Back in July, I started what will eventually be a series of stories on what IBM should be doing with its systems business. And like a bolt from the blue, the company did something that I have been mulling for the past several months in earnest and noodling for the past several years off and on. And what IBM has done is to mimic the ARM collective and open up the intellectual property surrounding its Power chips to help foster a broader ecosystem of users and system makers.

I know what you are thinking. Isn’t it a little too little

The Flex System modular server design is an improvement over the BladeCenter blade servers in that the IBM i operating system running on Power nodes is an equal and a peer to AIX and Linux running on the same iron and is similarly not a second-class citizen to Windows and Linux running on nodes using Intel‘s Xeon processors. But as I have said many times since the Flex System machines were launched in April 2012, the two-socket Power nodes are overkill in terms of processing power and IBM i software tiers for the vast majority of midrange shops.

What

Oracle is back in lukewarm water over a line of ads that say its own Sparc and Exadata servers are between two and 20 times better than IBM‘s Power Systems servers. This time, instead of getting another slap on the wrist from an independent industry board that oversees advertising in the U.S, it could get a slap on the wrist from the Federal Trade Commission itself. It’s time for IBM, which called Oracle “a serial offender,” to take matters into its own hands.

On August 1, the National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau recommended that the FTC

In the 9th century BC, in northern Israel, Princess Jezebel, Phoenician wife of Hebrew King Ahab, was thrown from a window to her death by political opponents; her body was left to be eaten by dogs. In the 15th and 17th centuries, in Prague, government officials were flung from windows by their adversaries; the incidents, by now called defenestrations, each started a war. In the 21st century, all over the world, Windows clients are getting tossed out by end users; this is a disruptive and disconcerting trend to some, but ordinary, welcome progress to others.

This year, according

Owning and managing IBM midrange hardware is moving from on-premise IT departmental responsibility to service providers. This is not a question. It is happening. The furniture movers have arrived. But to what extent remains mostly unknown. Companies are picking and choosing their managed service providers and, if that works out, they are adding pieces of infrastructure and applications to the cloud. They may be saving money and they may be outsourcing skills that are in short supply.

It’s always been true that the decision to move hardware, infrastructure, and applications off site requires a load of trust. For IBM i

Dan:

First, let me say that I agree with the general idea that midrange shops would be better positioned to meet the future with a modern database. I might even be convinced that data-centric development is a good idea, although I personally feel this that we’re already too data centric; locked into the tooling and architectures that existed in the 1980s. But even if we move toward SOA, we aren’t going to get very far without a modern database including RI, triggers, commitment control, stored procedures–the works.

I understand this article was about letting midrangers know how important the modern

The U.S. is languishing in the dog days of summer, but soaring temperatures have not caused the overall jobs market to wilt. In fact, there are signs of life with the unemployment rate falling from 7.6 percent to a four-and-a-half-year low of 7.4 percent. That is still above the 5 percent or so typical of a healthy economy, by past standards, but it is good news nonetheless.

While July’s modest gain of 162,000 jobs was the smallest since March, the U.S. economy is continuing to steadily add jobs, just not fast enough to make much of a difference in the

The server business continues to be a bit sluggish for master distributor Avnet, but the company is coping with it reasonably well by boosting sales of other IT products. Avnet was seeing similar softness in the prior quarter as well, and it is no doubt due to the many product transitions out there in Server Land as well bumpiness in various economies around the globe.

In its fourth quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in June, the Technology Solutions group at Avnet’s sales were up 3 percent to $2.62 billion, but the company separates out organic growth from that due

IBM is doing a little belt tightening in the parts of the company that make chips, servers, storage, and systems software, as well as those workers who buy all the myriad parts that go into these devices.

Big Blue confirmed last week that it was indeed asking selected employees in the United States to take a week of mandatory holiday. The employees are in the company’s Systems and Technology Group and in the cross-divisional Integrated Supply Chain operation that procures parts for devices made by IBM.

An IBM spokesperson tells The Four Hundred that the employees are being asked to

In addition to the three new Flex System server nodes that are discussed elsewhere in this issue, IBM also announced three new switch modules that slip into the back of the chassis and offer connectivity between enclosures and across racks of enclosures. (The number three is just a coincidence and there are no dependencies. Although three is, of course, the magic number.)

The first new switch, which you can see in announcement letter 113-125, is called the EN6131, and it is a based on the Switch-X Ethernet ASICs from Mellanox Technologies. This switch has 14 internal ports