• Survival of the Fittest: Ensuring IT Is Providing You with an Innovative Edge

  June 2, 2008 Paul Hollingsworth

  Seemingly it’s the old, old problem of how to have your cake and eat it. Chief information officers are being asked to ensure that IT is continuing to function efficiently, to comply with legislation and regulation, and to be secure against an ever-wider range of threats. They’re also expected to perform the usual upgrades, renewals and maintenance on legacy infrastructures, and to “manage” (as in maintain or reduce) IT budgets. But as if doing all of this were not enough, IT is now required to “innovate” to support businesses that are being fundamentally re-engineered for the new economy. All of

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• Mainline Buys Systems Integrator CompServ

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, server reseller Mainline Information Systems, of Tallahassee, Florida, acquired fellow reseller Cornerstone Systems, of Irvine, California, bringing together two of IBM‘s largest server resellers and two companies with particular expertise in mainframes and Power-based servers. Last week, Mainline reached across its home state of Florida and snapped up reseller and systems integrator CompServ. CompServ, which is located in the Tampa suburb called Clearwater and which was founded in 1998, is an IBM reseller that pushes i5/OS, AIX, and Linux platforms as well as IBM’s storage products, but which does not, like Mainline or

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• Interesting Mods and Add-Ons for Office Blade Servers

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back in the day, I think maybe when I was a baby–I mean that literally–the idea of office computers had as much to do with office as it did with computer. Despite the fact that they included a whole lot of electromechanical whooziwhatits and thingamabobs, vendors like IBM tried to create computers and workstations (that used to be where you sat to use the computer, not at a machine) that blended in with the colorful and trendy offices of the time. With the advent of rack-based server computing, small and medium businesses could not deploy lots of gear in

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• Tape Backup: Obviously, a Whole Lot Greener than Disk Backup

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some technologies are very hard to kill. Long before there was disk, there was tape, and the ridiculously cheap disk capacity that is available has allowed many companies to do their archiving on disk-based archiving systems that look like tape to servers even if they are not. But using disk-based archiving comes at a very high operational cost. Disks need to spin to be useful, but once a tape has data archived on it, it pretty much stops using power until it is specifically required to get a bit of data for an application or to archive another data set.

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• IBS Issues New Shares to Raise Capital, Reorganizes Operations

  June 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Swedish ERP software provider International Business Systems, a long time supporter of the OS/400 and i5/OS platform, has announced that it is working with investors to issue new shares in the company as a means of building up a pile of cash that will fuel its ongoing reorganization efforts and gird its loins to do battle globally against its competitors in the midrange market. Back at the end of April, IBS said in an announcement in Europe that it was proposing to raise as much as 400 million Swedish krona (around $68 million at exchange rates last week) through

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• It’s Training and Education Time: OCEAN Conference Set for June 30

  June 2, 2008 Dan Burger

  Career accomplishments don’t just roll off the turnip truck while you’re standing by the side of the road waiting for promotions and pay raises. People who work hard and work smart are usually the ones being rewarded. In most cases, those that succeed professionally actively seek education and training opportunities. In Southern California, one of those opportunities is right around the corner. At the end of June, the OCEAN User Group of Southern California hosts its annual technical conference featuring a full day of sessions specific to the new IBM Power Systems, System i, iSeries, and AS/400 business computing environment.

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• The Way IBM Sees New Versus Prior i Platforms

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of any major server launch, IBM‘s top marketeers have usually put together two sets of comparisons for IBM’s own sales reps and its business partner resellers. One set of comparisons looks at the new product line and compares and contrasts it with the immediately prior product line, usually highlighting scalability increases or price/performance improvements for given configurations. In the AS/400 family, IBM used to make a lot more comparisons to Unix and other proprietary platforms, too, which helped customers remain confident that the platform was competitive. The latter type of competitive platform comparisons are not usually

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• The Server Biz Enjoys the X64 Upgrade Cycle in Q1

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a lot of vintage server iron out there in the world, and most of it could only be classified as energy efficient if the characterization was being done by a pathological liar. The same holds true for a lot of RISC/Unix iron. And with energy costs rising, companies wanting to scale their applications without paying for new data centers, and the desire to have systems that can better exploit virtualization, server makers enjoyed a pretty good first quarter for shipments and sales from January through March, according to statistics compiled by Gartner. In the first quarter of

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• Evans Data Ranks Integrated Development Environments

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Farmers have their tractors. Managers have their PowerPoint and Excel programs. Plumbers have their wrenches and torches. And programmers have something given the utterly inelegant name of the integrated development environment, which just goes to show you that the marketing people get to name things far too often. Call it what you will, but the IDE is the tool that most of the professional programmers in the world–and there are millions and millions of them–stare at each day as they craft the applications that let the rest of us do our work. Picking the right IDE is not an easy

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• As I See It: The Programmer as Artist

  May 27, 2008 Victor Rozek

  It has been variously described as art, science, a teachable skill, a creative process, and an exercise in logic. And because it can boast of having all those properties, the nature of programming remains as elusive as good government. The challenge in pinning down the essence of programming is that no single descriptor is exact or sufficient. Almost anything you can say about it elicits a “yes, but. . .” reaction. Yes, programming has artistic elements, but how artistic is an accounting program? Yes, IT began as Computer Science, and during the formative years programmers wore lab coats and coded

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