The Remarketer

Network Computing Magazine hosts an annual “Best of Interop” awards program at the Interop Las Vegas show in the spring for the best new products offered by exhibitors at the show. This really helps the casual networking specialist sort through the hundred of exhibitors and products offered.

Vibrant noticed an important category missing in the awards though and took it upon ourselves to dig up the best “Schwag” or “Tchotchkes” that we could find on the Interop expo floor. I’m really not sure how this was previously overlooked!

Please take a look at the three finalists below and vote for your favorite.

There are endless numbers of tech bloggers online, but finding those that cover enterprise IT is a bit more challenging. For the past several months, I’ve been compiling a list of the best that I could find.

Quick observations: Sun is the runaway blogging leader. HP has a ways to go, as does Cisco, but they’re finally getting there. Storage Execs are your buddies in the blogosphere, as they go by their first names (i.e. Chuck’s Blog, Dave’s Blog, Hu’s Blog, etc…)

General IT Bloggers
- Some great writers and thinkers covering Enterprise IT of all flavors:

At lunch yesterday, I was amazed to find out that the two co-workers joining me hadn’t yet realized that daylight savings time goes into effect this coming weekend. Of course, they aren’t responsible for any of our company’s or clients’ IT hardware or computer systems. Otherwise they most certainly would have been aware that Daylight Savings Time is starting a month earlier this year due to new US regulations.

Just in case any IT admins out there have gotten (way) behind on their DST07 updates, here is a summary of where you can find help for various manufacturers:

“What is your ‘list price’ for this used IBM Server?”

We get this type of question pretty frequently, particularly when we’re selling to a large Fortune 500 Corporation, University or Government Organization. It is almost a knee-jerk reaction to ask as these buyers are conditioned to negotiate discounting directly with manufacturers such as Sun, IBM, HP and EMC. We also get similar questions regarding “educational” or “volume discounts.”

While used IT hardware is a fantastic way to save on IT infrastructure costs, negotiating pricing here can present some unique challenges.

Smaller chips, smaller servers, smaller datacenters, smaller world…

IBM wants you to forget about all that. If you’ve had your ear to IBM’s train tracks, you’ve heard the message too… Big is the New Small.

So, when the world is all about blade servers and you want to shift a little love to your system z9 and zSeries mainframe servers, what do you do?

1. Make Big = Easy. Mainframes have always been considered cumbersome, complex and difficult to use. IBM is investing $100 million over five years to make the systems and the z/OS easier to work with. Implementation and administration is expected to become much less complex.

The following are ten servers that have enabled IT world-beaters to develop technological advancements that transformed the way we work and live. While the people behind the systems are the real brains, this list highlights the hardware they relied on.

Without further ado, in no particular order, here’s our list of the Ten Servers that Changed the World.

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1. Google’s Very First Server
Server: Sun Ultra 2
Significance: First Google Server

The Sun Ultra 2 may seem like an unlikely candidate to make this list, but it steps up as the server which first hosted Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Backrub search engine – which, of course, eventually evolved into Google.