, those pesky links to networks and storage in the outside world remain physical. Which is why Hewlett-Packard announced a virtual switch and storage area networking

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