At the end of August, IBM‘s top techies from the Austin Power processor development labs showed off the features and functions of the forthcoming 12-core Power8 chip at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. As The Four Hundred pointed out in its coverage of the divulged specifications at the time, this processor will pack a serious punch. Perhaps way too much for most entry IBM i shops, in fact.

Or, perhaps not. Depending on how you want to make use of the substantial performance that Big Blue intends to cram into the Power8 chip, which is up and

IBM introduced the PureSystems in April 2012. It was a big deal and it still is. IBM is certain this is the system to converge all systems, with infrastructure in a box–PureFlex–as the solution to the huge business knot caused by IT redundancies. Instead of each platform requiring its own infrastructure, this is one infrastructure for all and all for one. In the past year and a half, the successes have mostly piled up on the X86 side as a server consolidation play, but IBM i shops are in this game, too.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say

The job market for IBM midrange professionals fluctuates somewhere between contrary and crotchety. The same could be said about many of the pros who are inside and outside the workforce. One thing for certain is that this job market is changing and the people who want to get jobs or keep jobs have to change with it. Resistance, as we all know from watching Star Trek, is futile.

A friend of mine, Bob Langieri, is dialed into the IBM i job market in the greater Los Angeles area. He’s been a one-man employment service specializing in career placement for

Just before we headed off on vacation, my wife, who never strays far from computerized devices, made a bold, unprecedented suggestion. “Let’s also have a vacation from technology.” I was pleased but dubious. Like Charlton Heston, who planned to have his gun pried from his cold, dead hands, I sort of figured the wife would leave this world clutching her smartphone. But her reasoning, she explained, was economic, not an unexpected lack of interest in all things with screens.

We planned to go to Washington (the state) to visit the in-laws, and then on to Canada to visit the Rockies.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. And probably again after that. Anything that makes the Power Systems business stronger lets the IBM i platform live a lot longer. And it is with that spirit that we should all greet IBM‘s announcement last week that it will be pumping $1 billion in investments in the Linux operating system running on Power processors.

It is always hard to tease out details on such big pronouncements from any vendor, but Jim Wasko, who is director of the Linux Technology Center in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, says

You write:

“The database IBM tested had 500 million records, which could fit into a machine with 32 cores; I am guessing here, but it would probably take a 64-core machine to do 1 billion records as HP tested with its pair of ProLiant DL580 G7 servers.”

What does the number of DB records have to do with the number of cores required? I’m not aware of any correlation between the two. Perhaps you were thinking of a correlation between DB records and RAM (only applies to in-memory databases; not IBM i).

“The HANA database has data compression and columnar

The volume of unstructured documents being generated in this world continues to grow, creating challenges for the consumption of the information in the documents. To help streamline access to unstructured documents, IBM last week bought Daeja Image Systems, a UK-based provider of software designed to make it easier for business and IT professionals to view large documents and images on the Web.

Daeja develops software that significantly enhanced the image viewing capabilities of Web browser. The company’s ViewONE Pro and ViewONE offerings are Java applets and enable users to do things with images–such as zoom, flip, rotate, invert, and add

More than a few people have asked me where are the young people in the IBM i community. It’s a good question, because you really don’t see a lot of them. That’s why it was somewhat surprising to learn that nine college students attended the COMMON Fall Conference and Expo about a week and a half ago in St. Louis, Missouri.

They were able to get indoctrinated because of an emerging program from the COMMON Education Foundation, which rounded up enough money to pay for travel, lodging, and registrations. The Foundation–which operates as a separate entity from COMMON, the user

IBM i Advocate Ian Jarman To Keynote At RPG & DB2 Summit

The general managers for the IBM i platform and its earlier iterations the System i, iSeries, and AS/400 have come and gone like clockwork. But one constant at the IBM executive level for as long as I can remember is Ian Jarman. He’s often been called on to be the voice of the platform when well-meaning folks like the gang at IT Jungle want to know why IBM is doing something or doing nothing with the operating system, the database, the hardware, or the marketing. He knows IBM

There was a time when social media looked more like a teenage hangout and no place for proper grown adults. Times have changed and it looks like social media has conquered the final frontier: senior citizens. At least, that’s the findings of a recent report from Pew Research Center, which revealed people ages 65 and older have roughly tripled their presence on social networking sites in the last four years, from 13 percent in the spring of 2009 to 43 percent now.

We’ve been harping on social media for the last few years (just see the Related Stories section