Exclusive If you run Itanium-based servers in your data center, 2010 has a surprise for you. The dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat, is not going to be supporting its future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on any Itanium platforms, old or new.
What is your recession sales strategy?
I think I've heard of non-relational databases before. There's a particularly famous one, in fact. What could it be? Let's see: first started shipping in 1969, now in its eleventh major version, JDBC and ODBC access, full XML support in and out, available with an optional paired transaction manager, extremely high performance, and holds a very large chunk of the world's financial information (among other things). It also ranks up there with Microsoft Windows as among the world's all-time highest grossing software products.
....You bet non-relational is still highly relevant and useful in many different roles. Different tools for different jobs and all.
The article notes that the House of Representatives took at least 5 years to replace the applications on its 12 year old mainframe. The costs (i.e. taxpayer funds) to perform this migration work were not disclosed, but it's a pretty safe assumption those costs dwarfed any others. Moreover, the article seems to suggest that it took at least 20 other servers to replace a single 12 year old mainframe, and that's even using virtualization on the new servers. One wonders how many (more) servers the House could have replaced with a single new mainframe.
But here's a more profound question: why is the House of Representatives running its own, separate data centers (primary and disaster)? Couldn't they at least consolidate with, oh I don't know, the Senate?!?! And, a related question: for all those 12 years, why didn't the House simply move its comparatively tiny mainframe workload to a bigger mainframe anywhere else in the federal government? (Yes, they can do that without also delegating any security control. Mainframes do that.) Quite simply, it sounds like the House was, and is, wasting a lot of taxpayer money. (Shocking, I know.)
Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear.