In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through the pricing of configured systems in the new Power7+ entry models that were announced on February 5. There are some interesting and useful comments on the data I put together showing the cost and performance of configured Power 710+, 720+, 730+, and 740+ boxes, which you can read about here. I only looked at hardware pricing in last week’s issue, and this week I want to give you a sense of what the new machines cost when you load up IBM i and Software Maintenance tech

A recent survey by COBOL tool provider Micro Focus found a decided lack of enthusiasm for COBOL at colleges and universities, with a large percentage of students viewing COBOL as un-cool, and even dead. COBOL’s little brother, RPG, faces a similar fate, as young IT students favor modern languages, like Java and C++, over what they think of as ridiculously boring business technologies used to run ancient IBM machines.

Just because they think that doesn’t make it right. But unless IBM i leaders get real about the COBOL and RPG skills shortage, it could mean more businesses will migrate off

Many of us who follow the IBM systems business have been predicting this day might come for many years and then talking ourselves into thinking it would not happen. But the day finally came on March 5. That was when the top brass of Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group held a meeting with employees of the Rochester, Minnesota, facility that gave birth to the System/3 in 1969 and successor technologies that culminated in the Power Systems and now PureSystems lines, telling them that they would no longer be making commercial systems at the legendary facility.

It is not clear

Most of what I know about Mark Zuckerberg I learned from Aaron Sorkin. Which is to say I’ve seen a dramatized version of his life where selected events have been massaged, embellished, or possibly invented for theatrical effect. But I don’t much care. Social Network was entertaining, and not being a Facebook user or stockholder, I have nothing invested in Zuckerberg. I don’t care if he’s awkward with women. I don’t care if he stabs friends in the back or screws business associates. And I don’t much care that he’s rich or lonely or the most inventive geek since Mr.

There is more than one perspective on H-1B visas that connect foreign IT specialists with jobs in United States. However, the biggest stick is not carried by those who would argue that what counts most is filling U.S. jobs with U.S. citizens. Since the economy was sawed off at the knees, experienced business computing professionals have been discarded and less expensive substitutes have been sought as part of the corporate globalization rules of the game.

It is bad now and it could get worse.

One of the reasons it looks threatening goes by the name of the Immigration Innovation Act

The thing about the four-core processors in the 710+ and 720+ is that they are P05 software group machines. To keep them “small” IBM has fixed them so that they don’t support ANY external disk apart from SAN-attach and no external I/O towers either. This is clearly deliberate because–as we both know–most customers with a traditional IBM i workload don’t need more than four cores but they surely do need more disk space than you can squeeze into a single system chassis and more performance, too. Unless you go to SSDs, of course. 🙂

And there’s another kick in the

If Oracle wants to take on IBM and others down in the midrange peddling database appliance servers–well, when you get right down to it, that is what an IBM i platform is–it has to do more than try to sell big and expensive Exadata parallel and flash-enhanced clusters. That is why Big Larry crafted the Oracle Database Appliance 18 months ago. Last week, Oracle put out an improved design with beefed up X86 processors and significantly expanded storage.

And if IBM is paying attention, it will offer a similar configuration running IBM i designed specifically to protect its base of

Like most people in the IBM midrange community, when taking the time to think about updating skills and learning new technologies your thought process automatically shifts into “when do I have time for that?” mode. It may take some mental wrestling, but the conclusion should be there’s no better time than the present. And if one, two, or three days devoted to education is unattainable, then the hole you’re digging may someday be too deep to climb out of.

In case you were wondering, there still are companies that invest in IT training and education. They recognize the advantages that

Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group was working on clouds many, many years ago, and because there were no open source alternatives out there, it came up with its own SmartCloud Entry cloud controller, a program that can wrestle with X86 and Power servers and their hypervisors and boss them around as they move workloads around a pool of servers. But now that OpenStack, an open source cloud controller created initially by NASA and Rackspace Hosting more than two years ago is mature, IBM has decided it is time to put that tool at the heart of its future

It’s always nice to have something to look forward to. In the U.S., the recession we have been stuck in for what seems like forever has left us with a seemingly endless view of bad news including continued high unemployment rates, a failing housing market, skyrocketing gas prices, and a looming fear of the fiscal cliff among the many issues we had staring us in the face.

But out on the horizon, the experts at IDC see a glimmer of change in our not-too-distant future. In its recently released United States Black Book 4Q12, IDC updated its forecasts for