Stories about: Midrange Systems

The note that Andy Gladys sent out to the Application Systems User Group of Greater Cleveland this week could not have been more straightforward or painful.

VMware believes every business can be like a Google, and have a data center that is highly efficient and automated -- and eventually so completely virtualized it operates not as a collection of networked machines but as a living organism.

There was a time when workstations occupied a highly competitive niche in the hardware market. In those days, some 10 years ago, companies such as Sun Microsystems, SGI, IBM, HP, and Dell competed fiercely to deliver the top desktop systems characterized by powerful graphics and processing engines. An added element to this competition was the vendors' reliance on vastly different processor architectures to deliver the knockout performance. A decade later, the market segment is significantly different.

Banking and insurance giant Suncorp is leveraging a unique opportunity to overhaul its IT infrastructure to bring it in line with the company's environment friendly philosophy.

Almost three years after signalling its intention to rationalize its IT infrastructure, national welfare agency Centrelink is beginning to see the fruits of its labour.

MySQL and IBM announced Wednesday that users of the latter's System i hardware line will be able to run the MySQL open-source database on the midrange servers.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is going after the virtualization market in the small-to-medium business space by offering a program to assess how an IT system might benefit from the technology.

Until a few months ago, the clearing and billing system for NYSE Group's stock options exchange consisted of about 800 discrete Cobol programs running on an IBM mainframe. Today, the entire application set has migrated onto a pair of clustered, quadprocessor Windows servers. The recompiled programs remain in Cobol today, but they won't stay there for long.

An IT manager in a telecommunications company recently told me that he is waging a major battle over the mainframe. It seems that the high-level executives in IT (along with the company's CIO) have been singing a familiar song: "The Mainframe Has Got to Go." The execs are principally concerned with three things:

An explosion of data and the availability of storage systems that can help businesses tackle data protection and business continuity issues drove a record year of growth for the disk storage systems market in 2005, according to a new IDC report.

Andrew Monshaw, general manager of IBM's Storage Systems and Technology Group for the past year, spoke with Computerworld about a variety of storage issues. He said he sees no end in sight for tape storage because of its value proposition, feels that virtualization is king and is still unsure where Microsoft's venture into storage is headed. Monshaw also said the open-source software development group Aperi, formed in October with eight other vendors, should produce the first version of a common storage management platform by mid-2006. That platform is designed to allow users to manage storage systems from multiple vendors through a single interface.