Platforms: Delivering bad news for Windows fans, of which is he counts himself, Randall Kennedy writes that those nagging performance issues plaguing Vista are here to stay, at least from the looks of the first service pack. Vista SP1 a performance dud? “Exhaustive testing confirms that Windows Vista is at least twice as slow as Windows XP when running on the same hardware. So it’s doubly painful to learn that the rumored performance tweaks Microsoft has been hinting at for SP1 simply never materialized.” From the Test Center: Coyote Point Systems’ Equalizer E550si is not the least expensive load balancer out there, but it’s more affordable than competitive systems. Though it does not have all the features, namely compression and traffic acceleration, that they do, “it does offer all the features needed to deliver Web-based applications,” Logan G. Harbaugh writes. “The Equalizer should work well for any corporate Web-based applications or Web farms supporting sites less heavily trafficked than, say, Amazon.com.” But for sites where hundreds of 100-megabit or gigabit connections hitting the app simultaneously, Citrix NetScaler or Juniper, “would be a better choice.” Read the full review. SOA: Orchestration is a requisite when building an SOA. “The best way to consider both notions of service and orchestration (and process integration in general) is to think of them as independent layers,” David Linthicum explains in How to consider orchestration. “Orchestration, in context to a SOA, is strategic, leveraging business rules to determine how systems should interact and better leverage the business value from each system through a common abstract business model.” Software Development