It’s thinner. It’s faster. It’s here. It’s… Sold Out.

The “It” is the iPad2.

And with about 600,000 iPad2 units sold in the first three days of shipment – roughly twice as fast as the original – the iPad can now officially take its place in the pantheon of celebrated phenomena alongside the hula hoop, the Rubik cube, Elvis, Marilyn, Beatlemania, Bieber Fever et al.

Faster than you can say “I gotta have it” Apple’s iPad2 flew off the shelves on Friday and Saturday, dashing any notion (as well as the hopes of more than a few competitors) that the device and the public’s appetite for it has waned in the past year.

The iPad2 was out of stock at every one of the over three dozen Apple Retail stores that I phoned over the last 72 hours. The phone lines were jammed and I spent about five to 10 minutes typical in the busiest locations.

Oracle must move quickly and decisively to customers’ anxiety and restore confidence in the database maker’s technical service and support organization – particularly with respect to the company’s Sun Microsystems’ software and hardware assets. The latest independent ITIC/ GFI Software (formerly Sunbelt Software) 2011 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey, polled 468 businesses worldwide found It found that Oracle products received the lowest ratings for the quality of its service and support of any of the major vendors. Users gave Oracle products, service and support mixed ratings.

Three out of 10 organizations rated Oracle products, technical service and support as Excellent or Very Good. A nearly equal number of survey participants – 26 percent gave Oracle’s offerings a Good rating, while 25 percent graded it as just Satisfactory. Nearly two out of 10 of the organizations polled, gave Oracle’s products, services and support a negative rating; with 13 percent judging it Poor and the remaining six percent giving it an Unsatisfactory rating.

Oracle Reliability, Service and Support by the Numbers

The reliability of Oracle’s Solaris operating system and the company’s x86 and SPARC servers remains fairly strong and competitive, though their uptime and reliability do not match the leaders in those categories.

For the third year in a row, IBM AIX Unix operating system (OS) running on the company’s Power System servers scored the highest reliability ratings among 19 different server OS platforms – including other Unix variants, Microsoft’s Windows Server, Linux distributions and Apple’s Mac OS X.

Over three-quarters or 78 percent of survey respondents indicated they experienced less than one of the most common, minor Tier 1 incidents per server, per annum on IBM’s AIX v. 5.3 and AIX v 7.1 distributions
Those are the results of the ITIC 2010-2011 Global Server Hardware and OS Reliability Survey. ITIC partnered with GFI Software (formerly Sunbelt Software) to conduct this independent Web-based survey. It polled C-level executives and IT managers at 468 corporations from 23 countries worldwide from November through January.

The survey data indicated that the reliability and uptime of all the major server OS and server hardware distributions has improved significantly over the past several years.