The XSi Data Center Blog:

In the not so far distant past the world was roaring, and “rolling in the dough” so to speak; and third party IT maintenance was not very high up on the food chain.  But lately, there hasn’t been as much “dough rolling,” and many organizations are turning to 3^rd party IT maintenance to accommodate severe budget constraints and reductions in capital expenditures.  Companies have been forced to retain equipment for longer periods of time, and organizations are doing more with less.  What they are finding out is with third-party IT maintenance they can actually limit their service expenditures without compromising uptime or performance. 

If you haven’t heard of it yet and you’re in computer networking, it’s likely that you will soon.  Software-defined networking (SDN) is taking the industry by storm and promising to change the way computer networks are managed in the future.  It’s refashioning the data center and creating an onset of start-ups that are forcing old-guard vendors like Cisco and Juniper to scurry to keep up.

On March 15th, IBM announced 33 cities around the globe that were selected to receive their IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grants during 2012.  The program was tested and developed by IBM Citizenship with 7 pilot cities back in 2010.  It was then launched in 2011 as a three-year, 100-city $50 million program.  The Smarter Cities Challenge is IBM’s largest philanthropic initiative yet. 

NASA’s Chief Information Officer, Linda Cureton, announced in a blog on February 11, 2012 that NASA has shut down its last mainframe — the IBM Z9 Mainframe —  a two-ton, 56 square-foot monster running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4), stating, "This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing.”

Brussels, 14 December 2011 - The European Commission has made legally binding commitments offered by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in the mainframe maintenance market. IBM commits to make spare parts and technical information swiftly available, under commercially reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, to independent mainframe maintainers.

Why do manufacturers like Cisco, IBM and HP declare products EOL and EOS?

* Photo Courtesy of New York Times

There are many reasons why OEM’s declare equipment End-of-Life and End-of-Service including:

(This is part 1 of a complete series on Budget Planning in 2011 and beyond)

With a new calendar year comes a new fiscal year, a new set of goals and budget challenges for every department in your organization. While CTOs, CIOs, CFOs, and other c-level executives are working together to maintain or improve vital business services, many of the executives focusing on IT budgets make the understandable mistake of limiting their analysis to capital investments and purchasing decisions. However, more progressive professionals, those looking to get more control over their costs in the long term, are looking to other expenses to keep matters under control.

IT operating budgets continue to stagnate or shrink, decisions makers in the IT world are looking at independent IT dealers as a way to cut both investment and maintenance costs. They’re continuing to find that OEM solutions, while robust, are often cumbersome and expensive. But, as purchasers and managers begin to survey the independent IT dealer market, their commitment to third party or alternative vendors can begin to waver. Letting go of brand loyalties can be difficult, even if you know that it is holding your organization back. There are excellent alternatives for the more expensive brands including: IBM, HP, Sun, SGi, Cisco equipment and others.