Sometimes in life, you have to put up or shut up. You have to put your money where your mouth is. You have to lead, even if you don't have the time. You have to try something that you think is right--or, might be right, but you're not sure--even if a lot of other people say you are crazy, or if they listen quietly and are not enthusiastic about the idea because they don't see what you do. This happens a few times in a good life, and that is what I face as I launch something I have called Hardware Foundry.

No matter what you are doing, if you are trying to solve a problem, it is best sometimes to just let your mind wander. I find designing logos, which I have done a few times, challenging. It is a lot harder than it looks. And I really like doing it.

When you live with a Windows and Linux cluster, as I do, the last thing in the world you need is a lecture on heat, noise, and energy consumption in the data center. But, apparently, a lot of IT managers not only need to deal with the power and cooling issues of their IT infrastructure, they cannot find the information they need to help them cope when they do come to realize they have a problem.

For the past couple of decades, when people talked about computing power, it was understood that what they meant was the ability of a computer to do work of some sort--number crunching, database churning, transaction processing, or, more recently, data streaming. Power is work over time, and when you invest in a server platform, processing power was by and large what you were investing in.

Corporate computing on machines that we can recognizably call electronic data processing systems--and what we now call servers--is coming up on its silver anniversary. The world has consumed a truly staggering amount of computing capacity and has devoured countless varieties of chip and server architectures, operating systems, programming languages, and middleware. But consumption is not a goal in and of itself--unless you are an IT vendor selling wares. Rather than consume what vendors feed us, it is time for the companies that buy servers to have more say in how servers get cooked and what server technologies we consume.

In the simplest terms, a computer takes energy, in the form of electricity, uses it to store and manipulate information, and releases the vast majority of the energy as heat, noise, and light. The computers we love so dearly are burning far too much electricity and creating far too much heat. They are among the most inefficient devices ever invented, and the industry has had very little incentive to make them more efficient. The Information Age has not yet learned from the mistakes of the Industrial Age.

You would think that with a totally revamped and repriced iSeries product line, IBM would be eager to demonstrate the power and value of the machines running on various benchmark workloads commonly used in the IT industry. But, alas, IBM has not been very active with iSeries benchmarks, and now the lack of good benchmark data is hampering the ability of the iSeries platform to gain new customers and to retain the ones it has.