You were probably wondering like I was last year why IBM only announced Power Systems blade servers using the Power7 processors with single-sockets instead of also offering more dense configurations with two sockets per blade. Big Blue never explained this, but now, one day shy of a year later, the company has put two-socket blade servers into the field. The company has also cranked the clocks a little bit on the Power7 processors used in the four-socket Power 750 midrange workhorse servers.

According to Steve Silbey, who is director of product management for the Power Systems line at IBM, the

As part of the Power Systems server upgrades last week, which The Four Hundred discusses elsewhere in this issue, IBM cut prices on disk drive features used on the platforms. Memory features used on PS7XX blade servers and conversions of memory cards from the DDR2 type used in Power 570 and 595 servers, which are based on Power6 chips, to features used in Power 770 and 795 machines, which are based on Power7 chips and use DDR3 memory, were also reduced.

In announcement letter 311-047, IBM cut the price on the 139.5 GB disk features used on various Power

Logicalis launched its new Power7-based cloud offering last month, providing IBM Power Systems shops and ISVs another avenue for running IBM i and AIX applications. The vendor, which has its US headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan, says the usage-based pricing of its new Enterprise Power Cloud platform will help customers scale-up processing power without large capital expenditures.

Logicalis Group is a large reseller of Power, X64, and storage gear from IBM that’s based in the U.K. and brings in more than $1 billion in revenue each year. While the company, which is a unit of the South African company Datatec

This is a story about online retailing giant Amazon and its tactful handling of a product problem. The product in this story is the Kindle 3 e-book reader. Kindle is the emblematic delivery device for a growing range of goods and services, Amazon’s direct connection to somewhere between five and 10 million customers. So, when the latest Kindle began failing in mysterious ways, there was a lot more at risk than a batch of gadgets. At stake was Amazon’s relationship to some of its best customers; it has emerged stronger than ever. Let’s all learn a little from Amazon.

The results of corporate-funded surveys are as predictable as finding donut crumbs in the conference room after RPG development team meeting. These surveys are designed to give the appearance of independent authority, but they rarely mask the built-in bias. In this case, I think Oracle is propping up its marketing efforts with a survey report that reveals what we already agree with while adding support for exactly what it wants to sell. If you have software upgrade worries, read this survey warily.

Just last week, Oracle was chirping about a survey of more than 400 enterprise application managers that confirms

Big Blue is putting the Hypervisor Mangling Controller, er the Hardware Management Console for managing the PowerVM hypervisor for Power Systems out to pasture. The device, which was launched with the Power5-based servers way back in 2004, is a glorified and expensive PC or rack server that runs Linux and the microcode that controls PowerVM and other aspects of the hardware system.

The idea with the HMC is to get the management of the hypervisor off the machines that it manages. Earlier incarnations of logical partitioning for OS/400 were what is called a type 2 hypervisor, or a hosted one,

Your April 11 article, As I See It: Shared Sacrifice, is mind boggling.

I’d love to send excerpts to my congressional delegation and governor. I don’t want to plagiarize, so what is the appropriate way to quote your article quoting others?

By the way, CVS is one of the few large corporations headquartered here in Rhode Island.

–Ed

Hi Ed,

The fair use provisions of the copyright law say you can quote a few items, but why not just email your politicians a paragraph of your own and then a link to Victor’s story?

–TPM

Victor:

I always enjoy

IBM and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat have come together to provide Enterprise Linux 6 on IBM’s Power Systems sold by Big Blue and with first- and second-level support provided by Big Blue.

That’s nothing new, of course. IBM has been a big OEM partner of Red Hat’s for years, and my back-of-the-envelope math is that RHEL drives somewhere on the order of $1.4 billion of IBM server hardware sales a year these days across X64, Power, and mainframe platforms.

What is new in announcement letter 211-114 is that IBM and Red Hat have cooked up a per-server license price

The relationship between IBM and the independent software vendors is built on mutual success. But where might that lead in terms of overall success and the health of the platform? It can mean a lot. As a case in point, let’s take a look at New Generation Software, maker of business intelligence software for IBM i shops.

Toward the end of 2010 NGS stepped up the IBM business partner ladder from the Advanced Partner rung to the Premier Partner position, a significant change in status.

IBM has a point system that allows ISVs, for example, to progress in what

Last week, IBM announced its first public cloud for running X64 applications, the Smart Business Cloud, or SmartCloud for short. The company also laid out its plans for fluffing up portions of the SmartCloud that would be based on Power Systems and support AIX or Linux applications and–eventually–IBM i workloads.

What Big Blue didn’t say as part of its announcements is that it had created a special promotion giving prospective customers slices of that cloud to play with for free.

In announcement letter 311-048, IBM launched the Smart Business Cloud Spring 2011 promotion, offering customers a piece of the