• IBM and COMMON Call the Cops

  May 10, 2010 Dan Burger

  As far as I know, this is the first time in the 50-year history of COMMON that the organization, with IBM backing them up all the way, had to call the cops. The funny thing was that during the COMMON Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida, it was the West Haven, Connecticut Police Department that got the call. No guns were drawn. No sirens screamed. But when it was all over, there were congratulations for what the WHPD has accomplished using technology to help preserve the peace and add officer safety. Behind the thin blue line in this case

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• Better Than a Sharp Stick in the i

  May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A business computer, no matter its architecture or applications, is really just a place to have a conversation between a buyer and a seller of a good or a service and the means to record that conversation for posterity. And the tax man. It is amazing to me, some days, that I spend my days as a second or third order derivative of that conversation. I talk about the people who build the platforms that support those transactions, who are themselves once removed from the transactions. It’s all talking about talking about talking. And the funny thing is, all this

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• Power7 Blades: The i/DB2 Combo Versus AIX/Oracle

  May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Major Correction: In this story, I made two errors. The biggie is that I thought the price to activate either i 6.1 or i 7.1 per core on the new Power Systems 701 blade server was $2,250 a pop plus $250 per user, as it is on the Power Systems 700 blade, since both are single-socket blades. Nope. The PS701 blade has the same ridiculous price as the two-socket PS702 blade. So my analysis below is for the PS701 is not correct. I also thought, through vaguary on IBM’s Web site, that the AIX licenses for the Power7 blades were

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• EMC Keeps i/OS Business Moving Forward with New IBM Agreement

  May 3, 2010 Alex Woodie

  Co-opetition is alive and well in the world of high-end System i storage, thanks to a renewal of the technology agreement between EMC and IBM. Last week, the two technology titans agreed to a five-year extension of their landmark 2006 agreement, which promises EMC access to low-level protocols needed to support the System i’s proprietary storage architecture with its line of Symmetrix and Clariion SAN arrays as well as its virtual tape libraries and hardware-based replication offerings. As the only independent provider of external direct access storage devices (DASD) for System i servers, EMC holds a unique spot in

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• As I See It: Life Logging

  May 3, 2010 Victor Rozek

  For all its remarkable properties, the brain is fallible and forgetful. Its formidable powers decline with age. Memories fade, knowledge retention is fleeting, and recall is unreliable. Interpretation of distant events is likely to be incomplete or inaccurate. Painful memories dwarf happy ones. Events are reduced to impressions. Time is compressed. Many people cannot even remember vast portions of their past, as if decades were torn from the fabric of their lives. Memory drifts, and over time the splendid minutia of our lives is forever lost. While that may be the cheerless reality for most of us, technology is now

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• Global Perspective Requires CIO to Think in Transitional Terms

  May 3, 2010 Dan Burger

  Warren Fristensky figures he’s built about a dozen data centers in his 30-year career. He doesn’t see that ever happening again. “I would not build a data center today,” he says. “I would go to someone to provision it and get into a managed services environment that would evolve into a cloud environment over time.” After three decades in IT, Fristensky has done a fair amount of evolving himself. He’s currently CIO at John Wiley & Sons, a global publishing company that has a long and happy relationship with the IBM i. Wiley is a collection of niche publishing operations.

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• Reader Feedback on RPG Open Access Is No Panacea and As I See It: Depriving the Senses

  May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you might have expected, IBM‘s decision to open up the RPG compiler and runtime to allow others to create custom data streams to other applications and devices has got a lot of people thinking and even more of them talking. We told you all about Rational Open Access, RPG Edition two weeks ago, and then BCD Software and LANSA piped up with their opinion on ROA in last week’s issue. There’s been a lot of back and forth at the water cooler, on the newsgroups, and in the press about this, and it won’t subside any

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• The U.S. Lost Nearly a Quarter Million Tech Jobs in 2009

  May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a new report from the TechAmerica Foundation, a think tank based on the U.S. capital dedicated to the high tech industry, that industry shed 245,600 tech jobs last year thanks to the economic meltdown. That was a 4 percent decline in the high-tech workforce, from 6.11 million to 5.85 million employees across all companies physically located in America. The high-tech manufacturing sector shed the most jobs, cutting 112,600 workers, down 8.1 percent, to 1.28 million employees in total. Engineering and tech services firms shed 59,100 workers, to 1.59 million, a decline of 3.6 percent, while communications services

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• IBM Delivers Deskside HMC Console for PowerVM Management

  May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No matter which bare-metal server virtualization hypervisor you choose, you need to have an out-of-band management console to configure and tweak the hypervisor. This, as OS/400 and i shops are well aware, has been the case since the Power5 machines were launched many years ago, and it is equally true of VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor and its vCenter manager, Citrix Systems‘ Xen Server and its XenCenter console, or Microsoft‘s Hyper-V and its Systems Center with virtualization plug ins. To virtualize one machine (or many) requires a physical machine outside of the loop. Which is a pain, of

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• IBM Boosts Dividend and Share Buybacks, What About i Marketing?

  May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The crack habit that is buying back its own shares to artificially prop up earnings per share numbers to appease Wall Street continued again last week as IBM‘s board of directors allocated another $8 billion in cash for this purpose. In an effort to get investors to pump up the stock, Big Blue also boosted its quarterly dividend by 10 cents to 65 cents per share. In the first quarter, IBM blew $4 billion on share buybacks and another $700 million on dividends, so now its quarterly dividend nut will be 18 percent larger, at $826 million, or $3.3

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