Shooting and hitting a moving target is never easy, but nailing a moving target when you are flying down a bumpy road trying to hit that target is another thing entirely. Which is why the server business is a bit like the chase scene in a thriller movie. The targets that vendors are aiming at are chip and system roadmaps, and the blood is red ink, but there is a certain kind of drama in it. Particularly if your company’s business, and perhaps your job, depends on the reliability, scalability, and availability of your primary server platforms.

I do plenty

Since the Power7-based machines were launched in February and March, The Four Hundred has been digging around for all of the performance information we can find on the new machines, particularly running the i 6.1 or i 7.1 operating system and filling in some gaps by making some estimates for online transaction processing on the Power7 blade servers. This week, I wanted to give you a sense of how the Power7-based machines stack up on Java application performance, in this case gauged by the SPECjbb2005 application serving test.

In March, in the wake of the launch of the midrange Power

The announcement in late June by application software powerhouse Infor that it was building a lot of its new applications for Microsoft‘s Windows Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server, doesn’t mean the Power Systems i platform is not still important to the company, and Infor is most definitely hard at work getting its apps up to speed on IBM‘s latest Power7-based machines and the i 7.1 operating system.

With around 15,000 customers worldwide running a variety of applications that were originally coded for OS/400, often in RPG but sometimes in Java or with Java extensions, privately held Infor

Those in favor of restricting speech often argue that the Framers of the Constitution could not have anticipated a technology such as the Internet that can be used to disseminate bomb-making instructions, invite sedition, propagate racism, and spread pornography like pollen. And, of course, they’re right. The Framers probably didn’t envision space travel either; or Lady Gaga, or a black President, for that matter. But here we are.

Free speech is perhaps humankind’s most cherished and envied freedom. Yet it is always under assault. The self-righteous would restrict it for moral reasons; the closed-minded for political advantage; and the unscrupulous

One aspect of the COMMON Europe Top Concerns survey results that were released a few weeks ago is in tune with a recent Forrester Research report. Both sources of feedback from people who buy software and services strongly suggest a desire to work with vendors that demonstrate how well they know the vertical industry of the buyer and how well a specific vendor understands a specific company’s position in its market.

Call it the “to know me is to love me” company-vendor relationship.

While plenty of vendors try to endear themselves to customers and prospects by offering the one-stop shopping

The idea helped Sun Microsystems have something for its top brass to talk about aside from its flagging sales for several years before it was sucked into the gaping maw (surely I meant to say loving embrace?) of Oracle, and maybe it will work better for Big Blue.

Am I talking about an open source version of OS/400? Perhaps porting the platform to X64 iron? Maybe Sam Palmisano growing a ponytail and speaking like a calm guru of IT wisdom? No. I am talking about a try-and-buy program for the Power Systems line. For the Power6-based Power 520,

It’s not every day I see IBM give away anything for free, much less see it two times in the same week. As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere in this issue, Big Blue has a try-and-buy program where it is letting companies and individuals tool around with a Power 520 server for two months. The company has also announced via its Web site (but not a formal announcement letter) some free Power Systems training courses.

IBM is offering seven of its online, instructor-led training courses for Power Systems shops for free, and some of them actually have something to

There is a lot of talk about cloudy IT infrastructure these days, and it just makes me laugh. The shift from virtualized, utility-priced server and storage capacity is transformational and important, no doubt, but no more so than many of the other transitions in the systems business in the past 45 years. Cloudy infrastructure will ultimately just be infrastructure, the way it was evolving to be all along.

But in the meantime, everybody is excited by change, and I can’t really blame them–the news business being based on change, after all. What people are mostly excited about are new

The Enterprise Computing Solutions IT distribution unit of IT and electronics master distributor Arrow Electronics has been building up its professional services portfolio since last fall and has relaunched its services unit in North America as Arrow Fusion, sporting a slew of cloud services for IT shops.

Arrow’s resellers are used to peddling boxes and software licenses to make their bread every day, and in a cloudy infrastructure world, where some shops are going to put at least some of their workloads on someone else’s computers, resellers are naturally wondering where their slice of the action is going to come

If you are chasing growth, as all companies along the IT supply and distribution chain are, then Latin America is one of the goals you are running toward. Which is why master distributor Avnet has acquired Tallard Technologies, a value-added distributor located in Miami, Florida, that has presence in all of the important Latin American countries.

The Tallard business was a division of Itautec S.A.-Grupo Itautec, which at $1 billion is one of the largest private companies in Brazil. Itautec is a supplier of computers and software aimed at the banking and financial services industry, as well as its