• Power.org Merges Power Instruction Sets, Gets New Members

  August 7, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having managed in February to get Freescale Semiconductor to join the Power.org community that IBM created to give others a voice in what happens with the Power chip architecture, the two companies have announced that they are now beginning the important work of creating a merged instruction set architecture, or ISA in chip geek speak, for Power that combines elements from IBM, Motorola, and other designs. Way back in 1991, when the PowerPC Alliance got its start, IBM and Motorola (which spun out Freescale two years ago because it did not want to be in the server, desktop, or embedded

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• LTO Drives, Libraries Rule the Midrange Tape Storage Market

  August 7, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape format created by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Seagate Technology shows just how powerful a standard can be. Developed in the late 1990s and commercialized beginning in 2000, LTO has just about taken over the midrange tape drive and tape library markets. How strong is LTO? Well, ExabyteSony’s 8mm AIT tape drives for video cameras to data centers and made buckets of dough in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, has put itself on the auction block after its founder, Juan Rodriguez, resigned. And while the modern VXA implementation of Exabyte’s technology

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• Bang for the Buck: Entry i5 Servers Versus the Competition

  August 7, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, I compared the System i5 Value and Express Editions against baby Wintel and Lintel servers in terms of their performance on online transaction processing workloads and the value for the dollar these machines have in relation to each other. The advent of dual-core X64 processors and aggressive, core-neutral software pricing on Windows and Linux software is giving the i5’s competitors a big leap in bang for the buck. And among the larger entry server market–machines with one or two processor sockets–the gap is similarly large. Considering that the i5 520 now represents the vast majority

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• 10 Gigabit Ethernet Rollout Begins at Global 2000 Firms

  August 7, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While it may seem like Gigabit Ethernet is only getting started in the data centers and offices of the world, the biggest companies on the planet are always looking ahead to the next fastest thing when it comes to networking, and that would be 10 Gigabit Ethernet, or 10GigE. If the Global 2000 is any guide, then the rest of us will probably find some excuse to move to 10GigE networking technology within the next few years. One of the drivers of 10GigE networking, of course, is the iSCSI protocol, which marries the SCSI connection protocol used in internal disk

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• Infor Closes SSA Buy and Acquires Remaining GEAC Bits

  August 7, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Midrange ERP powerhouse Infor announced last week that it had finalized its acquisition of rival software maker and similarly venture-capital backed SSA Global, and said further that it had acquired Extensity, the piece of Canadian ERP software supplier GEAC that was not originally acquired back in November 2005 when Infor started to bulk up in a big way. And, for good measure, Extensity had just finished doing an acquisition of its own, a software company called Systems Union, which nearly doubled the size of the resulting Infor customer base. Infor is a privately held company–with 73 percent of

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• AJAX and Java Use Growing Among Programmers

  August 7, 2006 Dan Burger

  If you’ve ever driven west across the Great Plains and caught your first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains, they don’t look that impressive from 75 miles away. But as time goes on and you get closer to them, they slowly begin to overpower the landscape. According to Evans Data, which recently released its latest Web Services Development Survey, Web services with Web 2.0 interfaces are on the rise much like the approaching Rockies. Of particular note in this survey is the increased use of AJAX, the development technology that combines Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and that is a

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• IBM Acquires Webify and MRO to Enhance Software, Services Offerings

  August 7, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  In two announcements in as many days last week, IBM bolstered both its WebSphere and Tivoli product lines along with its services oriented architecture software and middleware strategy. SOA is a technology that IBM, like so many software makers, seems to push at every turn these days. One of the acquisitions, at $740 million, represents one of the largest purchases IBM has made in years in the software arena. On August 2, IBM announced that it has acquired Webify, an Austin, Texas-based provider of software and services for building SOA-style applications. The price was not disclosed. Webify is a

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• NetManage Books Loss in Second Quarter, CFO Resigns

  August 7, 2006 Dan Burger

  After reporting weak first quarter financial results, Zvi Alon, the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of NetManage laid a portion of the blame on customers delaying the purchase of software. And now, NetManage has reported even worse second quarter results. Here’s what Alon had to say three months ago: “While the first quarter is always challenging for our industry, this was a disappointing quarter for NetManage with a larger than anticipated number of customers delaying the purchase of software. Given that several deals that slipped from the first quarter of 2006 have already closed, we do not believe this

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• The X Factor: High-End Chips Draw Even, Vendors Prepare to Differentiate

  August 7, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has taken a long time, a lot of planning and roadmaps, and some coincidental delays in products and surprises in the performance delivered by chip makers, but the four major high-end processors used in big servers–the IBM Power, Sun Microsystems‘ UltraSparc, the Intel Itanium, and the AMD Opteron–have more or less drawn even in terms of the high performance and dual-core capabilities that five years ago were only available from IBM. But the situation may not last for long, as these same chip makers are preparing to push their chips in different technological directions in the coming years

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• CCSS Boosts Its Presence in North America

  August 7, 2006 Dan Burger

  CCSS, a System i independent software vendor known for its QSystem Management Suite of monitoring and messaging software, has expanded and moved its North American office in Raleigh, North Carolina. The CCSS QSystem Management Suite includes: QSystem Monitor, QMessage Monitor, and QRemote Control. According to CCSS managing director Ray Wright, the move underscores the importance of the North American market in the company’s growth plan. “There is no question that the North American installed base of System i is the largest, and CCSS foresees many opportunities,” Wright noted in press release last week. Based on market trends that CCSS

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