• Gabriel X64 Server Survey: Brother, Can You Spare Some Time?

  April 5, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our good buddy, Dan Olds, over at Gabriel Consulting Group is looking for customers with X64 server to take part in his annual server survey, and he could use the assistance of readers of The Four Hundred. Admit it. You have these Winders and Loonix boxes all over the place. They crop up like mold in an unclean bathroom, like mice in a barn, like clouds off the coast of Africa that come whipping across the Atlantic, causing untold damage. Well, Gabriel Consulting wants to find out exactly what you think of those old X86 and newer X64 servers

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• Power7: Upgrade or Sidestep, Start Planning Now

  March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power 750, 770, and 780 machines here with their shiny new eight-core Power7 processors and the future Power 720 entry and Power 795 high-end servers still on the horizon, now is a good time to start thinking about the upgrade options you face in 2010 if you are running out of gas on your existing iron and your company has budget to buy some new iron this year. If your company doesn’t have budget for upgrades, your life may not be any easier, but your options are simpler. Customers using Power5 or Power5+ machine, your options are simple

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• IBM Flexes Java Muscles on Power7 Iron

  March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The benchmark test results are starting to trickle out on IBM‘s Power7 servers running the i for Business operating system. Last week, I told you about the SAP data warehousing tests that Big Blue did to compare the new Power 750s to older Power-based systems running i 6.1. This week, let’s take a look at the SPECjbb2005 benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. The Power 750 did alright compared to its AIX and Linux brethren, best I can figure. The SPECjbb2005 benchmark is a tweaked version of the Transaction Processing Council‘s TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark

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• IBM Looks Back on 2000s, Sets Sites on Next Decade

  March 22, 2010 Alex Woodie

  As an IBM System i user, you may think you have a good idea who and what IBM is. After all, for over three decades the titan of American high-tech has consistently delivered and supported perhaps the most dependable business computing platform ever developed. But as Big Blue’s recent annual report clearly shows, the Power Systems platform is a vestige of the old IBM business model, and the new IBM, as evidenced from its “Smarter Planet” initiative, is all about software and services. IBM has undergone profound changes over the last 10 years. For example, in 2000, IBM made almost

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• As I See It: A Different Currency

  March 22, 2010 Victor Rozek

  It all seems like a fairy tale now, as if I am recalling events that took place long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. But believe it or not, there was a time when businesses actually competed for skilled IT professionals. In the early 1980s, when Silicon Valley was booming, job-hopping was a way of life. The need for IT skills was urgent, and those who had them were regularly besieged by recruiters. Enticed by higher salaries, signing bonuses, and ridiculous perks, defections were as common as keyboards. It was the time when workplaces morphed into “campuses” complete

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• Madoff’s RPG Coders Indicted in Ponzi Scam

  March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The two programmers who have been implicated in the massive $36 billion Madoff stock investing Ponzi scheme were indicted last week in New York in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. This is where the U.S. Attorneys Office originally brought charges against Bernie Madoff and now the coders who helped him defraud investors and fool regulators. As The Four Hundred reported last fall, Jerome O’Hara, 47, of Malverne, New York, and George Perez, 44, of East Brunswick, New Jersey, were arrested in connection with the Madoff Ponzi scheme on November 13, 2009. They were

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• China Leading the Enterprise Software Charge in 2010

  March 22, 2010 Dan Burger

  Where would you expect to find the highest growth rate in the enterprise software market? China, of course. And, so the latest report from Gartner that forecasts what you expected is not exactly stunning in its revelations. The annual enterprise software revenue growth rate for 2010 is pegged at 14.8 percent. That slides neatly into an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.6 percent during a span of 2008 to 2013. Gartner foresees no other enterprise software market that will top this CAGR percentage increase. As a recent Newsweek headline pointed out: It’s China’s World. We’re Just Living in

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• IBM Chops Prices on Racks, PDUs, and UPSes

  March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are looking to build out your data center, server room, or data closet and you are in need of new server racks, power distribution units, and uninterruptible power supplies, IBM has a deal for you. In announcement letter 310-135, Big Blue announced that it is chopping prices on selected racks and rack options between March 17 and June 30, the end of the second quarter. The lowered prices are only available to customers who buy directly from IBM’s online store. IBM has cut the price of its S2 standard 42U rack by 25 percent, to $1,207, and

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• Systems Engineer: The Best Job In The US of A

  March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Recessions always cause people to take stock of their lives and examine and then re-examine their career paths, and the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 is no exception. So what is the best, most safe job? According to the analysts at the Focus.com collective, that would be a systems engineer. No kidding. Really. Check out the rankings yourself here if you don’t believe me. To come to this conclusion, and to rank the best 35 jobs you might think about working toward in the next decade, Focus.com grabbed a big bale of statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor that diced

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• Note to IBM: Price Power 720s to Crush Xeon 5600 Systems

  March 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM‘s entry Power 720 Power7-based servers–probably in two-socket and four-socket configurations and likely using four-core and six-core variants of the chips with lots of the L3 cache disabled if my hunch is right–come to market in maybe April or May of this year, they will be facing some pretty stiff X64 competition from systems that use the new “Westmere-EP” Xeon 5600s that Intel announced last week. As expected, the Xeon 5600s come in four-core and six-core variants, and deliver roughly 40 to 50 percent more oomph than their quad-core predecessors, the “Nehalem-EP” Xeon 5500s that debuted last March

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