When you look at a photograph of a microprocessor die, doesn’t it always look like a city of some kind where electrons live and work? The L1 and L2 cache memories are perhaps where the electrons live, and they work in the central processing units and floating point units, commuting back and forth as they form the signals that become zeros and ones, like a human wave at a football stadium. Main memory is where the electrons go for weekends, and disk storage is where they go for long vacations.

It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that when people

After close to two years of development and preliminary marketing in India, IBM‘s Smart Cube application appliances went on sale last Tuesday in its home market in the United States, moving one step closer to a worldwide launch. The Smart Cube appliances, which we have been watching closely since Big Blue first started talking about them a year ago, come in Power-i and X64-Linux flavors and are designed to tap into the Smart Market, a clearinghouse for systems and application software aimed at small and medium businesses.

Back in December, I gave you the rundown on the Smart

Metropolitan Community College serves the greater Omaha, Nebraska, area, but through an online educational program its reach is worldwide. Currently MCC is reinventing its General Information Technology curriculum–which includes specialized course work relating to the IBM Power Systems i platform–and building a technologically advanced data center that will substantially boost career preparation opportunities for a global student body. The innovative methods could well be the future of IT education.

In September, when a new two-year educational track called Data Center Management begins, MCC will have a program curriculum based on real world working conditions in a modern data center that

In 1860, a revolutionary multi-species information delivery system was unveiled in St. Joseph, Missouri. Its creators were honest enough to name their enterprise after the harder-working species in the joint venture and called it the Pony Express. The system included 190 stations spaced approximately 10 miles apart–about as far as a horse could run at full gallop–and spanned some 2,000 miles between Missouri and California.

Some 183 riders and 400 horses carried mail between St. Joseph and Sacramento, capturing the imagination of a nation eager for more immediate news from its western frontier. Immediacy, however, is contextual and at that

Yesterday was Memorial Day, the unofficial kick-off for the summer season. But that doesn’t mean everybody will be “going on holiday” this year, as the Europeans like to put it. In the United States, the poor economy is putting the kibosh on many American families’ vacation plans. Some simply can’t afford vacations, some are worried their jobs won’t be there when they return, while still others could go but go but are electing not to because of a newly discovered malady called Guilty Vacation Syndrome (GVS), according to surveys.

Every year, Internet job site CareerBuilder conducts a public opinion survey

For the past several years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been working with the server makers of the world to come up with Energy Star ratings–you know, those yellow tags that help you figure out which appliances are energy efficient and therefore save you money over the long run–for servers.

Last week, the EPA rolled out the release 1.0 of the Energy Star for Servers specification, which is the first serious step on the long road to doing green analysis on the gear that goes into data centers. As readers of The Four Hundred well know, I am big on

The price cutting and tweaking on hardware by IBM for gear relating to its Power Systems boxes continued last week.

Most importantly, Big Blue cut the prices it charges on selected feature conversions in its Power 595 line, and some of the price cuts were pretty dramatic, obviously intended to make it more likely that customers with these big iron boxes spend a little money rather than waiting for the next budget cycle. Here’s the details on the price changes, complete with the feature conversion descriptions that IBM never gives in its announcement letters:

The server makers of the world have all been slammed by the economic downturn, and by definition that means that their distributor partners are having a tough time, too. But all things considered, they seem to be holding up pretty well.

IBM‘s two master resellers, and the ones who do the selling downstream to myriad resellers who in turn interface with customers, are Arrow Electronics and Avnet. Let’s take at look at their most recent financials in alphabetical order so there’s no fighting here on the pages of The Four Hundred between these fierce and long-time rivals.

In

You don’t hear people dismissing open source software as a fad, a farce, or an IT freak of nature so much these days. Open source used to be a topic that enterprise systems administrators would joke about. It’s not so funny, and it’s not so freakish, anymore. And that’s not to say the switch to open source software has been flipped to the ON position. This is an evolutionary process and it has evolved to the point that acceptability is much more widespread than it was even a year ago, let alone three or four years ago.

A week ago,

Back on April 27, just as the COMMON midrange conference and expo was underway in Reno, Nevada, I told you that COMMON Europe, its European counterpart, was undertaking two surveys to try to gather up input from the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i community to try to influence the decisions that IBM is making about the i platform.

You can–and should–take the i Top Concerns survey of AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i shops, which is open to all i shops, not just those located in Europe; the online form is here in Deutsch,