• Labor Day 2006: Employees Want Companies to Invest in Them

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Yesterday was Labor Day in the United States, a national holiday that was created as a means of celebrating the substantial gains in workers’ rights that have been gained in hundreds of years of struggles among workers, employers, and the state and federal governments that sometimes picks sides in that ongoing struggle. A lot of you worked yesterday, with some putting in a hard day of work and even those of you who had the day off probably spent an hour checking emails. Because it was Labor Day, it is a natural time to reflect upon our relationship with our

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• IBM’s Systems at the U.S. Open Continue to Evolve

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM doesn’t sponsor the technology behind the U.S. Open tennis tournament just because its executives like to have box seats at the stadiums in Flushing Meadows, Queens, where the Open is held. Big Blue sponsors the U.S. Open, which is managed by the U.S. Tennis Association, because the systems behind the competition can be used to demonstrate the server hardware and software technology that IBM is trying to peddle to other companies. Every year, the systems that IBM uses to host the U.S. Open and several other global tennis events change, just like the systems do in your own data

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

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is a general rule in the server business, it is this: The cost of server scalability rises faster than the increase in scalability. In an ideal world, servers would scale perfectly linearly, and vendors could just keep adding processors, memory, and I/O to boxes to help their customers support ever-larger workloads. Or, because this is 2006, they could support ever-more server consolidation. But, this being the real world, which has some limits of physics, scalability comes at a cost. In the so-called enterprise-class server space, by which I mean machines that scale from four to maybe 16, 24,

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• Companies Continue to Consume Massive Amounts of Storage

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a long time, the disk storage array market has been growing considerably faster than the server market that it is loosely coupled to, and that continues to be the case. While the server market has been showing signs of fatigue in recent quarters, not so the disk storage market. According to the most recent statistics from IDC, in the second quarter of 2006 companies bought 704 petabytes of disk capacity, an increase of 51.5 percent over the amount of capacity that vendors shipped a year ago. External disk array sales grew by 8.5 percent to hit $4.2 billion,

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• The Governor-Buster Saga Starts Again with MAX400

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we go again. And maybe, like Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the saga of the OS/400 and i5/OS governor busters will ultimately have four cycles in it. Last week, yet another governor buster jumped into the fray, with a South Korean company called MAX400 Software launching a product called MAX400, which the company says can make raw batch or server capacity in an AS/400, iSeries, or i5 machine available to 5250 interactive workloads. As we all know, IBM uses a golden screwdriver approach inside the AS/400, iSeries, and i5 systems to artificially restrict or enable the processing of the 5250 green-screen

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• Zend Bags $20 Million More in Venture Funding

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Zend Technologies, the commercial company that stands behind the open source PHP programming language and related development tools, has gone back to the well for its fourth round of venture capital funding. Because the popularity of PHP is growing by leaps and bounds, Zend has had no trouble convincing venture capitalists to cough up $20 million to help Zend build for what one would presume is an inevitable public offering of its stock. There are mumblings on Wall Street that Zend could possibly go public toward the end of 2007, but the company would not confirm this rumor. In

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• Pre-COMMON Sound Off: Lack of i5 Marketing Still the Major Complaint

  September 5, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  As I discussed in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred in an article previewing the upcoming COMMON conference in Miami Beach in mid-September, each COMMON conference brings with it a discussion of the value of the conference and predictions about what major announcements are in store for the user group and for the vendors that participate in the OS/400 community. The COMMON Fall 2006 IT Education Conference and Expo brings some new independent software vendors to the Expo floor. One such company is AdventureTech Group. The company has exhibited its business process management and systems integration software in

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• Enterprise Portal Market Expected to Grow Immensely

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If Research and Markets is correct, then your company might be getting ready to buy an enterprise portal to interface with your end users, your customers, and your partners. According to the market researcher, the enterprise portal market accounted for $1.1 billion in sales in 2005, but its analysts are projecting that this market will boom to $9.9 billion by 2012. Research and Markets has just released a gargantuan report that cases the enterprise portal space, and of course, it wants to sell that report to you and your software vendors. But, to drum up interest in the report, the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Frequent Deniers Club

  September 5, 2006 Hesh Wiener

  Lots of people join clubs. They join social clubs whose members work together for their individual and collective benefit. They join professional clubs that make it easy for members to exchange information or address mutual concerns associated with a particular metier. They join special interest clubs for camaraderie and to further their avocations. Clubs and other affiliate groups are particularly important to computer folk, who can benefit from sharing and comparing experiences. But just as a person can grab the wrong end of a club, a club can grab the wrong end of people. Groucho Marx had it all figured

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• Researchers Build Prototype Ion Pump to Cool Chips

  September 5, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Chips are too hot these days, and fans are not a terribly efficient means of cooling them. While having air-cooled computers is much-preferred compared to the water-cooled past of mainframes (or the present of extreme PC users who over-clock their boxes and who have revived a variant of water cooling for the PC), air is nonetheless a relatively poor conductor of heat and you have to use a lot of energy and make a lot of noise to move cold air to computers and hot air away from them. Researchers at the University of Washington, Intel, and Kronos Advanced

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