• IBM Adds VXA 320 Tape Drive to i5 Line

  February 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the System i5 announcements two weeks ago, IBM rolled out a new low-end tape drive for the i5 line. The feature 6279 drive is a 160 GB VXA-320 tape drive, and it costs $1,500. IBM says that it is three times faster than the 30 GB quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tape drive that has been the entry tape product in the iSeries line for a while. The VXA-320 drive, at a 12 MB/sec data transfer rate, has twice the speed of its predecessor, the VXA-2 drive that IBM launched in the first i5 systems in 2004. Obviously, the

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• Enterprise Application Mergers and Acquisitions Big and Getting Bigger

  February 13, 2006 Dan Burger

  In the worldwide enterprise applications market, mergers and acquisitions have practically become everyday news. IDC, one of the research firms you can count on to count anything relating to the IT industry, recently tallied the number of deals that were done in 2005. The final score was 199 mergers and acquisitions, which is not quite one a day on average, but not too far off that pace either. It was a notable jump from the 144 recorded in 2004, and what pushes this news toward the truly astounding category is that the value of these deals more than doubled

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• Business Intelligence Advances Don’t Override Caution

  February 13, 2006 Dan Burger

  As the level of insight that is provided by business intelligence (BI) tools continues to climb, so does the level of interest in BI. So much so that Gartner is predicting the BI market to grow at a steady clip during the next five years. The analyst firm says new license revenues will be on an upswing, reaching to an annual growth rate of 7.3 percent. To some degree these increases relate to an increasing number of people within organizations making use of BI and also the far-reaching effects of organizational spending related to government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Gartner

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• Jack Henry’s Revenues Increase Thanks to Support and Services

  February 13, 2006 Dan Burger

  Jack Henry & Associates, one of the dominant providers of data processing hardware, software, and services for financial institutions, recently released its financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2006 ended December 31, 2005. The company posted overall gains based on the performance of its support and service sectors, which prospered despite the banking industry’s continued preference for outsourcing. The gains more than offset small decreases in hardware revenues, an area that makes up the company’s lowest margin revenue component. According to company president Tony Wormington, the best performance, in terms of recurring revenue, originates from outsourcing, in-house

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• Watch Out for Footnotes: Pricing on i5 520 Express Does Not Include WDS

  February 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, I went through the details of the new i5 520 Express configurations. I explained how the new machines and their preconfigured Express setups came with a certain amount of processing power, memory and disk capacity, and maybe with RAID 5 data protection or not. (See Feeds and Speeds of the New System i5s for the details.) Apparently, there is a very important footnote in the i5 520 Express announcements–one that I didn’t see, and one that IBMers themselves had to hunt around the document for to see. But, the footnote does exist, and that footnote just

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• IBM Adds VXA 320 Tape Drive to i5 Line

  February 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the System i5 announcements two weeks ago, IBM rolled out a new low-end tape drive for the i5 line. The feature 6279 drive is a 160 GB VXA-320 tape drive, and it costs $1,500. IBM says that it is three times faster than the 30 GB quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tape drive that has been the entry tape product in the iSeries line for a while. The VXA-320 drive, at a 12 MB/sec data transfer rate, has twice the speed of its predecessor, the VXA-2 drive that IBM launched in the first i5 systems in 2004. Obviously, the

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• System i5s Go IOP-Less with i5/OS V5R4

  February 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As IBM had promised it would do, the company is putting more and more intelligence inside the I/O adapters (IOAs) inside the iSeries line, so much so that it can actually begin to remove the I/O processors (IOPs) from the iSeries architecture. IBM wants to do this for two reasons. First, it simplifies the architecture of the iSeries and allows it to have fewer components, which in theory will make it more reliable. Fewer parts mean fewer failures. Second, by taking the IOPs out of the equation, IBM can remove some of the cost out of the iSeries configuration and

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• IBM, Freescale Reunite for the Sake of the Power Processors

  February 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The launch of the PowerPC Alliance was nearly 15 years ago, and one of the partners on the Power chip, Apple, has abandoned the three-way partnership and shacked up with chipmaker Intel. For the past several years, as IBM went its way with Power4, Power5, and PowerPC 970 chips for servers and Cell and other custom chips for games and electronics machines, it has drifted away from former PowerPC partner Motorola, which actually went so far as to spin out the PowerPC chip business as a standalone unit called Freescale Semiconductor. Now that Freescale is a

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• The iSeries is Comfort Food for the Food Industry

  February 13, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Who would have thought that the iSeries was behind the manufacture and distribution of so much comfort food? It seems only fitting that the quiet, low-hassle platform that so many have come to trust for its simplicity and ease of use should be instrumental in delivering our snacks and treats. But for decades, many companies in food distribution have seen the iSeries as a sort of comfort food of its own. An April 2005 Sageza Group report discusses the challenges faced by an industry where food–often perishable–must be produced and delivered rapidly and in adherence with tough standards. But this

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• Q&A with Elaine Lennox, VP of System i5 Marketing

  February 13, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with Elaine Lennox, VP of System i5 Marketing As we all know, IBM has a new vice president of iSeries marketing, Elaine Lennox. She took over two weeks ago from Peter Bingaman, who left Big Blue to take a job at LexusNexus, and she comes to the job with quite a bit of experience in the small and medium business space that used to be the hallmark of the AS/400 line. She took some time to chat with me about her new job and what she sees as the challenges the System i5 line faces. Lennox was previously vice

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