• Evans Data 2008 Survey Ranks Application Servers

  October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Market researcher Evans Data has carved out a nice little niche for itself keeping track of the popularity and usage for application development tools, compilers, and such, but it talks to end user companies about their application servers, too. This summer, Evans Data did a survey of 700 developers and IT managers to assess their opinions on various application servers that they have actually had some experience with. Based on the survey results, Evans Data put together a report ranking eight application servers. You probably know all of their names: Adobe ColdFusion, Apache Geronimo, Oracle WebLogic Server (which came to

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• The SAS Disk Spec Gets a Bandwidth Boost

  October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Now that Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disks are starting to be deployed as a standard feature on servers of all shapes and sizes–they came to the Power Systems servers this year, after a lot of crabbing–it is time to ramp up the SAS specification and get more bandwidth. The SCSI Trade Association announced last week that the next-generation SAS-2 disk interface, which sports a 6 Gbit/sec interface, is ready to rock. That’s twice the bandwidth available in the current SAS spec, which offers 3 Gbit/sec and the original SAS drives, which came out at a much less useful 1.5 Gbit/sec

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• IBS Picks Windows Instead of i as Strategic ERP Platform

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Swedish ERP software maker International Business Systems, a long-time supporter of the AS/400 and successor platforms, hired a new president and chief executive officer last week in the wake of a recapitalization earlier this year. And, to the chagrin of i enthusiasts the world over, the company also announced a new platform strategy that will see IBS push its IBS ERP suite on Windows platforms rather than on i 6.1 and its successors. But don’t panic just yet, AS/400 folks. The majority of the 5,000 customers that IBS has are running RPG or Java versions of its eponymous ERP

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• The Power Systems i 570 Versus Its Predecessors

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Throughout the summer, The Four Hundred has been examining how the Power Systems i Edition machines in rack and blade form factors compare to their predecessors and, for entry and midrange machines, compare to Windows boxes. This week, we climb one step higher on the Power Systems ladder and compared the System i5 570 machines from 2006 with the new Power 570 machines of 2008. Basically, IBM is offering more performance for more money for customers who need it, or the same performance for a little less money. We all know, of course, that last July IBM announced an interim

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• New ASNA President Takes On Modernization Business with Services Emphasis

  September 29, 2008 Dan Burger

  When BluePhoenix Solutions acquired ASNA 13 months ago, it made building the services side of the business a priority. Pieces of that puzzle have been added since the merger, and the latest move has been to put a new president in place. Last week, ASNA announced Greg Schottland would be taking command of the .NET-oriented application modernization software company that has refocused its approach to helping customers with modernization projects. Modernization projects are under way in a fair number of IBM i shops, but the traction that many people predicted in the application modernization area has not taken hold. Schottland

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• As I See It: Insult to Injury

  September 29, 2008 Victor Rozek

  After the Fed bailed out AIG with 85 taxpayer billions, William Greider said something that caught my attention the way a near-death experience does. Greider is no blowhard. He is a serious journalist with a deep understanding of the backroom workings of the economy. Among other things, he’s written a weighty volume about the inner-working of the Fed called Secrets of the Temple. He knows of what he speaks. In the aftermath of the AIG bailout Greider wrote: “For the first time in this unfolding financial crisis, I felt personally scared by the news. Not about my money, but

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• BCD Adds New Partners in Europe and California

  September 29, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Business Computer Design Int’l has added a trio of new partners to its reseller program, including Deltacare of The Netherlands, Dagessa of Poland, and evolveIT of Irvine, California. All three new partners will be selling the array of BCD’s application modernization and transformation products for the IBM i operating system. BCD markets a collection of integrated i OS solutions, which includes the WebSmart PHP and ILE development environments, the Presto screen modernization tool, the Nexus Web portal, the Catapult spool file delivery system, and the Clover reporting and query tool. BCD sells its solutions through a business partner program, which

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• Help Desk Follies: We All Ask Stupid Questions, Right?

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The economic woes in the financial services and housing markets are putting a pretty significant damper on life inside the data center and out, and taking a break from the seriousness that we are all facing thanks to the global nature of the economy is more important than usual. It is in that spirit that we report on an utterly silly survey of chief information officers by IT headhunter Robert Half Technology, which asked the CIOs what were the weirdest questions that their help desks have fielded. We have all heard the one about the end user who mistook

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• RISC and Itanium Server Makers Do Well in Europe, Says IDC

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sales and shipments of servers in the European, African, and Middle Eastern region of the world grew faster than the global average in the second quarter of the year, according to statistics released by IDC, pushed upward by sales in Central and Eastern Europe and providing economic sanctuary for U.S.-based server makers. Server revenues in Q2 rose by 8.7 billion to $4.5 billion, and shipments rose by 12.4 percent to nearly 700,000 units. According to IDC, x64 machinery accounted for 95.5 percent of total server shipments in the quarter throughout the EMEA region, a statistic that has been pretty

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• HP and Oracle Launch Database Machine, and So Can IBM with i

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, I think of myself simply as a journalist and analyst, reporting on what is happening or what will happen soon in the IT racket. Sometimes, I feel a bit like the Greek chorus in a comedy or tragedy in the ancient world. And so it was last week as I watched Hewlett-Packard and Oracle announce a co-developed data warehouse appliance called the Database Machine at Oracle’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco. The HP-Oracle machine is based on HP’s ProLiant DL360 G5 servers–five of them in a rack, to be specific, each with two sockets and using four-core Xeon processors

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