• With No Power6 QCMs, IBM Waits for Power7

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Prior to the launch–or rather, relaunch–of the Power6+ processors in selected entry and midrange Power Systems iron at the end of April, I was suggesting that given the competitive pressure that was being brought to bear by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices with their latest X64 chips, now might be a good time to take a play out of the summer 2006 System p playbook and create quad-core modules (QCMs) for using the Power6+ chips and thereby take the fight to Intel and AMD. The QCMs, you will remember, were based on IBM’s dual-core Power5+ processors, and they put two

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• Gartner Confirms Server Sales Were Awful in Q1

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were hoping that the market researchers at Gartner would somehow have a rosier opinion of how the server market did in the first quarter of 2009–or would somehow forecast that the year would get better than its rival IDC said it would do in last week’s issue–well, you can just forget it. Gartner has been tracking the server racket for longer than IDC, and said the first quarter was the worst one in the history of the business. By Gartner’s math, the server business took a 24 percent haymaker to the cut, dropping revenues to $10.1 billion,

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• Manufacturers to ERP Vendors: Give Us More Functionality

  June 8, 2009 Dan Burger

  When it comes to making ERP software decisions, the choices are: increase the functionality, lower the cost, and improve the integration with applications and data that reside outside the ERP system. You can hope for all three, but your luck probably won’t be that good. Given one choice, the winner is functionality. That’s part of what I learned from the Aberdeen ERP in Manufacturing 2009 report that I peeked at in advance of its release on June 30. In light of the current emphasis on cost cutting and downsizing, it might seem that the most popular choice would be cutting

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• As I See It: Smarten Up

  June 8, 2009 Victor Rozek

  IBM is worried about the world. Like a parent with an underachieving child, IBM thinks it’s time to sit the world down and have a serious conversation. So listen up world, the computer maker wants you to get smarter, because apparently you’re none too bright at the moment. In contrast to the fried philosopher Timothy Leary, however, who memorably urged the world to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” the great thinkers at IBM have come up with a slightly less catchy dictum. They’re calling on the world to get “instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent.” Keep still my beating heart.

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• IBM Helps Customers Understand the Cost of Paper

  June 8, 2009 Alex Woodie

  The average office worker uses about 40 pieces of paper per day, or 10,000 sheets per year, according to IBM. Instead of cutting down those trees and shuffling all that paper, many organizations would be better off, operationally and ecologically, migrating their paper-based processes to electronic content management (ECM) solutions. IBM announced two new service engagements last week aimed at helping users understand how to move to ECM. There are numerous disadvantages to relying on paper, according to IBM, not the least of which is the impact paper has on the environment. Long lead times are often required to

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• More Power Systems Price Changes and Tweaks

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  OK, IBM, this is getting to be a habit. Last week, IBM once again tweaked the pricing on a bunch of upgrade features for its Power Systems lineup, once again cutting prices pretty dramatically. The price changes, which went into effect on June 2, are shown in the table below: From To List Price Price Machine Feature Machine Feature Description Old New Change 9119 7667 9119 4754 2.1 GHz Power5+ to 4.2 GHz Power6 $16,550 $16,500 -0.3% 9119 7667 9119 4755 2.1 GHz Power5+ to 5 GHz GHz Power6 $24,735 $19,485 -21.2% 9119 7925 9119 4754 p5 595 book

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• Write-Downs Hammer Agilysys Financials in Fiscal Q4

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software developer and hardware reseller Agilysys is trying to steer its enterprise in the same choppy economic seas as the rest of us, and despite an uptick in sales for its key InfoGenesis product, the company still was unable to stay in the black in its fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 ended in March. For the quarter, which spanned the worst part of the economic meltdown and the consequent slamming down of IT spending, sales of hardware and software by Agilysys, which is a key peddler of Power Systems i products, fell by 27.1 percent to $118.2 million. However,

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• Arrow Revises Its Fiscal Q2 Outlook Downward

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the economy is booming, distributing electronic components and IT products can be a good, if challenging, business. But the economic downturn is still putting a damper on IT spending, and that has compelled master distributor Arrow Electronics to revise its expectations for its fiscal second quarter ending July 4 downward. As The Four Hundred reported two weeks ago, both Arrow and its main rival in IT distribution, Avnet, managed to do as well as could be expected considering the steep drop off in server spending since last summer. While the economy in the United States is showing

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• Dataram Pushes Entry and Midrange Power System Memory

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of its acquisition of Micro Memory Bank, a maker of memory modules for various servers including IBM‘s Power Systems and predecessor System i and System p servers, Dataram is ramping up its marketing efforts to sell memory modules to cash-conserving shops that want to move to Power6 iron or add some memory to existing machines to boost performance. As most of you know, virtualized servers are more times than not memory or I/O bound, not CPU bound, and machines supporting online transaction processing workloads as well as a bunch of other infrastructure apps (as i platforms

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• Big Blue Names Eight New IBM Fellows

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM last week announced eight new elite researchers who have been given the elite designation IBM Fellow. A number of them have worked on the technologies underpinning the systems you are currently using or most likely will at some point in the near future. Perhaps the most significant new fellow is Hung Le, who works as a chip designer in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, specifically at its Austin, Texas, Power Systems labs. Le has had a hand in a lot of different System z and Power processor designs, starting with the Power3 chip that was announced for IBM’s RS/6000

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