• Lab Services and Training Available for Power Systems Shops

  September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You want to adopt IBM‘s latest server technologies to replace your aging systems, but you are not too sure where to start? You want to talk to some techies with real-world implementation services instead of a salesperson itching to make a sale? Well, Big Blue has a deal for you called Systems Lab Services and Training. In announcement letter 610-042, the somewhat bizarrely named service is aimed at companies that want to deploy specific Power Systems technologies on Power7 servers and who just want to get some help getting together a plan to stand up these products without

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• IBM Adds New SSD and Fat SFF Disk to Power Systems

  September 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like most of you, I am still chewing through the latest Power Systems announcements from IBM. We covered the five new systems that Big Blue announced on August 17 in as much detail as was possible on announcement day, and followed up with detailed price and performance information in the weeks following the announcement. We’ve also gone into pricing for IBM i on the boxes, and the deals the company is making on software to encourage shops to upgrade to new Power7 iron. Now is the time to drill down into some important storage announcements that were buried in

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• Power7 Planning Beyond the Bells and Whistles

  September 13, 2010 Dan Burger

  While IBM gets busy with its Fall 2010 Power of the i road show schedule (see the Redbooks, White Papers, and Other OS/400 Resources section of Four Hundred Monitor for dates and cities), business partners have their own plans for getting out and talking about Power7 and IBM i 7.1. Where Big Blue tends to make grandiose presentations that showcase all the bells and whistles, the business partners spend more time talking with individuals about the best fit for their purposes. Recently I spoke with Jim Kandrac, president of United Computer Group (UCG), a business partner based in Cleveland, Ohio,

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• Companies Buy Lots of Disk Storage–At Cheap Prices–in Q2

  September 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The faltering economy hit the storage market almost as hard as it hit the server racket, but both have recovered to reasonable levels as 2010 has progressed. According to the latest numbers coming out of IT market researcher IDC, the appetite for internal and external disk storage rebounded in the second quarter. Storage didn’t bounce as high as servers did in the quarter, but then again, storage was not hit as hard during the Great Recession last year, either. The IDC box counters believe that companies consumed some 3,645 petabytes of disk capacity across both internal disk arrays tucked

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• As I See It: Introducing the New Quarterlife Crisis (with Cheese)

  September 13, 2010 Victor Rozek

  Quarterlife Crisis. When I first heard the phrase, I thought it sounded silly. The notion of 20-somethings having their mid-life crises two decades early had the suspicious ring of some trumped up Madison Avenue condition that Pfizer would gladly sell you drugs to assuage. I could almost hear the cheerful announcer intoning the disclaimers: side effects include kidney failure and rectal bleeding. But the more I looked into it, the more convinced I became that the Quarterlife Crisis is every bit as serious as, well, the dreaded Restless Leg Syndrome. OK, maybe more so. Having a generation of kids who

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• CIOs Are a Little More Optimistic About IT Hiring–But Not Much

  September 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The high-tech headhunters at Robert Half Technology have done their latest surveys of IT shops to try to take the pulse of the job market, and it looks like the situation is improving, but is still not great. RHT did its quarterly survey of over 1,400 IT shops in the United States, asking them what their hiring and firing plans were for the fourth quarter that starts in a couple of weeks. The IT labor market seems to have softened in the past quarter, with everyone worried about the economy possibly slipping back into recession, but the situation is still

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• Maxava Officially Becomes Maxava

  September 13, 2010 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i high availability software company previously known as Maximum Availability last week announced it has officially shortened its name to Maxava. In addition to being easier to say than the old nine-syllable name, Maxava hopes that, by formally adopting the three-syllable nickname that many people (including this newsletter) often used, it will shake up previously held notions about the company and the enterprise-strength capability of its high availability products. The new company name is the tip of the iceberg of changes occurring at Maxava, the New Zealand-based company that has been successful in selling IBM i high

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• COMMON Fall Conference Offers 112 Sessions in San Antonio

  September 13, 2010 Dan Burger

  You hear a lot of talk about upgrades these days. Upgrade your server, upgrade your operating system, and upgrade your mission critical software. Well, what about upgrading your mission critical training and education? Putting that on the back burner is really downgrading your IT investments. COMMON president Pete Massiello last week took there you area break from his regular job as owner of iTech Solutions Group, to beat the drum for COMMON’s Fall Conference and Expo that is coming up October 4 through 6 in San Antonio, Texas. Massiello also serves as the chairman of the Fall Conference Task

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• IBM i 7.1 Gets Support for PCI Express Crypto Co-Processor, LTO-5 Tapes

  September 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to augment the encryption and decryption capabilities of your Power Systems servers or add LTO-5 tape drives and libraries to machines, the IBM i 7.1 operating system now supports these features. As the The Four Hundred previously reported in the wake of the April Power Systems announcements (when the Power7-based blade servers were launched), the new PCI-Express cryptographic co-processors are more sophisticated than using software-based encryption and using the AltiVec vector math units to do the encrypting and decrypting heavy lifting. The cryptographic co-processors that IBM is now selling, which are known as features 4807, 4808, and

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• Asseco Group Buys Formula Systems, and Therefore Magic Software

  September 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the IBM midrange, it is hard to know who owns whom when it comes to the hardware and software players, and not just because the vast majority of the players in the midrange are privately held. It is sometimes hard to reckon what’s going on with the publicly held ones, too. So it is with Magic Software Enterprises, which makes application development and integration tools for the IBM i platform and which has just changed hands and now has a new grandparent holding company. As The Four Hundred has previously explained, Magic Software is owned by Formula

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