Opinion

3PAR and Polyserve Serve Up the Ultimate Utility Data Center

3PAR and PolyServe announced an integrated utility computing platform for database and enterprise file serving environments. The combined offering pairs 3PAR Thin Provisioning and Dynamic Optimization with PolyServe's Database Utility and File S

eWeek Labs Names VMware a Top Product of 2006

It looks like VMware has once again been named a "Top Product" by eWeek Labs for the third year in a row. In 2004, VMware received a top product award for its VMware VirtualCenter management application. And then the following year, the com

Developer’s Perspective on Wasted Time With Proprietary “Support”

Year end lab notes part 3: Thrilla in Manilla

And at last we reach the last installment of the year-end lab notes for 2006. The previous posts dealt with infrastructure, servers, and network gear. I'm going to add a few notes to those categories, and finish up with workstations, testing too

Where does Database Auditing Belong?

I've had so many good discussions with vendors and DBAs recently it's really hard to know where to begin. I'm going to start with the most recent talk I had with a vendor (not going to say just yet) because it's still very fresh o

My SOA Predictions for 2007

My SOA Predictions for 2007 Download file…

Why many software projects fail

Trapped in the middle of a municipal culture war, an IT professional fights for survival

Home Delivery Turns Into a Snow Job

It's one thing when the disconnect between a retailer's e-commerce engine and its shipping company results in a Christmas present going astray. But it's quite another when the product is one that you need to have in hand before winter

Staying current when you aren’t paid to do so

Dear Bob …You don't hear the term "Golden Handcuffs" used very often. The term in its narrowest sense, receiving a very high pay rate to stick to what you're doing, doesn't describe my situation perfectly. The pay is fine,

Why Stop with Databases?

OK, I've written before that DBAs should know more than just DBs. I've just posted a review on an ASP.NET training course that is just excellent. Again, it's by AppDev, and I would personally recommend it to anyone wanting to get into

IBM and Intel Work on Virtualization Benchmark

IBM and Intel Corporation have announced a joint initiative aimed at helping IT managers identify and quantify the value of virtualization in their organization. Specifically, the two are working together on a set of new tools that will help IT manag

BEA Jumps Into Java Application Virtualization

At VMworld 2006, one of the takeaways from the event was that the operating system shouldn't matter. BEA Systems is taking that to heart, and in fact, they seem to be cutting out the operating system from the picture altogether. The company anno

Open Source Monitoring 101- A Refresher

Holiday Horrors

In my latest podcast, readers voice their frustration over problems they've encountered with major retailers when Christmas shopping online.  LISTEN!…

The blogosphere has too many unquestioning fans

I had dinner over the weekend with Steve Gillmor of Gillmor Gang fame and of course we got into a discussion about the blogosphere and its value. Gillmor called me a conservative because I always question the value of the latest technology coming do

Oliver’s Other Essential, Geek/Non-Geek, All Encompassing, One-and-Only Holiday Gift Guide

One working week left, so… It's the Monday before Christmas and all through the SMB IT virtual house all the ADD shoppers are freaking with last-minute gift grumpiness and grouse… So follow this gift guide and you'll be stress-free for

ChainBuilder ESB moves to beta stage

Bostech has released a beta version of its open source ChainBuilder ESB v1.0 at ChainForge.net, positioning the enterprise service bus for SOA. The ESB complies with the Java Business Integration specification. Usability and feature enhancements are

Preview: Spotfire DXP turbocharges interactive BA

When I last reviewed Spotfire's Decision Site, I noted that its originality derived from its structure. Spotfire divides the design and analysis cycle into a model that provides a separate, user-appropriate interface for each of three kinds of u

2006 Year in Reviews: Platforms

Virtualization, Windows, and Suse Linux all came on strong in 2006

What does 2007 hold for open source?

The ongoing collision of free software and commercial business promises an action-packed year

2006 Year in Reviews: Application Development

AJAX was the name of the game in app dev this year, but a clash of business rules titans made news, too

2006 Year in Reviews: Data Management

Whether it was e-mail, analytics, enterprise documents, or database records, these tools managed it all

2006 Year in Reviews: Hardware

Servers got more powerful and Apple's iMac rocked the desktop house in 2006

2006 Year in Reviews

A compendium of every product review — all 228 of them— conducted by the InfoWorld Test Center in 2006

Test Center Tracker: Reviews, reviews, reviews

Year in reviews: Sometimes in life, it's all too easy to keep your eyes focused on the future and thus ignore where you've been. But we in the InfoWorld Test Center are pretty fortunate: Once a year, we get to compile brief summaries of eve

Kidaro secures $10 million in funding

Since the days of the dot com bubble burst, Venture Capital firms haven't exactly been beating down the doors of technology start-up companies. However, it seems like virtualization may be changing that just a bit. Virtualization technologies ar

Avocent Enables Seamless Access to Desktop Workstations from Remote locations

Avocent Corporation announced that it has achieved several important technical breakthroughs to enable desktop workstations and PCs to be seamlessly accessed from remote locations, for an unmatched user experience. The advances include transparent ex

Hyperic Delivers Open Source Management Solution for VMware

Hyperic Inc. is making available its virtualization management solution Hyperic HQ for VMware. According to the company, the solution will enable data centers to consolidate complete discovery, monitoring, analysis and control of all application, sys

Want to Join the Sigma Omega Alpha Fraternity? ZapThink is Taking Pledges.

Hard to believe that Animal House came out in 1978. I think it was the first R rated movie I say in my life, and I had to sneak in, the old buy a ticket for a Disney flick and switch theaters. Gezz, I hope the statue of limitations has run out on th

Who should own the company’s website?

Dear Bob …I find myself in the midst of a turf war. The president of the company is battling the CIO over the issue of who should control the website. The president says it belongs in the Marketing department, the CIO says it belongs in IT. Persona

Gadgets can be dangerous to your corporate health

With SOA and Web service APIs on the back end and AJAX on the front end, the age of DiY (do it yourself) software appears to be upon us. Over the past few days I heard from software companies both big and small, all extolling the amazing DiY capabili

More on Asterisk and the Cisco 7970

After some tweaking, I believe I have everything working the way I want it with my new TrixBox/Asterisk system. To recap, the actual Asterisk server is a Trixbox 1.2.3 build running on a VMware virtual server, linking to a SIP trunk from BroadVoice.

Microsoft readies AJAX technology

Microsoft on Friday began shipping a Release Candidate – the precursor to the general release – of its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology. The company's ASP.Net team shipped the Release Candidate of ASP.Net AJAX 1.0, which enables

VISTAphilia

I've got one issue that if any of you guys on the Windows team are listening, I could use some guidance. Keep reading… So I finally took the plunge and upgraded my main workstation to Vista. What can I say except that I completely love this OS

“SaaS and SOA: Together Forever”

Now that I'm an independent I've been working with a number of authors and reporters attempting to figure out SOA, and while some are doing average jobs, some are dong great jobs. Case in point a nice article entitled "SaaS and SOA: T

The biggest rubes, boobs, and noobs of 2006

Tirelessly seeking out new lows in high tech

Videoconferencing: A call for action

One New Year's resolution that's past due: Focus on tackling videoconferencing interoperability

Backup Software: Bah, Humbug

Complex, insecure, and frustrating data backup solutions are sapping Roger's patience

Does Oracle Need an Attitude Adjustment?

Oracle has always brought a certain high-handed arrogance to its treatment of customers, but — in the database field, at least — that attitude has always been at least partly justified by its edge over the competition's technology. But reader

Microsoft readies Visual Studio service packs

updated| Microsoft on Friday will release Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. A Microsoft representative said the service packs should be accessible from this link by 9 am Pacific time on

VMware Appliances: Not Quite What Microsoft Expected

Remember the Microsoft Test Drive program that we talked about back in November? The one where you can try out some of Microsoft's software as a demo but instead of installing it on your own machine, you could download the entire thing – preinst

The last word on unified storage

Dell and Microsoft stitch together file and volume serving on Windows

Windows Server 2003 patch proves painless

Although SP2 includes SP1 and more, installation is far less stress-inducing

SWsoft Partners With Acronis

SWsoft, a leading provider of automation and virtualization software, announced a partnership with Acronis to resell Acronis True Image Server for SWsoft Plesk 8.1 control panel software. According to the company, the stand-alone solution will enable

Review: IBM and Yahoo give the gift of free search

Enterprise search often defines massive projects that federate information from the Web, portals, legacy databases, and business intelligence systems. Yet many organizations thrive on finding information on the Web and within their intranets or file

When to Consider SOA Performance

Making solutions scale is nothing new. However, the SOA technology and approaches recently employed are largely untested with higher application and information and service management traffic loads. SOA implementers were happy to get their solutions

Test Center Tracker: Big Blue and Yahoo give away search

Has Google Mini met its match? : InfoWorld has looked at Google's search appliances in the past, and Test Center Contributing Analyst Mike Heck has liked what he's seen, from the nifty yellow casing down to the overall performance. Well, IB

Advice for a newbie consultant

Dear Bob …After a 10-year career as a staff employee (application developer) at various organizations (from tiny to mega), I am about to start a consulting contract. This is my first foray into the contracting arena, although I have been in a consu

JBoss updates Web 2.0 framework

JBoss has updated its Web 2.0 application framework, JBoss Seam, the company announced on Wednesday. The framework integrates SOA technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), JavaServer Faces, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 and busine

Payback time for Novell

The Novell/Microsoft pact might just be a plea bargain to avoid Novell's wrath over SCO