• HPC Sales Account for Most of 2007’s Server Sales Growth

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The appetite for high performance server clusters, vector supercomputers, and a few exotic hybrid machines continued to outpace the growth rate in the overall server space in 2007, according to market research just completed by IDC. The so-called HPC market, which most of us old hands still think of as supercomputers, has always been on the cutting edge of technology, but in recent years, it has been one of the key drivers of the server market as supercomputing has become more mainstream. In addition to the casing of HPC server sales, IDC has also worked with the supercomputer industry–all

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• Reader Feedback on IBM and IT Jungle’s Four Hundred Stack

  March 17, 2008 Hey, TPM

  I just wanted to thank you for the information you are providing in your newsletters. I look forward to them. I keep waiting for news of a native graphical connection from RPG to the browser and am glad to see that question asked of IBM managers from time to time. I understand from Kurt Rump at the Rochester Briefing Center that they have some research projects in Rochester that are looking into this. Hopefully that will eventually make it into the real world. My question to him was if they were splitting up the organization to address the needs large

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• TFH Flashback: Assault, Battery Not Included

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Note: This article was originally printed in the October 1994 edition of The Four Hundred, as IBM was readying PowerPC-based AS/400s and Hewlett-Packard already had power RISC servers in the midrange. Military forces, espionage agencies and computer companies have something in common: They like to use code names for projects, particularly secret projects. The monikers lend mystery, dignity, and importance to a risky yet often worthwhile undertaking. For instance, IBM called its AS/400 development project Silverlake, after the giant pond north of the Mayo Clinic in downtown Rochester, Minnesota. In retrospect, this was probably a better name to borrow

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• IBM Rejiggers System i and BladeCenter Deal One More Time

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If at first you don’t exceed your sales targets, try, try again. IBM last week once again tweaked a deal it announced in October 2007 that gave customers buying specific System i configurations a freebie BladeCenter H chassis and two HS21 blade servers, which use Intel‘s Xeon processors. In the original deal, customers in the United States who spent at least $150,000 and those in Canada who spent at least $220,000 on a new System i 520, 525, 550, 570, or 595 with at least two iSCSI PCI-X features installed (for linking to blade servers received the BladeCenter chassis)

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• AMR Says Companies Spend Big on SOA Software

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT vendors haven’t had something so exciting to salivate over and rub their hands about since the advent of Java more than a decade ago. Every new layer of abstraction in the information technology sprawl always leads to more flexibility, but it usually also comes at a price: more iron, and more software and services expenses. The question that IT vendors are wondering about now is will service oriented architecture, a means of leaving legacy applications and databases in place and then extending them with a new abstraction layer of services, be the money pot they all act like it

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• Mainline and BPO Partner to Offer Managed Hosting and Co-Location

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Mainline Information Systems, the Tallahassee, Florida, reseller of the entire portfolio of IBM servers and storage, said last week that it has partnered with BPO Management Services, a business process outsourcing service provider located in Anaheim, California, to offer managed hosting and co-location services to BPO’s customers. BPO Management Services is, as its name suggests, a company that provides outsourced back-office computing functions such as human resources, content management, and finance and accounting; the BP part of BPO presumably means shifting your company from what it is currently doing on your own platforms and re-engineering your processes to

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• IBM Readies Big Power6 Boxes, New X64 Servers

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may be mostly a services and software company, but most of the services and software it sells are still, despite all the changes in the IT industry in the past three decades, driven by its own server platforms and the operating systems that IBM creates for them. So in that regard, if you think of services as the extra goodies you used to get when you spent 10 or 100 times as much for a server than you do today and if you think of software as the stuff that used to come with the hardware more or less

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• System i Security: Lots of Room for Improvement

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  System i security software supplier PowerTech hosted its first iNSIGHT 2008 security and compliance conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and one of the main events at the show was the fifth annual State of System i Security report that the company put together to give people an understanding of the real security issues that real AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops are coping with in their production environments. As my first grade teacher explained in my report cards, there is lots of room for improvement and you just need to apply yourself. The data behind the 2008

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• Server Virtualization and Consolidation Require More Resiliency

  March 10, 2008 Bill Hammond

  Server consolidation will be a top priority for many IT departments in the coming year. In a recent research study conducted by Gartner, 61 percent of the companies polled were already paring their server count, and 28 percent were planning to do so in the near future. The back story on consolidation is interesting. Life often smacks of irony and the renewed interest in centralization is certainly ironic for those of us who know the history of mainframes and minicomputers. Starting with IBM’s 1400 series machines in 1960, mainstream computing topologies were centralized. When Datapoint launched the minicomputer it

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• Thermometer Money: Changing a Business Partner Paradigm

  March 10, 2008 Doug Mewmaw

  Living in Chicago, the cold hard winter weather tends to take its toll on my family. Recently my family was really sick with all of us experiencing a high temperature. During this recent bout with the flu, I started to chuckle as I was in line at our local Walgreen’s buying a thermometer. Why was I laughing? Because this would be the fifth thermometer I have purchased in the last five years! For some reason, my family can’t seem to have the discipline to put the thermometer back in the medicine cabinet. As someone that is responsible for the family

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