Volume 15, Number 27 - July 10, 2006 Archives

Does the IBM Server Selection Tool Select the System i?

July 10, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

Recently, IBM posted the Systems Advisor Tool on its Web site. This tool, according to Big Blue, “pinpoints the server or storage offering that best suit your needs and offers up to three recommended choices.” Intrigued, I decided to check this out.

My mother told me many times in my life to be wary of easy answers. But I was curious to see if this quick and easy tool would select the beloved System i or if it was predisposed to recommend other server choices.

The tool has six questions to pose to the reader relating to:

System use (e.g.,

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Centerfield Technology, Innovatum Team on Database Tuning, Compliance

July 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Centerfield Technology, which sells a variety of adjunct tools to the OS/400 and i5/OS platform, has announced a partnership with Innovatum, which sells auditing and compliance software as well as enterprise bar code and RFID labeling software, have announced that they have teamed up to help each other generate new business in the OS/400 market.

This was a match made at COMMON, as it turns out. “When we met Ardi Batmanghelidj, president of Innovatum, at COMMON, we were impressed with the similarities between our two companies, as we both are small, nimble, and dedicated to the System i

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Google to Defend Net Neutrality with Antitrust Lawsuits?

July 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Vinton Cerf is the former telecommunications executive from MCI who is now the chief Internet evangelist at Google. He is also famous as one of the co-inventors of the Internet Protocol, the IP part of TCP/IP. Cerf is also one of the loudest critics of creating tiered Internet services–and as such, he is a staunch supporter of net neutrality, which the U.S. Congress is still trying to cope with as telecom companies and other IT players lean on it with the pros and cons of net neutrality.

Cerf suggested in a speech last week that he gave in Bulgaria,

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Faulty Business Data Leads to Bad Decisions, Workers Say

July 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a very old saying in the computer business: Garbage in, garbage out. And if you are trying to sell business intelligence software, and companies are making faulty business decisions based on bad data they have in their systems, you need to do a little analysis of your own and try to lay the blame where it belongs.

By commissioning Harris Interactive to do a poll of “information workers” in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, business intelligence software maker Business Objects was not just looking for a way to shift blame, but to bring up a

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Storage Vendors–Minus IBM–Partner on Storage Management Standards

July 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Some of the biggest names in the storage business have put their weight behind a standard called the Storage Management Initiative specification (SMI-S) put forth by the Storage Networking Industry Association and are calling for everyone to get behind the SMI-S standard to make the job of managing storage a bit easier.

As has been the case for servers, storage arrays come with unique management tools and use different protocols to make the management features embedded in the arrays accessible through APIs. SMI-S has been crafted to make a standard way for tools to discover, model, and provision storage in

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Does the IBM Server Selection Tool Select the System i?

July 10, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

The tool has six questions to pose to the reader relating to:

System use (e.g.,

…

High End Power5+ System p5 Launch on July 25; System i5 Machines Possible, But Not Rumored

July 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM is getting ready to complete its roll out of the Power5+ processors in the System p5 sibling to the System i5 line on July 25.

While I am aware of some of the details of the System p5 announcements, I do not know if there will be a companion set of System i5 announcement either concurrent with or following the System p5 announcements. There have been no suggestions at the rumor mill that there will be more additions to the i5 line, although there are some good changes that IBM could make, for sure. Like a very low cost

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The X Factor: Is Memory-Based Software Pricing the Answer?

July 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A year and a half ago, the IT industry was just beginning to come to the realization that the advent of multiple cores on processor chips was going to wreak havoc on software pricing. Since that time, vendors have been wrestling with how to price software on products where more and more processing elements, virtual threads, and even whole virtualized machines are zooming around dynamically inside of a single physical machine. But the answer might have been there all along: The 1s and 0s of main memory.

Dual-core processors and hyperthreads (which are virtual threads that make a single processor

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Open Source RPG Apps: The ‘Bright Future’ That Didn’t Happen

July 10, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

Flashback to 2002. Open source software is hot. It’s the future. It’s what everyone is writing and talking about. Projects and their related Web sites are popping up all over. And it wasn’t just the Linux and PC folks doing the talking either. There were all kinds of open source projects for systems and application software–tens of thousands of projects, many of which called SourceForge home.

With apologies to our own Alex Woodie (and with hope that he won’t retaliate by digging up some of my headlines four years hence), IT Jungle published an article entitled Open Source is Alive

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Micro Memory Bank: Another System i Clone Memory Maker

July 10, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about the X64 server business is that there are many suppliers of servers, which affords companies the opportunity to comparison shop for machines that they want to run Windows, sometimes Linux, and rarely (but still a very large number of machines) a Unix variant. With IBM being the one and only supplier of Power-based machines on which OS/400 and i5/OS run, there is no way to get direct competition for the platform itself.

However, since the advent of IBM midrange machines, there has usually been a number of suppliers who make compatible memory, disk, and

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