The data center started getting diverse in the late 1970s and has been increasingly heterogeneous for decades. And as the IBM PC turns 30, it is not just ironic, but expected, that the proliferation of processors of all types fronted by pretty little screens and wireless communication chips have not only made our personal computers more numerous, they have put the desktop back in its place: in the office or home office. Toss in compute and storage clouds and we can say that we have finally entered the era of personal computing.

For those of you in the System/3X and

The hardware refresh cycle in the wake of the Great Recession and acquisitions have been good for the two master resellers of IT gear, Avnet and Arrow Electronics. Both companies did well in their most recent quarters, but also expressed some concern about downstream customers made jumpy and cautious about a jittery global economy.

Avnet finished up its fiscal 2011 year in the first week of July, and in the fourth quarter the company had $6.91 billion in sales, up 32.6 percent compared to the year ago period, and brought $238.8 million to the bottom line, an increase of

You need a supercomputer to predict the future, and unfortunately when you are trying to predict the kind of supercomputer you might need to build the supercomputer to predict that future, you can’t have as much knowledge of the future to easily make the predictions. And therefore, sometimes a supercomputer project backed by governments and key IT players gets taken out behind the barn and given the Old Yeller treatment.

Such is the case with the technically impressive “Blue Waters” massively parallel machine that was to be built this year by IBM for the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA)

There’s a phenomenon that takes place in extreme mountaineering that is perhaps illustrative of human nature. Teams ascending the highest peaks like Everest and K2 will often come upon a solo climber from another group who is clearly in trouble and in imminent danger of death. The nearer the summit, the more likely that person will be left behind. Granted, the margins at altitudes well over 20,000 feet are small, and the choices limited. But there is a “me first, me at any price” ethic that essentially says: I paid for this, I trained for this; this may be the

The IT job market continues to favor the temporary worker over the full-time employee, a trend that is most often tied to the weak economy, but may also signal a trend that will not reverse itself even after the economy picks up some long overdue momentum. Based on a quarterly survey of IT leaders, four out of 10 IT managers and executives expect to increase IT staffing using temporary workers during the next three months.

“Continued economic uncertainty makes contract workers more appealing,” says TEKsystems market research manager, Tania Lavin. “IT leaders would rather hire consultants on a project-to-project basis

I really enjoyed your latest posting about the Lean Mean Green Screen. It took me back to the days when I was doing a lot of development for these and really strove to provide the best and easiest interface possible to the users I supported.

Your article made me wonder if the green screen or other similar interfaces weren’t the best thing for the most productivity. Web and Windows interfaces are certainly pretty, but too many times the developers clutter the screens with a lot of pretty little trinkets that only serve to distract the user and slow down

Harvey Najim has stepped down as CEO of Sirius Computer Solutions, the server reseller that he founded 31 years ago. Najim’s right-hand man, Joe Mertens, is now leading the $1.2 billion company, which started out as an AS/400-only reseller but has grown into IBM‘s largest solutions provider. Mertens plans no great changes for Sirius and sees continued growth through providing superior technical and managed services, and as well as more channel consolidation.

The powerhouse that became Sirius started in 1980, when the ex-IBMer Najim founded Star Data Systems. The San Antonio, Texas-based company initially was focused exclusively on

We all know it’s a tough job market out there, and job seekers need to stand out in the crowd to land a new position. Manta Technologies has a new idea to help a lucky few get that edge.

Manta is looking for approximately a dozen unemployed and underemployed IBM i professionals who would like to participate in the beta test of the next generation of Manta’s training delivery software, EasyTutor 7.0.

“Lately I’ve been getting so many requests from people who have come to the conclusion that their skills aren’t up to date, and that’s why they aren’t employed,

Sometimes I wonder if IBM really wants Power Systems machinery to compete with X64-based servers–be they its own System x and BladeCenter machines or those of its competitors.

Last week, IBM announced some preconfigured bundles of BladeCenter blade servers called Foundation for Clouds. I am getting the feeling that Big Blue’s marketeers are falling under the same hypnotic spell as all of the cloud vendors that sell hypervisors and their cloudy management extensions on X64-based machinery. That is, cloud has become synonymous with X64-based machinery. If it ain’t on X64, then it ain’t a cloud.

This is, of course, perfectly

At the end of July, before the debt crisis and renewed worries about the economy had taken hold last week, retail and supply chain application software vendor JDA Software reported its second quarter financial results and was pretty optimistic about the rest of the year despite disappointing sales in Q2. It is important to remember that correlation is not causation, but the timing with the swoon on Wall Street in the wake of U.S. government credit getting a downgrade by Standard and Poors is spooky.

And not necessarily meaningful except in hindsight several quarters from now if business doesn’t pan