• IBM Is Enjoying the Role of Green Giant

  June 16, 2008 Dan Burger

  If you believe there is an energy crisis in your data center, there’s a lot you can do about it. It makes no difference if you are Save the Planet green or Save the Bottom Line green. It’s clear that both are closely tied. For that reason, IBM is putting green-job-driven economics into practice. If it helps companies save money by reducing power consumption, Big Blue makes money by selling hardware, software, and services. And there will be plenty of green to go around. When IBM announced in May 2007 that it was investing $1 billion in an energy efficiency

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• Reader Feedback on Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You live, you learn. And most of the time, it is a collective effort, whether we all want to admit it or not. I didn’t claim to be the king of the job posting engines of the world in last week’s story, Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs. In that story, I queried the big three job sites in the States–Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster–for jobs that had been posted within the past 30 days and ranked job hits by various terms. The AS/400 and the iSeries did not do so well when ranked against

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• Another i5/OS-i Security Vulnerability Surfaces

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You have to work pretty hard to find a security vulnerability in the OS/400, i5/OS, and i operating systems, and according to a posting from computer security research and development company Secunia last week, to find the latest one, you have to look in a very unlikely place: the system modem. According to a Secunia advisory published last week, a security vulnerability in an operating system module with the name BrSmRcvAndCheck, which can apparently be exploited to cause a buffer overflow when running diagnostics on the modem port. Secunia rated this as a “less critical” patch when it issued

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• There’s Still Money in Operating Systems, But Disruptions Loom

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before the Internet, the operating system was your computing environment, and even though machines might be networked, the operating system on your desktop and the servers it was connected to were not just the dominant way you did computing, but the way you thought about computing. The advent of the Internet, the World Wide Web HTML abstraction layer, and various scripting languages has, as Netscape correctly foresaw when it went public more than a decade ago, changed not only the way we do computing, but also the way we think about computing. So you might be thinking, the operating system

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• SPEC Members Start on Energy Benchmark for Web Servers

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There’s an old adage: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. As most data center managers and server and storage arrays makers have been well aware of for years, we have some pretty serious power and cooling issues affecting IT operations. (As I write this, the 95-degree temperatures in New York City have me worrying about keeping IT Jungle’s Linux-Windows cluster cool once again drives the point on home.) While we have many different benchmarks for determining performance of computers, there are few workloads that have been tweaked to provide a standard means of gauging power draw while benchmarks

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• Enterprises Are Judged by the Measure of IT Performance

  June 16, 2008 Dan Burger

  Some planning and problem solving can go a long way toward better IT management and performance management. Of course, that’s much easier said than done. However, getting it done becomes much easier with the help of organizations like the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), which consists of the information technology professionals responsible for planning, measuring, and managing the performance of the world’s largest IT infrastructures. Effectively managing performance requires a focus on specific activities and a plan that can handle problems if and when they occur. Presenting information and techniques that can be applied to managing IT capacity and quality of

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• Zend Taps System i-PHP Guru, Pushes the i Platform

  June 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In its efforts to pump up the use of PHP for enterprise applications running on the i platform, Zend Technology has announced that it has hired a long-time PHP-on-i advocate, Mike Pavlak, to be part of the Zend team, helping get i shops moving toward deploying PHP for creating new applications and modernizing old ones for the Web. Zend has also hired other i-specific sales and channel managers, and has announced two new partnerships with players in the i ecosystem. Pavlak, as many of you know, was formerly the IT director at Tripp Lite, a Chicago-based maker of uninterruptible power

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• The Power Systems M15 and M25 Versus Their Predecessors

  June 9, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It seems like a long time since IBM announced the Power Systems convergence and the new Power6-based Power 520 i Edition 9407-M15, 9408-M25, and 9409-M50 machines, which replace the System i 520, 515, 525, and 550 boxes, which were based on the Power5+ processors. To its credit, Big Blue made a lot of progress in late 2006 with its user-capped Solution Edition Power5+ machines, which were productized as the 515 and 525 with the Power5+ chips in early 2007. The new Power Systems offer further price/performance improvements, but just how much depends on the precise configuration you look at. As

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• Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs

  June 9, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a long time watcher of the systems and server area–at least by IT journalism standards, where journos usually burn out after five to 10 years in the field–I take a keen interest in any means of ranking the different platforms of the world. In the absence of truly impartial data, I am always on the lookout for a new way to compare different platforms. For the past couple of weeks, I have been playing around with the Internet’s major search engines to rank various server platform brands, and this week I continue the series, this time looking at what

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• As I See It: Citizen CEO

  June 9, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Think of yourself as the CEO of your life. Your budget, like that of your competitors, is 8,760 hours per year. How do you vote with your time, money, and energy? What do you say “yes” to, and what do you say “no” to? Given all of your different personas (the goof-off, the responsible one, the dreamer, the provider, the visionary, the critic, the good child, etc.), which has controlling interest of the enterprise that is you? Who are the stockholders you are obliged to please? Who sits on your board of directors; and who has veto power? And, if

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