Thank the explosion in the use of digital cameras and send a condolences card to Polaroid, the maker of instant cameras. One of the most useful technologies to come along in years for servers is flash-based solid state disk drives, or SSDs. While SRAM and DRAM versions of SSDs have been around for ages, they were so awfully expensive that only the most serious workloads could ever have them and they never even came close to going mainstream. But now SSDs are going mainstream, and they are going to change the way servers are configured.

As I detailed in the

If the server business had a flat tire in the in the fourth quarter of 2008, when the economic meltdown was in full blaze, then two tires went flat and the muffler bracket broke, leaving metal scraping down the highway, with sparks a-flying and making a terrible racket, in the first quarter of this year. It’s a tough market right now, which makes it a buyer’s market to a certain degree. But companies are nonetheless hesitant to spend budgets.

According to the box counters at IDC, which tracks factory revenue coming out of the server makers, $9.9 billion in

Last Thursday, May 28, was COBOL’s 50th birthday. If you didn’t gather around your data processing device to celebrate this technological milestone, don’t feel too bad about it. Chances are, few of your IT business associates celebrated COBOL’s birthday, either. But backers of COBOL, such as Micro Focus, are a little miffed that the language doesn’t get more respect. After all, the vendor points out, you don’t see Barbie, who also turns 50 this year, being relied upon to run billions of dollars worth of transactions every day, do you?

COBOL may share the same age as Barbie, that

We’ve all been there. It’s first thing Monday morning and the phone is ringing off the hook. The CIO is calling, and everyone is freaking. Even though your system’s team didn’t submit one single change over the weekend, there’s a problem and you, the systems administrator, are being blamed. You know it’s not your fault, and wish you had a way to prove what the heck is going on. Sound familiar?

Before I continue, I must share a funny story about my son. Let me preface the story by saying that my wife is a gifted teacher and educator.

Our

Let’s begin by saying IT training and education programs increase production. Measuring increases isn’t as easy as measuring widgets produced in a factory each year, but employee production is quantifiable. Those who believe training doesn’t have a strong return on investment can’t be looking at their ROI on employees without training. The frequent excuse that training is expensive is why the OCEAN User Group of Southern California has slashed the registration fee for its annual technical conference to $120 for members and $220 for non-members.

The conference is a one-day event with a schedule that allows attendees to take up

A few weeks ago, I did a short story on some processor cards, processor activations, disk drives, and other features that IBM has withdrawn from its product catalog as part of the April 28 announcements. That withdrawal announcement–which you can read all the details about here and which I analyzed in Older Power Iron Starts Heading for the Dustbin–has caused some confusion.

Jim Herring, the director of high-end Power Systems at IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, who you will remember as managing several generations of iSeries and System i product launches before the convergence of the i and p

It looks like the politicians have finally figured out how important–and how vulnerable–America’s digital infrastructure is. Last Friday, the Obama Administration said that it would be creating a “cyber czar” Cabinet-level position to help better secure government and private IT infrastructure. The edges between these, as you all know, has been blurred by the Big Gray Cloud, or the InterTubes, or whatever you want to call it. (OK, the Internet.)

In his remarks to the press, President Obama made his concern over security IT assets clear by coming clean on the fact that his presidential campaign had been hacked. “It’s

You can’t really blame David Johnson, the senior IBM executive in charge of Big Blue’s merger, acquisition, and divestiture strategy, from wanting to take a job at rival Dell. But last week, IBM sued Johnson to prevent him from jumping to Dell, the second time this year when IBM has had to sue to stop a high-level employee from going over to a competitor.

The complaint against Johnson, which was filed by Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s managing partner and long-time IBM hired gun, Evan Chelser, on May 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of

If the search engine behind IBM‘s iSource announcement and product catalog is any guide, then it looks like Big Blue is going to call the next release of the OS/400 operating system i 7.

Check it out:

The iSource search engine at IBM has the right idea

As you can surmise from this drill down in its iSource menu system, OS/400 V5R1, V5R2, and V5R3 as well as i5/OS V5R4 are all being lumped into something IBM is calling i 5 (formerly known as i5/OS V5, somewhat inaccurately), and it even says that i 6 was formerly known

There’s an old saying in business that you have to spend money to make money. But in an economic downturn, like we are experiencing now, sometimes you have to lend money to get business. And IBM, which is very keen on tapping into the $5 trillion in stimulus funds that the various governments of the world are kicking into their economies, knows that if it wants governments and companies to get going on IT infrastructure projects, it is going to have to bridge the gap between shovel ready (or screwdriver ready) projects and when the government funds are available