A recovery of sorts is underway in the server market, according to the latest statistics from Gartner that dices and slices the server metrics for the final quarter of 2009. While by no means a full-blown recovery–something no one expects–in server spending, the market seemed to be a little bit stronger than expected, signifying that companies are willing to dedicate some funds to new iron to support new and existing workloads.

“The recovery that began in the third quarter of 2009 based on x86 servers extended into the fourth quarter,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, the research vice president at Gartner who

If you are like many midrange shops, your data center–or what might be more accurately described as a data closet if you are lucky–is a bit informal. The AS/400 and its progeny were invented to be office systems, excepting the very largest machines. They are rugged enough to be tucked almost anywhere and use regular wall power, which means they are often running in the most bizarre places. But this is the 21st century, and you probably ought to have your IT equipment in a safer and more secure location.

That’s why IBM’s data center engineers have cooked up a

Help/Systems, one of the dominant providers of system administration and security tools for the IBM i platform, has expanded its technological reach by forming a partnership with Crossroads Systems, a company known for its data security products. Specifically, this means the Help/Systems automated operations software–primarily Robot/SAVE, but also Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/REPORTS–will be will be matched with Crossroads’ SPHiNX virtual tape appliance.

The integration of these products offers an increase in automated and secure media management including object inventory of systems, audit trails, encryption, and optional use of tape.

Sales and marketing will be handled by Help/Systems and will

Intel has a very strong server chip lineup. Its current Xeon line, dubbed Nehalem, will soon give way to two newer product lines, Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX. Where performance counts more than anything, Power still trumps X64. But where economy is foremost, X64 usually wins. With its new chips, Intel is ready to take on Power in the midrange. IBM’s server business cannot live on mainframe-class machines alone. Consequently, IBM may be about to lose its grip on servers to systems built to shared standards, much the way it lost its power in PCs.

Advanced Micro Devices will also get its

Computer hackers and cyber criminals are successfully adapting their techniques to the Web in response to efforts by software vendors to crack down on security vulnerabilities in their products, according to a new security report from IBM‘s X-Force team. In a separate report on enterprise security, Symantec found large companies are struggling to cope with the growth in and changing nature of cyber attacks, and plan to make extensive investments in security controls.

Five years ago, hackers were actively exploring and exploiting vulnerabilities in products installed on nearly every Windows desktop. Microsoft, with hundreds, if not thousands, of

While I was off on Winter Break with my wife and kids in the mountains of Vermont two weeks ago, IBM snuck out some price cuts on processor features in the current generation of Power 595 boxes.

In announcement letter 310-127, IBM cut the prices on the four-socket processor books used in the Power 595s as well as on the activation fees it charges for turning on Power6 cores within the boxes using its Capacity On Demand (COD) feature. The features that had their prices chopped are all on the 9119 series of machines, which only have Power6 chips,

If you are interested in the new Power7-based servers from IBM and you like all the good things you have been reading about them in The Four Hundred, you might want to try to figure out what it costs to buy one of these boxes. Particularly since the Power 750 Express models started shipping two weeks ago and the Power 770 and 780 will ship a few weeks from now.

Well, forget about getting configured pricing for the Power 770 and 780 machines, because it isn’t out there on IBM’s Web store. (You can see the lack of pricing

A year ago, at the peak of the economic meltdown, application lifecycle and software change management software maker MKS was doing comparatively well financially as gauged by its peers in the software biz. But no company can outrun the economy for long, and MKS had its share of revenue declines in fiscal 2010. But as MKS finished up its third quarter of fiscal 2010 ended January 31, the numbers were all pointing northward.

In the quarter, MKS said that its software license sales were up an astounding 34.1 percent, to just under $5 million. (Although MKS is based in Waterloo,

The funny thing about IBM‘s performance-based pricing metric for much of the systems and application software that it sells on its own and others’ servers is that the Processor Value Metric has become an increasingly arbitrary number. It really is not based on relative performance at all–and that is a good thing for IBM’s own customers.

In the wake of the launch of the Power7 chips and the initial Power 750, 770, and 780 systems on February 8, IBM put out revised PVU tables that added the new Power7 chips used in these machines, which can have four, six,

IBM doesn’t have a homegrown networking hardware business, and has been pretty careful to not tick off Cisco Systems, positioning itself as a kind of Switzerland in IT networking, even as Cisco jumps into servers, which is more than a bit annoying to IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and now Oracle.

But just because IBM wants to sell any and every major networking product and spread its partnerships across Cisco, Brocade Communications, Blade Network Technologies, Juniper Networks, Voltaire, and Mellanox Technologies does not mean Big Blue does not have its own networking aspirations (or