Posted 11/20/09 at 07:24:20 AM by Paul Lilly

Despite the growing popularity of open source software, there's still the issue of how to make money with it. No easy task, warns Miguel de Icaza, Vice President of Novell, who also heads up the firm's open source Mono project.

"If your livelihood depends on the product that you're selling, until you can figure how you're going to make money on that thing, I say, keep it proprietary," de Icaza said.

The VP went on to say that it's "incredibly difficult" making an open source business. His remarks were in response to an audience member at the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference), who raised the question of making money via open source. The issue of making money by selling support also came up.

"You need to take those steps carefully in my opinion," de Icaza said. "And support, by the way, is a horrible business. I want to be writing code, and I want to be paid to write code."

The VP did note that if you're a young developer without a lot of obligations, like a family and tuition, then it's far easier to consider doing open source projects.

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Posted 11/20/09 at 07:24:09 AM by Paul Lilly

Dell didn't deliver in the third quarter the way analysts were expecting, instead missing the mark even on modest expectations, Businessweek reports.

According to the OEM's earnings report, sales dropped 15 percent to $12.9 billion. Net income took a bigger hit and fell by 54 percent to $337 million, or 23 cents per share, well below Wall Street's prediction that Dell would earn 28 cents per share on sales of $13.1 billion.

The poor performance affected just about every aspect of Dell's businesses, but sales to large businesses were hit particularly hard. That's bad news when close to 80 percent of Dell's sales are businesses and government customers.

Even the launch of Windows 7 didn't do much to bolster sales, at least not yet. According to company CFO Brian Gladden, customers had put off purchasing a PC in the weeks leading up to Windows 7, and Dell's quarter ended just eight days after launch.

"We built a bit of a backlog as a result, and we'll ship through that in the fourth quarter," Gladden said.

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Posted 11/19/09 at 07:08:14 AM by Paul Lilly

We have to hand it to keepgoing.biz, because if you're going to get your point across, you might as well go all out in a high powered YouTube video that ends in a bang (literally). The victim, in this case, is a server.

To demonstrate the benefit of disk-to-disk backups with multiple offsite backups at data centers in separate states, keepgoing.biz posted a video of company president Jon Klaus and others firing rounds at a computer server with shotguns and an assortment of other weapons. The video culminates with the server being blown to bits.

So what's the point?

"Businesses rely on their servers and data being protected and safe," a voice over narrates. "When a server fails, data is often lost, putting your business at risk. Keepgoing.biz backs up your data continuously and restores it completely in minutes, no matter what happens."

Because, you know, a good IT is always prepared for a Colt M2 .50 caliber heavy machine gun firing rounds in slow motion at an exposed server that happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All joking aside, keepgoing.biz's 2 minute video is worth every second. Check it out here.

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Posted 11/19/09 at 07:06:30 AM by Paul Lilly

Some CIOs worry that underpaid IT pros may be a flight risk once the economy rebounds. That's because IT workers have been asked to work more for less money, while also watching their benefits be taken away, and that's not something they'll soon forget once job opportunities open up elsewhere, suggests a new survey.

Robert Half Technologies pinged 1,400 CIOs and found that 43 percent of them plan to make retaining existing workers their top staffing priority in 2010.

"Employers need to focus on preventing burnout and keeping their best people engaged at work. This may be a challenge, given that staffing cuts and the reduction or elimination of benefits have left many employees feeling overworked and undervalued," said Dave Willmer, executive director at Robert Half Technology, in a statement.

But it's not all gloom and doom for CIOs. To prevent a mass exodus among IT staff, Robert Half Technology suggests that IT employers begin implementing training and career development programs. The firm also recommends communicating regularly with staff and encouraging team-building activities that promote a balance between work and life.

"Companies may have to work at 're-selling' themselves to existing employees in much the same way the would when promoting themselves to prospective hires," Willmer said.

But will it be enough?

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Posted 11/19/09 at 07:06:21 AM by Paul Lilly

Netbooks have been selling exceptionally well without much support in the enterprise sector, but they won't stay relegated to the consumer side forever, and that's something IT managers should be preparing for, some observers say.

Maulik Pandya, Dell's senior planning manager for commercial notebooks, says netbooks could conceivably ease into 5 percent of enterprise sales, but there's potential for much more. Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst for the Enderle Group, says that if end-users had any say in the matter, netbooks would blaze past the 5 percent mark.

"Small portable computers for less than $400 is where the market should be," Enderle said. "Portability and the price point really tear up the laptop. Many vendors don't wan to build a strong corporate netbook model because they don't want to pirate their laptop lines."

The obvious downside for enterprise applications is the lack of power inherent in most netbooks. However, this might not be as big an issue as some believe. According to Allen Gwinn, senior director and chief technologist for the Edwin L. Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, there are workarounds. He cites an example of one faculty member who works with demanding SAS models.

"We couldn't find a laptop powerful enough for him to do his work at home," said Gwinn. "So we gave him a netbook. He uses the remote desktop feature to connect to his desktop machine in the office."

Scenarios like this are what IT professionals would be wise to prepare for.

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Posted 11/18/09 at 04:30:00 PM by Katherine Stevenson

GammaTech’s Durabook D14RM is the antidote for folks who are really rough on their hardware. The notebook’s gray and black magnesium-alloy case, complete with black rubberized corners, not only makes the rig look burly, but also serves to protect it from aggressive manhandling.

GammaTech says the notebook complies with MIL-STD-810F guidelines for ruggedness, so we put those claims to the test. We “accidentally” knocked the D14RM off a desk when the machine was open and running a program, dropped it from a standing position onto a concrete floor (a few times, because it gave us such a thrill), and spilled a full 16-ounce cup of liquid across its keyboard. The D14RM withstood all that abuse without any apparent damage to its structure or functionality. And mind you, the D14RM uses a mechanical hard drive. Yes, an SSD seems like a more obvious choice for a notebook that’s meant to be tossed about, but then it wouldn’t be nearly so affordable. 

Read on for the full review!

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Posted 11/18/09 at 07:03:26 AM by Paul Lilly

While Oracle's been busy trying to win the blessing of the European Union in its attempted takeover deal with Sun Microsystems, Sun has been focusing on upping its storage ante, The company on Tuesday announced upgrades to its Sun Storage 7000 family of disk arrays that purports to double both the performance and capacity from a maximum of 288TB to 576TB in a 4U space.

Sun said it outfitted its Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System with four six-core AMD Opteron processors, double the amount of DRAM cache as before (up to 512GB), and new 2TB capacity drives. The end result is significantly improved performance, the company claims.

"Sun server, storage, and networking contniue to fuel world record HPC performance and provide the building blocks for dozens of new Sun Constellation System deployments around the globe," said John Fowler, executive vice president, System Group, Sun. "Corporations and scientists alike are using Sun server and storage innovation to gain competitive advantage and tackle the world's most complex problems."

In addition to storage upgrades, Sun also announced a pair of InfiniBand switches, the Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 and Switch 36.

More details and specs here.

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Posted 11/18/09 at 07:03:21 AM by Paul Lilly

Recent maneuvers by networking bigwigs Cisco and Logitech seem to indicate that videoconferencing technology may be headed towards the mainstream market. That hasn't been the case up to this point, as high prices and somewhat complicated equipment have relegated virtual face-to-face meetings to enterprise applications.

But that's rapidly changing. Cisco, Logitech, and a handful of smaller companies have been wheeling and dealing with a focus towards morphing the market into a mainstream gold rush. Cisco, for example, increased its $3 billion bid for Tandberg to roughly $3.4 billion in an attempt to entice investors who felt that the original bid wasn't enough. In addition, Cisco is expected to introduce a consumer-level videoconferencing product at CES this January, Businessweek reports.

Logitech meanwhile has opend up its purse and will pay $405 million for LifeSize Communications, a company which makes high-end HD videoconferencing equipment.

By themselves, each deal isn't particularly telling, but when looking at the overall picture, it appears imminent that videoconferencing is headed towards becoming a natural part of business, both big and small, with the cost of entry on its way to being removed as a barrier.

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