• Q&A With Doug Balog, Power Systems GM

  October 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A With Doug Balog, Power Systems GM Doug Balog took over as general manager of the Power Systems division this past summer after having run IBM‘s System z mainframe business for a little more than a year. Balog has been in charge of development for the System x, BladeCenter, and TotalStorage disk arrays before that, and in fact he cut his teeth at Big Blue three decades ago working on chips for the System/390 mainframes and eventually was put in charge of OS/390 systems software development as the 1990s came to a close. To say that Balog has a

  …

  Read more

• BCD Hooks Up With ARCAD To Manage Web Development On IBM i

  October 7, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Native RPG development on the IBM i server was largely tamed long ago by change management and application lifecycle management (ALM) tools. But as IBM i shops extend their RPG investments with new Web-based front-ends written in languages like HTML, PHP, and CSS, cracks have emerged in that ALM wall. Last week, Business Computer Design Int’l. and ARCAD Software announced a partnership that aims at closing some of those gaps for BCD’s WebSmart users. The partnership between BCD and ARCAD will see the two companies working to integrate their respective tools, namely BCD’s WebSmart development environment–including the ILE CGI and

  …

  Read more

• As I See It: Virtual Pheromones

  October 7, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Helen Morrison was a single woman with an age-old dilemma. Entering midlife, she wondered if she would ever meet a suitable partner and, frankly, she was getting lonely. But although Morrison longed to be married, she had no acceptable way of meeting men socially. Respectable women did not frequent taverns, nor were desirable partners likely to be found loitering over pints at the nightly watering hole. But Morrison found what would become a visionary solution to her quandary: She placed a personal ad in her local paper, the Manchester Weekly Journal. Her “Lonely Hearts” ad was the first of

  …

  Read more

• IBM Readying Power Systems, PureSystems For Cloud Push

  October 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s the fall, and more importantly, it is the beginning of the fourth quarter. And historically, that usually means that IBM is gearing up to make some announcements. As it turns out, this is precisely the case, and Big Blue is getting ready to make a slew of systems announcements–at least judging by the lineup for top executives that are hosting a webcast scheduled for this week. The webcast, which you can register for here, will be hosted on the morning of October 8 and is meant to also be timed to an event that CEO Ginni Rometty and

  …

  Read more

• Take A Look At The New

  October 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  EnterpriseTech Site As most of you know, I have almost always had two different writing jobs. Sometimes I manage multiple publications at the same company, such as I did for several years at Midrange Computing or later at IT Jungle. Sometimes I work for two different companies, as I have done for the past five years with my job here as editor of The Four Hundred and over at The Register as systems editor. I do this for professional as well as economic reasons, because one job always informs what I am writing in the other. And, to be

  …

  Read more

• IBM i Educational Grant Denied

  October 7, 2013 Dan Burger

  A Department of Labor grant application that would further the development of a standardized IBM i curriculum that could be implemented at participating colleges and universities has been rejected, sending the grant writing team of IBM midrange advocates back to the drawing boards. Jim Buck, who guides the IBM i educational curriculum at Gateway Technical College in Wisconsin, advised me of the setback last week. To bolster the grant application, 119 companies participated in a survey that prioritized skills that college graduates could possess that would make them candidates for job opportunities. An email was sent to the companies (78

  …

  Read more

• Large Enterprises Float Toward Hybrid Clouds

  October 7, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Whether you are part of a large enterprise or a small business, it is inconceivable to think your company is not aware of the explosion in cloud computing in recent years. Even if a cloud deployment isn’t in your organization’s immediate future, keeping an eye on the trends can help you make a better decision about going cloud should the time ever come. The analysts at Gartner make it their business to follow what’s happening in IT, and there has been some movement in the cloud market that has caught their attention. In a recent report, Gartner says nearly half

  …

  Read more

• IBM Gives Away Storwize V3700 Advanced Software Features

  October 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are looking to install IBM‘s Storwize V3700 storage arrays, which are compatible with the IBM i -Power Systems platform and which are also the storage devices at the heart of the PureSystems modular systems, then IBM has a deal for you. In announcement letter 313-094, IBM is putting out the System Storage V3700 Advanced Function offering, and this gives customers who buy a minimum hardware configuration some freebie software that runs on the arrays. Specifically, you have to buy a dual-controller version of the V3700 array and a minimum of a dozen disk drives or flash

  …

  Read more

• Disk Array Revenues Drop For The Second Quarter In A Row

  October 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Disk array makers are trying to make it up in volume, and they are not succeeding. This is the second quarter in a row that revenues have fallen. According to the latest statistics from IDC, disk array storage capacity shipments were up 21.5 percent in the second quarter ended in June, to a total of 8.2 exabytes. This disk array market was able to grow capacity shipments by between 30 and 40 percent a year, which kept revenues growing. But with thin provisioning, data compression, virtualization, and other technologies being more widely deployed on arrays, it is getting harder

  …

  Read more

• Power8 And The Potential Oomph In Midrange And Big Boxes

  September 30, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I did a little thought experiment about how the Power8 processors from IBM would affect the entry part of the Power Systems market. I also talked about how a 12-core processor spinning in excess of 4 GHz was a lot of machine for an entry IBM i shop running a database and ERP applications. But, the good news is that IBM wants to sell Power-based systems more effectively against X86 machinery, and that means the performance is going up and the price per unit of performance is coming down. But what

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles