• IBM Cuts Deals on Selected Network Switches

  August 9, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While The Four Hundred was on hiatus last week, IBM announced some pretty deep discounting on various networking products commonly used with its System x products, which are popular among the Power Systems base as well. The deal, in announcement letter 310-229, applies to five different Ethernet switches resold by IBM. Under that deal, if you buy through IBM’s Web site or over the telephone, you get 30 percent shaved off the price. That is as good as most midrange shops were going to be able to negotiate on their own. Presumably IBM has some inventory it wants to

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• More Details on the Entry Power7 Rollout

  July 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I told you last week that five new Power7-based systems–four small ones and the big iron Power 795 boxes–were coming out on August 17. It didn’t take long for people to start helping me put together a little more of the launch plans for the remainder of the Power7 rollout for 2010. It was kinda funny how the veil kept lifting a bit higher and higher as the week went on. We already knew that there were four machines plus the Power 795. I had been guessing there would be an entry box, the Power 705 in a 1U chassis,

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• IBM Revenues Hurt By Server Transitions and Currency in Q2

  July 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Wall Street just can’t get used to the fact that IBM doesn’t care all that much about revenues or bookings or other indicators of business so long as it hits its revenue targets for the quarter and is on track for whatever this year’s earnings per share goals are. That’s how the top brass at Big Blue get their compensation and bonuses, after all. Still, Wall Street was expecting IBM to do better than $23.7 billion in sales in the second quarter, up 2 percent, and $3.39 billion in net income, up 9.1 percent. It’s hard to imagine how Big

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• Wanted: An AS/400-Centric System of Systems

  July 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM had the right idea all along, perhaps, but lost it somewhere along the way–maybe when the AIX people took over the Power platform three years ago and stopped listening to what the OS/400 people were saying. That idea, which was a competitive reflex to the intense competition coming from low-cost X86 servers in the early 1990s, was to turn the AS/400 system into the central management hub and database server for X86-based co-processors running NetWare, OS/2, Windows, and Linux. It was with great interest last week in New York while attending the System zEnterprise 196 server announcement–which IBM is

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• As I See It: Rolling the Rock

  July 26, 2010 Victor Rozek

  In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a huge stone up a hill. Each time he neared the top, the stone would escape his grasp and roll back down. Up, down, and back up. So it would go for all eternity: The frustration of meaningless work. The guy who designed the pyramids probably loved his job; the guys who stacked the rocks, probably not so much. Soul numbing, repetitive work has been humankind’s burden since frontal lobes became fashionable. Still, in every epoch a select few rise above the survival grind to leave impossible legacies: cave dwellers had their

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• IBM Reorganization Tucks Systems Under Software

  July 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I think we might have to start calling it International Business Services and Software. Last Monday, after the market closed and after Big Blue told Wall Street all about its business in the second quarter, Sam Palmisano, IBM’s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, sent out an email to all of the company’s employees telling them about some reorganization of the company. This reorg is different from other ones you have seen. Now, the Global Services behemoth that was split in two a few years back is one unit again, and the Systems and Technology Group is now under

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• Reader Feedback on Microsoft Azure: An AS/400 for Private and Public Clouds

  July 26, 2010 Hey, TPM

  I have quite a bit of trouble dropping the i into a cloud, where hardware virtualization and abstraction are considered to be key concepts. While the i’s partition capability is roughly equivalent to virtualization, Microsoft’s live migration feature (a substantial improvement over Quick Migration) allows nearly instantaneous move of virtual machine to another host; a capability that doesn’t seem to be practical within the highly integrated i environment. Live migration has prerequisites (including all servers must be on the same failover cluster, all CPUs must belong to the same processor family, SAN required) but the bottom line is that live

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• Vision Solutions Completes Double-Take Acquisition

  July 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Backed by the cash of private equity firm Thoma Bravo, high availability software maker Vision Solutions was able to take the lion’s share of the i HA space and get a good foundation for AIX HA through its acquisitions of rivals iTera and Lakeview Technology. And now, with the completed acquisition of long-time Windows clustering and replication partner Double-Take Software, Vision Solutions is expanding mightily into the Windows and Linux space and gearing up to do a whole lot of cross-selling into the IBM server base and expanding into other server bases. To get the deal done, Double-Take

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• New Site, Positive Vibe Mark OCEAN Tech Conference

  July 26, 2010 Dan Burger

  There are still several local midrange user groups that can organize and put on top-quality tech conferences. The OCEAN user group in Southern California continues to show it can get the job done in a big way. This year, the organization moved to a new location without skipping a beat. Attendees and vendors approved and OCEAN was able to do well enough to fund another year’s worth of monthly programs that keep members educated, informed, and enthusiastic about the IBM i platform and their careers. In regions where local user groups have not folded up their tents, there remains some

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• Wisconsin i Job Market Looking Gouda

  July 26, 2010 Dan Burger

  There’s no end to Wisconsin cheese jokes. Sorry to perpetuate the stereotype, but those folks who proudly wear blocks of cheese on their heads at televised sporting events are chiefly responsible. In California, we’re known for fruits and nuts. In Wisconsin, it’s cheese. Last week in The Four Hundred, I wrote about a few regional opinions that the IT job market was gaining momentum. This week the job outlook comes from Nick Simmons, an account executive at TEK Systems, one of the leading technology staffing and servicing companies in the United States. Simmons works from an office in

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