A complete IT meal

The best issues of InfoWorld combine solid, in-depth reporting on products and technologies — our meat and potatoes, so to speak — with tasty insights into the future of IT on the side. Judged on that culinary basis, this issue makes a great meal.

You could start with our InfoWorld Test Center cover story titled “Sizing up VoIP servers.” Wayne Rash and Brian Chee took big VoIP systems from 3Com, Avaya, Siemens, and Zultys into the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawaii and came back impressed.

This competent performance is good news for vendors, of course, because it validates the claim that VoIP has outgrown the early bugs and glitches and really is ready for the enterprise. But it‘s even better news for buyers, because VoIP offers excellent value for new or expanding facilities. Expect lots more coverage of this topic in coming months, including a detailed look at VoIP tools in October.

Also on the hardware front, don‘t miss Paul Venezia‘s entertaining look at the 64-bit computing wars (see “The great 64-bit shootout”). For those who haven‘t followed this series, we‘ve been seeking to answer whether Intel‘s new Xeon with Extended Memory 64 Technology can match or beat AMD‘s Opteron for 64-bit performance. When Paul first tested these processors head-to-head, the Intel entry was still so new that it had no good 64-bit benchmarks. Now Venezia returns to the subject with benchmarks in hand and concludes, as he puts it, that “while the EM64T Xeon is no slouch, the Opteron reigns supreme” — at least for now.

I also particularly liked both Jon Udell’s and Tom Yager’s columns this week. Udell, in Strategic Developer, examines a new approach to determining who should have access to data. Currently, this process is usually governed by some sort of access control list, but ACLs require a human being to fill them out, and, with the growth of both users and data, the human gatekeepers have trouble keeping up.

Udell examines an alternative solution that relies on better accountability instead, using mechanized agents to track exactly which files people use and how they use them. This system, he notes, may scale better than ACLs because — unlike man-made permission lists — “event logging and data analysis ride the favorable current of Moore’s law.”

Tom Yager gets the last word in this issue, as usual. Ahead of the Curve discusses the lessons for IT in the convergence of PDAs and mobile phones. As someone who just returned from his first trip in at least 20 years without a PC — a feat made possible by the versatile Treo 600, which did make the journey — I can vouch that the lessons are worth noting.