• Tivoli Provisioning Manager Deal Chops Prices in Half

  February 22, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are looking to automate your provisioning operating systems on your servers, IBM has a deal for you. Well, yet another deal, I should say. Just ahead of the Power7 systems launch a few weeks back, in announcement letter 310-113, IBM announced that it was slashing the price in half of its Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.1 software for slapping operating systems onto bare-metal servers and logical partitions. The deal is available in the United States and Canada and only through IBM’s Passport Advantage online store, and expires on March 31. The deal applies to the Tivoli

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• IBM Fired Up About Power7-Based Smarter Systems

  February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You are probably wondering why IBM started the Power7 systems rollout in the middle of the line instead of rolling the line out at once as it did in days gone by with the AS/400 and RS/6000 machinery. It is really simple. IBM has dominant market share in the high-end of the midrange lineup represented for the past six years by the 570-class machines–iSeries, pSeries, System i, System p, and Power Systems all–and the company wants to keep it that way. According to Ross Mauri, general manager of the Power Systems division within IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, the 570-class

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• A Little Insight Into the Rest of the Power7 Lineup

  February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the rollout of the first wave of Power7-based Power Systems servers last week, IBM provided a little insight–and mind you, I did not say a lot of insight–about what the future entry and high-end products would look like. As usual, Big Blue issued some statements of direction concerning these bookends of the Power Systems lineup, and as usual, they didn’t really say enough to help customers make plans. If you are expecting IBM to say a lot more about the high-end of the product line than it already has, you did get a few more morsels of

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• Power7: Yields Are Good, Midrange Systems A Go

  February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever a new chip comes to market, there’s always a question about how many good chips are coming off the wafer baker lines–what is known in the chip industry as the yield. Whenever a company shifts its chip making processes at the same time as the overall design changes radically, this is a bit nerve wracking. But apparently not with the eight-core Power7 chips that are the brains in the new Power 7XX line of servers from IBM. At the launch event for the four new Power7 systems last week in New York, which was held on the 36th

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Lotus Reposition

  February 15, 2010 Hesh Wiener

  One of the products that helps drive i/OS users forward is the Lotus Domino family of communications servers. IBM has been rolling out quite few new or enriched features lately, and argues that the new technologies, which cost more, pay their way by improving productivity. But there’s catch: IBM’s most advanced Domino features can require new operating systems. Basically, the latest Lotus announcement can mean that your operating system, which could have run any version of Domino a year ago might not support the Domino you want a year from now. If your system runs OS/400 V5R3, which is pretty

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• Pay Increase? You’re Getting a Pay Increase?

  February 15, 2010 Dan Burger

  On the whole, workers in the United States saw their paychecks shrivel last year. Weekly earnings fell 1.6 percent. Maybe in that light, a projected increase in IT salaries of 1.8 percent in 2010 is not so bad. That’s the “things could be worse” perspective anyway. Welcome to “Austerity 2010,” where even meager wage increases have to be compared with worst-case scenarios that include declines in personal income and loss of employment. The news of this little bump in pay comes from a new report released by Computer Economics, a research and advisory service that specializes in strategic and

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• Existing Power Systems Get a Few Storage Tweaks

  February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The four new models of the Power Systems lineup based on the Power7 processors were not the only thing that IBM cooked up in the engineering labs. As usual, the drumbeat of change continues a-pace for the various subsystems that are used with the new as well as existing systems, and in this case, some storage features have been upgraded. First up is a new DAT320 tape drive for archiving data and distributing software that is intended for entry and midrange boxes. Feature 5661, as the device is warmly known, slides into selected Power 520 and Power 550 servers as

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• VOIP and Other Apps Dropped From i/OS Catalog

  February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM always announces its partnerships for bringing new kinds of applications to the i/OS platform with much fanfare, and being optimistic, we at The Four Hundred cover these launches with attention and hope. Sometimes, IBM’s love affair with ISV wares as well as with its own code seems to end abruptly. So it seems to be with some software withdrawals that happened as part of last week’s rollout of the initial Power7-based servers. In announcement letter 910-002, IBM told i/OS shops that effective May 31, it would stop selling the 3Com Telephony software for the System i platform (5639-3CM)

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• An Early IBM NENR Appliance Catches the WORM

  February 15, 2010 Alex Woodie

  IBM this month began shipping a new information archiving appliance that offers non-erasable, non-rewritable (NENR) storage capabilities. Based on IBM’s DR550 storage array, the Information Archive version 1.1 can ingest data via Network File System (NFS), which is supported by the System i and every other server, and is being positioned as an ideal archive solution for medium sized companies with legal or regulatory information retention obligations. A raft of new regulations last decade drove organizations to adopt stricter data protection measures. About five years ago, there was a big rush to so-called Write Once, Read Many (WORM) technologies, which

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• IBM Launches Servers For Truth Campaign

  February 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In its ongoing and escalating campaign against Oracle and in anticipation of a lot of mudslinging (or worse) as the Power7-based machines start coming to market, IBM has launched a spoof of political campaign advertising promoting the new Power Systems and slapping Oracle for cheating on benchmarks tests. The site, which is on Facebook here and which has a YouTube video there, is about as amusing as these things tend to be. (What can you expect from a couple of marketeering people, a modest artistic budget, and a few bottles of wine?) IBM is once again trying out viral

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