The Power8 rollout has seen entry machines with one and two sockets, the so-called scale-out Power S-class machines. And IBM has just condensed the enterprise-class Power 770 and Power 780 machines with the high-end Power 795 to come up with the new scale-up or enterprise Power E-Class machines using the Power8 chips. But there is a pretty big hole in the middle between these two classes of machines, and one that IBM knows it has to fill before too long.

And the word from on high is that IBM will, indeed, fill the gap between the entry and enterprise class.

One of the big issues with IBM i high availability is the lack of testing by the users. The problem is, without regular testing, the chances of a successfully completing a real failover when it counts are slim to none. Last week, a Florida startup called Focal Point Solutions Group unveiled a hosted high availability offering called DR FlashCopy that uses an innovative approach to allowing customers test their HA environments at their leisure.

“I hate to say it but the majority of high availability customers haven’t done a switch in several years,” says Ron Venzin, the CEO of Focal

The connection between the OpenPower Alliance and IBM i is more indirect than direct, but do not miscalculate the significance of OpenPower, IBM‘s most critical, most ambitious, and most risky strategic move of the 21st century. Although this is all about scale out Linux, the cloud market, and attacking Intel, the IBM i community should be watching closely. It is a business model shift for the Power brand. From a hardware perspective, this is a trip to another galaxy.

The catch phrase “Making the Power tide go up raises all boats” is embedded in the conversations of Systems

Vladimir Putin is flexing. Testing air defenses here, coastal defenses there, reminding the world of Russia’s nuclear prowess, and implying his willingness to engage in World War III. And he’s just petulant enough to do it. Oorahsky! Meanwhile, China is bullying its helpless neighbors, gobbling up additional resources and territory to support its voracious appetites.

These are serious stories that deserve my attention and concern, but the Internet offers too many distractions, and the pull of entertainment is strong. I’m scrolling down Yahoo’s home page and in seconds my attention is highjacked by World Series coverage, college football highlights, lava

It’s not quite like walking through destiny’s door, but Patrick Schutz believes he’s in the right neighborhood. Surveying the situation, Schutz confidently predicts that cloud computing is exactly what many IBM midrange shops want. They’ve just needed some time get comfortable with the idea. According to Schutz, senior account executive at Abacus Solutions, an IBM i and Power Systems oriented managed service provider (MSP), the conversations about infrastructure as a service business have changed from if to when.

“In the past year, we have seen more interest and desire,” Schutz says with regard to Abacus’ interaction with the IBM

As we reported in last week’s issue, Avnet saw a rebound in sales of proprietary systems in the most recent quarter ended in September. And thankfully for those of us who are in the Power Systems community, rival Arrow Electronics, which has a similar-sized business as a master distributor of electronics components and IT wares, also server a systems bounce. But the company also showed how small a portion of its business comes from systems, which is a bit striking.

In the third quarter ended in September, Arrow’s overall revenues rose by 11 percent to $5.61 billion, and

The COMMON Education Foundation and the IBM Power Systems Academic Initiative, along with a group of IBM i ISVs and members of the IBM i community combined efforts to bring 24 college students to the Fall COMMON Conference in Indianapolis last week. That’s the most students that have ever attended a COMMON conference and a trend that should continue.

COMMON and the IBM i community in general benefit from increased participation from a decidedly youthful audience. It makes a noticeable difference at the conference, which is good for everyone involved, but the greater good is accomplished by bringing together

The FlashSystem 840 is a lot of machine for most IBM i shops, but the potent combination of the Storage Virtualization Controller (SVC) that IBM has been using to front-end disk arrays to provide them with snapshotting, deduplication, and other advanced features for many years is something that many enterprise-class IBM i shops should be taking a look at for their storage capacity and I/O needs.

In a series of announcements last week, IBM made some tweaks to the FlashSystem hardware and the software stack that runs atop it.

In announcement letter 114-179, IBM is expanding the connectivity options

In case you haven’t noticed it, IBM thinks that its Storwize disk and sometimes disk/flash hybrid arrays are a pretty hot commodity. If Big Blue had its way, IBM i shops would adopt Storwize arrays as their primary or “tier one” storage and pay for lots of extra software goodies on them, such as compression or automatic data tiering, to make them a lot more useful, and importantly, to help IBM make some extra money on software with a recurring subscription.

The deal in question is at the moment only available in Australia and New Zealand as far as I

Even the prettiest green-screen application is not going to win many, if any, admirers these days. The truth is that a green-screen app is going to cost money by not being used. This is particularly true if you are creating commercial software. Put a green screen on one monitor next to a GUI on another monitor and ask people to vote on their favorite. And the winner is . . . not the green screen.

Paragon Consulting Services saw software sales dry up on its 5250 application for the metals industry. Guess where the blame rested? Yep, the interface. The