• IBM’s DB2 Pure Scale–Not Quite iDatabase V1

  October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, in the wake of the launch of the Exadata V2 database machine from Oracle and Sun Microsystems, I got all excited about the possibilities that IBM might remember that it had similar database clustering technology back in 1996 for the AS/400 and that it could take today’s Power Systems and build a powerful, yet relatively inexpensive, database cluster for i shops, something I dubbed iDatabase V1. Imagine my excitement when I found out early last week, ahead of IBM’s official announcement last Friday, of something Big Blue is calling DB2 PureScale, which is a

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• Early Views on iManifest: ISV Expectations, Public Misconceptions

  October 12, 2009 Dan Burger

  The results of those with knowledge and a little money who act are worth far more than the results of those with knowledge and much money who remain idle. I think that’s an appropriate way to describe the current state of the iManifest U.S. initiative. The match has been struck. It just needs a little gasoline to light the bonfire. There are more than a few who believe, and have spoken out, that fighting for the IBM i platform is somehow akin to fighting a house fire with a squirt gun. It’s viewed as impeding progress and is, therefore,

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• News Flash: IT to Drive Economic Recovery

  October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As long-time readers of The Four Hundred, you know that I like to take a look at how the different server ecosystems stack up and how they have changed over time. As part of some cheerleading about the IT industry in general as the world tries to put together an economic recovery and to help tout its important (but still not completely dominant) position in the general IT ecosystem, Microsoft commissioned the box counters at IDC to case the IT ecosystems of 52 countries and reckon the impact of Microsoft’s products on those ecosystems. The generic IT data put

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• As I See It: The Greening of IT

  October 12, 2009 Victor Rozek

  One of the persistent annoyances of the Do-Unto-Others-While-You-Still-Can era is polluters pretending that global warming has nothing to do with them. Not coincidentally, the loudest deniers are also pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at record levels, while their lobbyists pump record amounts of cash into congressional pockets. Meanwhile, as the world heats, hucksters would have us believe that 20 mile-per-gallon SUVs are planet-friendly, and dirty coal can produce clean energy. The contradictions are tolerated, in part, because pollution contributes to the GDP by employing people twice: Once when it’s created, and again when it’s cleaned up. To paraphrase Upton

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• The Power Systems Catalog Gets Skinnier

  October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As has been happening for the past several months, IBM has once again been warning customers that features for its Power Systems and their System i and System p predecessors are going to be removed from the Big Blue product catalog. Last week the axe fell on a bunch of features, and the company also mothballed a bunch of System x servers and features that are probably important to i shops. IBM also put some Ultrium tape cartridges back into the catalog after withdrawing them in May. According to announcement letter 909-217, January 4, 2010, will be the last

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• Reader Feedback on Moore’s Law and the Performance Wall

  October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, in talking about the future Power7-based servers from IBM, as I have been doing for the past several weeks, I brought up the idea that IT managers and programmers had better start thinking about how multicore and multithreaded chips with a lot more cores and a lot more threads might impact their applications. I received a thoughtful letter from a long-time i programmer, which gave me–and therefore you–some food for thought. Hey, TPM: The whole threads thing concerning RPG is bogus. Before one starts questioning RPG’s performance with multi-threading, one should ask what the need for

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• Ballmer Dishes on Big Blue; Why Should Ellison Have All the Fun?

  October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, it was Oracle‘s chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, explaining how he wanted to buy Sun Microsystems to be the platform company of the 21st century as IBM was back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. And now we have Microsoft‘s CEO, Steve Ballmer, bashing Big Blue for its profit-obsessed business strategy. Yes, we have woken up, once again, in BizarroWorld. In an interview with the New York Times, Ballmer basically called IBM a chicken, one that ditches businesses that it helped create–networking, memory chips, disk drives, PCs, printers–in an obsessive desire to squeeze profits

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• IBM Deals on Blade Chassis, Tivoli Provisioning Manager

  October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are looking to move from rack servers to blade servers, or to automate the provisioning and patching of your servers, IBM has some deals for you. In the first deal, which is described in announcement letter 309-568, Big Blue is giving customers who have non-IBM blade servers a free BladeCenter S or BladeCenter H chassis for every non-IBM chassis they throw out, and customers wanting to move from non-IBM rack servers to BladeCenter blade servers can get a free BladeCenter S or H chassis for every nine rack servers they unplug. The BladeCenter S chassis, which is

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• Notes/Domino 8.5.1 Dances with the iPhone

  October 12, 2009 Dan Burger

  As it paves the road to full-time connectivity for the workforce, IBM‘s Lotus division last week rolled out the latest editions to its unified communications and collaboration tool box. Grabbing the headlines is . . . the Apple iPhone. Ooops! This was an IBM announcement, wasn’t it? Sorry, the iPhone gets top billing wherever it goes. So the news is that Domino 8.5.1 and the Lotus Notes Traveler mobile device now have native support for the iPhone. For Notes folks, that means your email, your calendar events, and your contacts–those things most dear to you–will also be near to

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• Much Ado About IBM’s Mainframe Monopoly; Once Again, the i Is Overlooked

  October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The business and trade press was all beside itself late last week as it came to light that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened up an investigation of IBM‘s monopolistic practices with regard to the mainframe market. While it is always a welcome sight to see the DoJ at least interested in making sure monopoly power is not abused, it is a little late for someone interested in fostering an alternative mainframe market. (Well, maybe.) And as usual, no one is thinking about the even tighter grip that Big Blue has on an even larger–and more economically powerless–group

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