• Symantec Survey Says DR Planning and Testing Are Inadequate

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s a story you hear over and over again in the data center. Disaster recovery plans are only as good as the changes you make after you test the plan and see that it fails. According to a study performed by Symantec, which sells the Veritas stack of file systems and related tools used in clustered Unix, Windows, and Linux environments, IT departments have some work to do on their disaster recovery plans. The Symantec study indicates that 91 percent of the IT organizations polled that have disaster recovery plans carry out full scenario testing of those plans, but

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• State of the System i: First-Hand Reports from Second-Hand Dealers

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While few people think about it, much less talk about it, some of the things that make any data center-class computer system worth the extra money that companies shell out for them include the fact that they last for a long time without breaking and their components hold economic value for a lot longer than cheaper commodity iron. It is not unheard of for a mainframe or midrange server to run without any problems for a decade, particularly among companies with steady or only modestly growing workloads. It is not so easy to find commodity X86 servers that last so

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• System i Sales Drop Again in Q3, IBM Says Little

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another financial quarter’s results have been reported by IBM, and it is yet again another quarter of revenue declines for the i5/OS platform. With a Power6 refresh of the System i and System p lines not in the works until early next year–the latest rumor is that the high-end System p boxes have now slipped into 2008–it is hard to imagine that the fourth quarter will be any better for the System i than the third quarter was. Which is probably why IBM’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, didn’t say too much about the System i in his conference

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• IBM Hit by Financial Services Slowdown in Q3

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Financial services companies, particularly among large enterprises based in the United States, slammed the brakes on IT spending in the third quarter and nearly gave IBM a financial haircut. Thanks to very strong bookings in past quarters for services that were delivered between July and September and to the continually weakening U.S. dollar, IBM’s financial cookies were saved despite the weakness in the financial services sector. IBM’s sales were up 6.6 percent to $24.1 billion and net income rose by 6.3 percent to $2.4 billion; earnings per share, thanks to an accelerated share repurchasing funded by debt earlier this year,

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Symphony for the Devil

  October 22, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  Symphony is what IBM calls its collection of free (as in free beer) productivity applications based on free (as in free speech) OpenOffice code. IBM has given its OpenOffice distro a recycled brand name and put it to work as a printer’s devil for its Lotus Notes client and Domino collaboration and publishing server. But IBM is giving away ice in the winter. You don’t need IBM to get OpenOffice, and, besides, productivity applications are headed for the Web or, as Sun Microsystems said before the Dot Com Crash wiped the smile off its overbite, the network is the computer.

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• Reader Feedback on AS/400s Are From Rochester, RS/6000s Are From Austin

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Doug Mewmaw’s article about his experiences while visiting a System p technical conference while being a hard-core System i guy not only shows what two different worlds the AIX and i5/OS platforms inhabit, but how the differing cultures behind the platforms and the expectations of programmers and administrators in these two environments link to each other in their respective AIX and i5/OS stacks to create radically different operating system platforms that now share a single hardware platform. It is a bit like having one brain, but two minds. Which, if you ask me, explains some of the crazy things IBM

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• IT Managers Do Really Well in Europe, Fair in North America

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Mercer, the international consulting, outsourcing, and investment services arm of March & MacLennan Companies, a giant in IT and investment consulting with nearly $12 billion in sales and over 55,000 employees worldwide, does an annual global survey of IT manager pay around the globe each year. Based on the results of the Mercer study, it is clearly a good thing to be from Western Europe if you are an IT manager these days. According to Mercer’s 2007 IT Pay Around the World report, which was released last week, the salary and bonus compensation for IT managers in the

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• Green Computing Tops Gartner’s List of 10 Hottest Technologies

  October 22, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Even before Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize two weeks for his work on global warming, it should have come as no surprise to you that “green computing” is a very important issue for IT managers today. And it will continue to be the hottest trend in IT going into next year, Gartner said last week. At its semi-annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, last week, the IT analyst group laid out what it believes will be the 10 most strategic technologies for 2008. While there are no real surprises on the list, it’s worthwhile to hear what the

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• Aldon Says SOA, Web 2.0 Apps and Compliance Drive ALM Sales

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, executives from application lifecycle management software maker Aldon met with me to chat about what’s going on in the wake of the company’s acquisition by private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners. At the time, Matt Scholl, Aldon’s president and chief operating officer said that the company was talking to users about how they make use of ALM products, and last week the company released some interesting statistics describing how and why companies are using these tools. To get a better handle on why its existing customers buy its ALM products and therefore help Aldon sell

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• Hitachi Predicts 4 TB Disk Drives by 2011

  October 22, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The clever engineers at the former IBM disk drive business that is now known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies are pushing the technology barriers again, and said last week they have shrunk the read/write heads on a prototype disk drive enough that the company is predicting it can ship 4 TB disk drives by 2011 for the desktop market, and presumably for the server market soon thereafter. To boost the recording density of its disk designs, Hitachi’s San Jose Research Center in California and Central Research Laboratory in Japan figured out a way to reduce the size of the disk

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