This week, networking giant Cisco Systems is going to be jumping into the server business. And everybody is all kerfluffle and kerflooey about what this does and does not mean. If you draw boxes around pieces of electronic gadgetry called servers, storage, and networking, then you can make a big deal about what Cisco becoming a server vendor may or may not mean. And it is fun, and I must admit, I have been amusing myself as I cover this story from my second life over at The Register.

But if you instead draw the box around the data

With Intel and Advanced Micro Devices hogging most of the press these days when it comes to processors, the design and manufacturing techniques that go into creating chips, and the chip fabs where they are made, IBM, which is no slouch when it comes to designing and making chips, wants to get the word out that it, too, is working on advanced technologies.

In late February, IBM said that it has extended its partnership with PDF Solutions, a company that provides yield improvement and other services for the integrated circuit manufacturing industry. IBM has worked with PDF (which

What are college students making a priority when it comes to career choices? You might be surprised. Technology skills are foremost in many young minds. These are skills that can be advanced, and skills that can be turned into a job. They have staying power, but only if you keep them current and in tune with business trends. What was hot 10 years ago may not be so hot today.

One thing that’s changed is the emphasis on technology in education beyond high school. Enrollment in technology courses at colleges and universities has been on the decline for years, but

These are hard times. Blue chip companies are reducing their profit forecasts, slashing dividends, and laying off armies of employees. IBM remains an exception. It is sticking to its earnings forecast of $9.20 per share or higher for 2009, up from $8.93 in 2008. It is not cutting its dividend. And while it has had layoffs, it is also hiring in Asia. But there is still one sign that IBM lives in the same harsh world the rest of us do: The company’s net worth, also called shareholders’ equity, is less than half of what it was a year ago.

On the disk storage front, Moore’s Law has barely been able to keep up with the appetite for capacity since the disk drive was invented in 1956. But in the fourth quarter, it looks like Moore’s Law caught a breather as sales for external disk arrays declined for the first time in more than four years. According to a report released by the box counters at IDC last week, disk array sales across all sizes and types accounted for $7.3 billion in sales in the final quarter of 2008, down 5.9 percent. Proving that even disk storage is not immune

Job terminations at IBM‘s Rochester, Minnesota, facility are colder than a late winter north wind. Losing a job is one of the most stressful life changes anyone has to go through, but if there are degrees of stress that apply, being over 50 years old and getting the axe is especially hard because the rebound job is often at a considerably reduced salary and reduced benefits package. How did IBM handle its latest round of terminations in Rochester? Not very well, apparently.

Local NBC affiliate KTTC took a closer look at the firings (to call them layoffs, as if

JDA Software Group, like most enterprise software vendors, is feeling the pain of the global economic recession. As corporate executives put the clamp down on big new software projects with multi-year time horizons, vendors like JDA have been forced to scramble to find ways to create shorter-term value for customers. One surefire way of giving value to shareholders is to buy back its stock, which JDA last week announced it will start doing.

JDA has seen its share of bad news over the last year. For starters, its stock has been hit hard by the bear market, losing more

While the main chasses in the Power Systems product lines have had slots for SAS drives since the System i and System p product convergence last April, it looks like the System x and BladeCenter lines are going to get the latest and greatest disk technology first this time around.

Last week, IBM announced new small form factor SAS drives, those with 2.5-inch wide drive cases rather than the earlier 3.5-inch wide cases that were standard for SCSI drives since IBM shipped the first such 3.5-inch drives back when it was still called the AS/400 and when IBM Rochester had

Well, Vivek Kundra, the new Federal chief information officer for the Obama administration and the first executive to hold the newly created post, didn’t spend enough time in his new office to get his chair warm.

According to a report in the Washington Post on Saturday, Kundra, who was hired on March 5 to the Fed CIO position after being CIO for the Washington, D.C. city government, has been placed on “administrative leave pending the outcome of the federal investigation” into a bribery scandal in the D.C. offices and implicating employees of the city’s tech agency, who worked for Kundra,

Where are you on the Power Systems i learning curve? If you are in the low single digits on the time and effort side of the chart, it’s not likely that you’ve advanced on the measurable learning side. You probably don’t need to be reminded there’s a correlation between the two sides. Coming at the end of April is an opportunity to climb up the learning curve. The days, it’s called the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition.

If you don’t already know, COMMON is the single largest community of IBM midrange users and its annual conference is largest gathering of