• Taking A Ride On The IBM i

  June 24, 2013 Dan Burger

  What’s ahead for the IBM i platform is a very good question. IT Jungle readers are pretty well versed on what’s been accomplished during the platform’s 25-year run. Many of you have been with the platform from the beginning and more than a few recall when IBM stormed the midrange with its first mini mainframes. While looking back provides many good memories, it doesn’t do much to keep modern businesses running. So the road ahead has our attention. The IBMi25 campaign, which was devised as a three-month saga that played up the history of the platform but differentiated it from

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• IBM Delivers New Mobile Development Tooling With RDi 9.0

  June 24, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM is now shipping Rational Developer for i (RDi), the name of the once-and-current flagship development tool for writing RPG, COBOL, Java, and C apps for IBM i. The product, which replaces Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDp), was officially unveiled by IBM two months ago. Chief among the new capabilities is support for Worklight Studio, which brings hybrid mobile application development capabilities to the IBM i platform. IBM has, once again, reshuffled the deck of cards (some say nested set of Russian dolls) that is its Rational development tool collection. On June 14, it began shipping a broad new

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• Mad Dog 21/21: What Hath Got Broth?

  June 24, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Towards the end of May, Arvind Mahankali, a very smart kid from Long Island, won the National Spelling Bee. His winning word was knaidel. Knaidel is the Yiddish-American term for matzoh ball, variously spelled as matza ball, matzah ball or matzo ball. The top speller was the sixth consecutive desi to cop the prize; soon the winning word might be dacoit. Meanwhile, IBM, with its center of IQ mass in South Asia, can contemplate how it should spell out cloud computing . . . and the possibility that its services empire is the wrong kind

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• IBM Cuts Systems And Software Jobs, Hopes To Boost Profits

  June 24, 2013 Dan Burger

  Like night follows day, darkness is descending on nearly 3,000 IBM employees who are being dishonorably discharged–the company prefers the term “workforce rebalanced”–from the payroll of the IT giant in the United States and Canada. On a global basis, the number is expected to exceed 5,000 and possibly as many as 8,000 could be without jobs by the end of the year. Earnings per share, which guides IBM’s decision making, should benefit, while families and communities get the dirty end of the stick. Don’t let that first paragraph fool you. I despise the influence of stock prices over corporate citizenship

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• Disk Array Biz Has Sympathy Pains With The Server Racket

  June 24, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The general rule of thumb is that for every dollar that is spent on servers, there is another 50 cents or so spent on storage and another 50 cents or so spent on networking. That is the ratio across the industry, and the server class average is brought up mightily by mainframes and other big iron that is pricey indeed. While server and storage purchases are not always directly tied to each other, they are often part of a single system upgrade or new installation and, in many cases, disk arrays are in fact internal to the server. So there

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• IBM Kills Off Original Flex p260 Node, Other Power Systems Features

  June 24, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With new Power7+ processors in full production and Big Blue wanting to shift customers to the latest iron rather than stuff that is one to three years old, it is no surprise that the marketing and manufacturing people in Systems and Technology Group are cutting some pages out of the IBM product catalog. In announcement letter 913-142, IBM said that effective September 20, it would stop selling the original Power7-based Flex p260 server node, which was announced back in April 2012 as one of two Power7 nodes for IBM’s PureFlex modular system. This is the half-width, two-socket node, which

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• Big Blue Offers Interest-Free Financing For IBM i Iron Down Under

  June 24, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The OS/400 and IBM i platform has turned 25 years old, and IBM’s units in Australia and New Zealand are offering special financing to celebrate. In announcement letter A313-099, IBM’s Global Financing unit, which provides leases and rentals to business partners and end users alike, is offering special zero percent interest rate financing on IBM i-based gear over a term of–wait for it–25 months, one for every year that the AS/400 and its progeny have been running applications in the midrange. The deal in New Zealand is structured the same way and is detailed in announcement letter NZ313-099.

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• Mobile, Modernization, And Cloud See The Money In 2013

  June 24, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  IT departments around the world can practically be heard crying out “show me the money” after years of tight budgets and sweeping cutbacks. And while the overall picture for IT spending still isn’t looking too rosy, there are a few areas that will get an infusion of cash this year, according to a recent survey of spending by government sector organizations on hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications by Gartner. The Gartner analysts are projecting that worldwide IT spending by government organizations will total $449.5 billion in 2013, which is a slight decrease of 0.1 percent from 2012. This

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• Take A Survey, Help Gateway Technical College Help You

  June 24, 2013 Dan Burger

  There are two ways to look at the IT skills shortage: macro and micro. Macro is an industry-wide view and micro is how the skills shortage affects the organization where you work. A week ago, in the But Wait There’s More section of The Four Hundred, readers were encouraged to participate in a survey designed to gauge the severity and focal points of the IBM i skills shortage. Equally important was the objective of matching up companies that are searching for talented entry-level workers with IT educations that included IBM i-related skills with the colleges that specialize in that

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• IBM Chops Power Systems Memory Prices After Chip Upgrade

  June 17, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has had a busy couple of weeks making enhancements to the Power Systems lineup and crafting deals to try to entice customers to move up to more modern machines, or, in the case of IBM i shops, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launch of the AS/400 platform. The AS/400’s silver anniversary will be on Friday this week, and I will share my thoughts on the Silver Anniversary for the system that was code-named “Silverlake” in next week’s issue. For now, let’s talk about memory enhancements at the high-end of the line. The big thing relating to

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