This week, and probably into next, IBM, its partners, and its customers will be celebrating the 20th birthday for the AS/400 system, which came to market on June 21, 1988. It has been an incredible–and sometimes unbelievable–two decades for the venerable OS/400 platform, whose roots go back a decade earlier to the System/38, the first integrated system in the world with a relational database and easy-to-use programming language designed for people who speak business, not assembler or C or some other alien computer language.

I am not sure how much celebrating Big Blue will be doing, particularly since a

It is a goal of all the makers of big iron boxes to push the performance envelope, and not just because vendors have big egos–oh, they certainly have those–but because their customers are always pushing them to push the performance envelope a little further. Sometimes, a lot further. For the past six years, the cold war in the big iron space has been especially intense between IBM, the Unix upstart and proprietary system leader, and Hewlett-Packard, the Unix stalwart and Windows and Linux upstart with a smattering of proprietary big iron.

The two server makers have been leapfrogging

While processors have hit a gigahertz wall somewhere around 3, 4, or 5 gigahertz, depending on the chip architecture, forcing chip makers to shift the use of Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing to multicore devices to pack more capacity into a single slice of silicon, disk makers have not, thus far, hit a capacity wall on drives. And as far as anyone can tell, the appetite for gigabytes just keeps on growing and growing. It is really quite astounding, especially when you consider the amount of garbage that must be stored on computers the world over.

According to the

What did the extraterrestrial called ET in the eponymous 1982 Spielberg film use to save itself from a cadre of government agents? A phone. Twenty years later, people routinely phone home and everywhere else from anywhere. This hasn’t distracted the technologists caught up in arguments about thin versus thick clients, but now there’s a new Apple iPhone. It might ring loudly enough to be heard above the bickering advocates of various clients. A client as well as a phone, it could shift the focus of the user interface debate from technological means to budgetary goals.

In a sense, Apple helped

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

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

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

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

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

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