• Arrow Says Midrange Shops More Worried About Security than Money

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT distributor Arrow Electronics gets a lot of its sales and profits from the midmarket, and it likes to take the pulse of small and medium businesses so it knows how to position its products and services and polish its sales pitches. To that end, the Midmarket Group of Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions division, which distributes servers, storage, and other IT gear to a network of resellers around the globe, did a survey to find out what midrange shops are and are not concerned about. You can take a look at an executive summary of the survey at this link

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• CIOs in the States Say IT Hiring Still Happening in Q4

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever the economies of the world start getting dicey, as they certainly are in the United States and in parts of Europe, IT personnel start looking around to their left and right to see what the pecking order might be if job cuts become necessary. With the American workforce shedding jobs at an alarming rate and continuing issues in the housing market and financial services industries, it is no wonder that IT managers, programmers, project managers, system administrators, and other IT staff are a little jumpy. But, apparently IT is doing alright in the States. According to the most recent

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• IBM Hosts Power Systems Tech Conferences This Week

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As many of the i platform intelligentsia know, IBM‘s educational and technical teams for the AS/400 Division and its successors have hosted two technical conferences (one in spring and one in fall) in North America and one in Europe each year for as long as anyone can remember. When the System i and System p were merged into one line earlier this year, IBM said it was going to create a unified set of tech conferences for Power Systems. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. As it turns out, there are two Power Systems Technical Universities being hosted

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• CA and IBM Pull Together for CMDB Interoperability

  September 8, 2008 Dan Burger

  The promise of IT interoperability often feels like the brass ring that is just out of our grasp. Yeah, it seems closer each time we pass it on the IT merry go round. But if you never lay your hands on it, what difference does it make whether it’s close or far away? A good example of this reach not meeting grasp is the configuration management database (CMDB). For most organizations, any talk of a CMDB follows a familiar story line that leads nowhere. The lack of budget and resources gets much of the blame, but the gulf between IT

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• VAI Partners with BFC Associates to Go After the Food Market

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software vendor and i platform enthusiast VAI is taking a page out of the IBM Vertical Industry Program (VIP) marketing effort and establishing specific partnerships to help push its software into targeted industries. In particular, VAI, which is based in Ronkonkoma, New York, said last week that it is partnering with BFC Associates, of West Chicago, Illinois, to go after the food services industry as a tag team. VAI sells a variant of its S2K Enterprise ERP suite that is tailored to food distributors–called S2K Enterprise for Food Distribution, of course–and BFC Associates sells a food distribution warehouse

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• LTO Tapes: Over 100 Million Served

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Linear Tape Open (LTO) form factor for tape drives just keeps hitting higher and higher numbers. Last week, the three big players behind LTO–IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum–said that since the first LTO products were announced at the turn of the millennium, a large number of tape decks and a huge number of tape cartridges have been sold. How many? As of last week, some 2.5 million LTO drives have shipped, with a million of those units shipping since the third quarter of 2006. The LTO format was launched in 1998, and products started coming to

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• A Flash in the Pan or the Future of Data Storage?

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s Hursley development lab in England and its Almaden Research Center in California are known for a lot of different innovations, particularly in the area of disk storage. Before IBM sold off its disk drive business to Hitachi a few years back, the labs in Minnesota and outside of San Jose in California were also hotbeds of disk development. IBM invented disk drives, and has a lot of knowledge about data storage in its institutional memory. Last week, the Hursley and Almaden labs announced that they have been collaborating on a new storage device, code-named “Quicksilver,” that will marry

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• Server Buyers Shop Like It’s 1999 in the Second Quarter

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the economies of the Western countries are heading into recession, the purchase orders for servers at companies sure don’t seem to be a reflection of this yet. And the Asia/Pacific, Eastern European, and South American markets still seem to be booming, despite more than a year of jittery economies where their indigenous companies have their own customers. And so, the second quarter looked pretty good in terms of server sales, according to research from box counter Gartner, with server sales up 5.7 percent to $13.8 billion and shipments up 12.2 percent to 2.34 million units. Of course, such

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• IBM Expects Customers to Build Security Best Practices Through SaaS

  September 2, 2008 Dan Burger

  Never let them see you sweat. That’s easier said than done if you’re in charge of corporate security. You’re watching those X64 boxes like a cat watching for a mouse. What about the System i? No worries, right? It’s not even top 10 on your security priorities list. It’s been that way for years, but that doesn’t make it the right way. The bright lights of regulatory compliance can make things hot for you, and suddenly that looks like sweat on your forehead. Tsk-tsk. If you ask Kris Lovejoy, IBM‘s director of corporate security strategy, she’ll tell you the

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• The X Factor: Why Maintenance Is Worth the Money–Sometimes

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of checks that IT managers and chief financing officers do not like to write when it comes to the IT budget, and hardware maintenance is one of the checks they increasingly dislike writing. There are good reasons for this–and there are also good reasons for writing that check. Equally important, IT shops have to be smart about what they put on hardware maintenance, and how they deal with break-fix issues in general as they relate to hardware. But before getting into why hardware maintenance is something of value and therefore worth a piece of the IT

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