Volume 15, Number 2 - January 9, 2006 Archives - Page 3 of 3

DataMirror Claims Top Benchmark for Data Replication

January 9, 2006 Alex Woodie

DataMirror last week reported impressive benchmark results for its data replication offering running on the biggest iSeries iron IBM has to offer. DataMirror says its Integration Suite offering was able to replicate more than 2 billion customer records (equaling more than 1 TB of data) in an hour from a 32-way i5 595 functioning as the source to a similarly equipped target machine. DataMirror conducted the tests, which were designed to mimic real-world settings and which included a range of inserts, updates, and deletes, last fall at the IBM Benchmarking Center in Rochester, Minnesota, and IBM verified the results.

The

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Barbarians at Bill Gates

January 9, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Even if you have not been the richest man in the world for the better part of a decade, the one thing you can afford is a sense of humor. And it is nice to see that Bill Gates, one of Microsoft‘s founders, its chairman, and its chief software architect, has a great sense of humor. Nothing was made more clear when Gates called IBM its biggest threat in the IT market in an interview prior to his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

CES usually comes in the early part of each

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Auto Parts Dealers Love the iSeries

January 9, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

As much as any industry I’ve encountered, folks in the auto parts business are quick to disclaim any notion that they are “IT people.” And they appear to have no desire to take on that role, either. Their business is fast, competitive, and requires a lot of physical labor (moving all that stuff around in warehouses and onto trucks), distribution, and, in general, heavy lifting to get all those windshields, wiper blades, batteries, plugs, gaskets, and hoses where they need to go.

Their ability to remain competitive depends largely on having the right parts in the right places at the

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An IT Retrospective: Forty Years in the Business

January 9, 2006 Rich Loeber

I got to thinking the other day that as of November 2005, I celebrated my fortieth year in the information technology field. That thought has prompted me to think a lot about how I got started and the way things have changed over the years. This article will try to explore these four decades of progress from just one person’s perspective.

I have absolutely no recollection of my first day on the job working in the IT field, but I clearly remember the second day. I started work on November 8, 1965, working in the computer room for the New

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TFH Flashback: Let Them Eat Gates, February 1995

February 1, 1995 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When times are good and commerce plentiful, it’s good to be the king. Times appear to be propitious for IBM, and chairman Louis Gerstner must get a proportionately good feeling when he looks in the mirror each morning to shave. (Unless he cuts himself, we suppose.) IBM’s first outside king seems to have gotten the IBM Empire back on track. We would even go so far as to say that Gerstner seems to be worth the unheard of $16 million it took to bring him over from RJR Nabisco on April Fool’s Day, 1993.

On second thought, we wouldn’t

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TFH Flashback: Let Them Eat Gates, February 1995

February 1, 1995 Timothy Prickett Morgan

On second thought, we wouldn’t

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TFH Flashback: Let Them Eat Gates, February 1995

February 1, 1995 Timothy Prickett Morgan

On second thought, we wouldn’t

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TFH Flashback: Brave Two Worlds, November 1992

November 1, 1992 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the last contest between IBM and Microsoft–the battle for control of personal computers–Microsoft won. OS/2 is growing, to be sure. But nearly all the personal computers going into business offices use applications written for a Microsoft environment: either DOS or Windows. With Windows for Workgroups now reaching the first brave users, Microsoft’s main systems software development effort is aimed at controlling the fastest personal computers in every business. This is the project to field Windows NT, a software product already well along the way to a mid-1993 debut.

In addition to running on fast personal computers, Windows NT

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