• IBM Delivers Yet Another Hardware Management Console

  September 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  How many different types of Linux-based PCs does it take to screw in a PowerVM hypervisor? Apparently more than one. And apparently IBM still thinks it is fine to charge an outrageous price for the Hardware Management Console (HMC), which is little more than a low-end X64-based server running a control console for PowerVM as it runs on Power5 and higher systems. This week, IBM will roll out another in a long line of HMCs that I cannot see as anything other than a profit center for Big Blue. In announcement letter 110-146, the details of the 7402-CR6 iteration

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• Entry IBM i Server Deals Greased With License Discounts

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As this newsletter reported a month ago, IBM has been cutting deals with customers moving from older Power 550 and larger machines based on Power 5, Power5+, and Power6 processors to Power 550/750 machines based on Power6+ and Power7 processors. The deal allows IBM i software licenses bought above and beyond the base OS that is configured with the server to slide from the old to the new box for a modest fee. Now, Big Blue is cutting smaller IBM i shops a break, too. The deal, called the IBM i License By User offering, is detailed in announcement

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• Prices Jacked on Power Systems Tape Drives and Expansion Drawers

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is offering pretty good bang for the buck on its new entry Power Systems machines based on Power7 chips, and ditto for the midrange boxes using the processors. And so, the money has to come from somewhere and it is always a good idea for it to come from somewhere that might not make it into a press release or a benchmark. Like peripherals. And maybe soon, hardware maintenance fees. And so, in announcement letter 310-236, you will find that selected peripherals used across the Power Systems product line, whether you install IBM i, AIX, or Linux on

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• The Server Racket Strengthens in Q2, But Will It Hold?

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just after The Four Hundred went on hiatus for the Labor Day holiday, the box counters at IDC and Gartner put out their dicing and slicing of the server space for the second quarter of 2010. The news was generally good, but not so much for the high-end systems at IBM and Hewlett-Packard that are undergoing product transitions. The Sparc and X64 servers at Oracle took some hit points, too, thanks to the uncertainty surrounding Oracle’s plans for its servers. Gartner and IDC count up the market slightly differently and provide different sets of data for subsets of the server

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Craft Nouveau

  September 7, 2010 Hesh Wiener

  Somebody at Google knows about Bing. Not Bing the Microsoft googloid. Bing as in Siegfried (Samuel) Bing, the German expatriate whose Paris gallery, L’Art Nouveau La Maison Bing, founded in 1895, gave its name to a worldwide movement in art, craft, and design. A Google logo celebrated Art Nouveau on July 24, the 150th birthday of Czech illustrator and temporary Parisian Alphonse Mucha. Today, one can find that je-ne-sais-quoi of turn of the Twentieth Century Paris in cyberspace. Its message: Computing, to succeed, must, like the Eiffel Tower, marry art and science. The Eiffel Tower, opened

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• IDC Raises Global IT Spending Projections for 2010

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So here’s the three questions everyone in the IT sector wants to get an answer to: Is there going to be a double dip in the Great Recession, what is going to happen to IT spending in the second half of 2010, and how will this all affect my compensation? And if you are looking for answers, so are the economists and box counters over at IDC. But unlike you, they are paid to respond to questions like these instead of taking the bugs out of someone else’s code or going to meetings to defend the IBM i platform.

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• IBM Pushes Power Envelope Down with Power7 Chips

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IEEE hosted the Hot Chips 22 chip conference at Stanford University while The Four Hundred was on hiatus, and the chipheads who work on IBM‘s Power Systems were on hand to talk about the EnergyScale power-saving features of the new Power7 chip as well as the forthcoming Power7 IH supercomputing node that is part of the petaflops-class “Blue Waters” supercomputer being installed at the University of Illinois. I already told you all that you need to know about the Power Systems IH supercomputer nodes last fall, which is that one of these monsters would have a tremendous

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• Drunk and Disgruntled Employee Unloads Hot Lead into Server

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Admit it. You have wanted to do the same thing, and probably more than once. Unless you grew up in the suburbs and didn’t grow up with guns. And if you did grow up with a shotgun, rifle, or pistol of some sort, you would know that what Joshua Lee Campbell, an employee at RANlife Home Loans, of Salt Lake City, Utah, did was pretty stupid and unsafe. If you take the report in the Deseret Times and interleave it with another report from the Salt Lake Times, Campbell, who is a youthful 23, went to a concert

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• Agilysys Narrows Losses on Uptick in Sales in Fiscal Q1

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Business continues to be tough for application and services provider Agilysys, but things are getting better. In the first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended on June 30, the maker of software for retailers and hotels said that revenues were up 1.9 percent, to $132.4 million. Product sales were down a fraction of a percent, to $104.1 million, but services revenues rose by 10.7 percent, to $28.3 million. The company cut its operating loss almost in half, to $6.6 million, and after paying income taxes (it did not pay taxes on profits in the current quarter, but corrected a past

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• Jack Henry Ends Fiscal 2010 on High Notes

  September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The big banks may have taken it on the chin during the economic meltdown, but smaller regional banks and credit unions that are commonly customers of Jack Henry & Associates did comparatively better, and the software company’s numbers for the fiscal year ended in June show it. In the final quarter of the fiscal year, Jack Henry said that it posted sales of $227.8 million, up 18.7 percent over the year-ago period. Net income rose by a skinnier 7.9 percent, hitting $30 million flat. License revenues plummeted by 29 percent in the quarter, to $12.4 million, and hardware sales (including

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