• IBM Goes After Windows with User-Priced System i Servers

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After years and years of complaints that IBM has not done enough to make the AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 lines more competitive with Windows on X86 and then X64 boxes, Big Blue has now codified a new set of entry i5 servers based on its Power5+ processors that is sold on a per-user basis instead of as a system with a set price tag. By shifting to user-based pricing, IBM hopes to be able to make a more compelling case that an i5 hardware and software stack is competitive with a Windows-X64 stack. It will take a few weeks

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• Virtualization Can Hurt Security, Gartner Says

  April 16, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Thousands of companies are adopting virtualization to increase the utilization rates of their servers and save money. But unless these companies take pains to properly secure their virtualized IT environments, it can end up hurting their security posture, reducing their agility, and increasing costs, Gartner warned last week. While there is a lack of uniformity and standards among virtualization technologies, there is one aspect that all virtualization products have in common, according to Gartner: They create a privileged layer that, if compromised, puts all consolidated workloads at risk. With so many eggs in one basket, it’s even more important to

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• New 36 GB, 4mm Tape Drive Fills In the VXA Gap for i5 Servers

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In February, after trying to sell 8mm VXA tape drives for a while on the System i5 server line, IBM killed off the product. The move came in the wake of Tandberg Data‘s acquisition of Exabyte, the former being the supplier of quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tape drives to Big Blue after it got out of that business years ago and the latter being the once high-flying innovator that brought Sony‘s 8mm video tape technology to the data center. By killing off the VXA tape product, which is a low-cost, midrange performance product that sits above QIC drives but

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• Vendors Propose Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Standard

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t recall who said it first, but I know it wasn’t me as much as I know it to be absolutely true: Any protocol that comes up against Ethernet eventually loses. It was probably Bob Metcalf, the creator of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com. Fibre Channel is feeling the burn indirectly from iSCSI, and rather than take on Ethernet directly, its proponents have now come up with a truce: Run Fibre Channel protocols over Ethernet. Ethernet, which was conceived back in 1973 by Metcalf, is an amazingly resilient technology. Token Ring, IBM‘s network topology and electronics

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• Lawson Sees Red Ink In Fiscal Third Quarter

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Lawson Software reported its financial results for its fiscal 2007 third quarter, and the numbers show that it is still digesting its acquisition of Swedish ERP competitor Intentia International. Lawson said that it booked $191.2 million in sales in the third quarter, which ended February 28, with $26.4 million coming from software license fees, $73.3 million coming from maintenance fees, and $91.5 million from consulting and implementation services. Overall, Lawson’s sales in the quarter rose by 118 percent, and the company said that most of that growth was attributed to adding Intentia’s revenue stream to its own. The

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• Massive $74 Billion Consolidation in the ERP Space

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  That giant sucking sound you have been hearing for the past several years has been identified by the analysts at IDC. No, there is not a black hole in the clouds above Kansas. No, it is not the sound of all of the money in the Western world heading toward China or our jobs heading to India. That sound is the massive consolidation that has swept the enterprise application space in the past two years. By IDC’s count, from January 2004 through December 2006, a stunning 550 mergers and acquisitions in the ERP and related applications software arena, and

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• IBM Executives’ iSociety Chat: Direct Sales and a Developer Price Point

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the user-priced System i 515 and 525 announcement festivities last week, Jim Herring, director of System i products and business operations, and Ian Jarman, System i product manager, hosted a chat with the iSociety user organization last Thursday. The consensus among Herring, Jarman, and presumably other IBMers is that the new products were well received by the market, and they conveyed that message in the chat. If you were unable to participate (as I was not last week), you can read a transcript of the chat that is posted in the iSociety site. If you don’t have

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• System i and the Web: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

  April 16, 2007 Amit Ben-Zvi

  Which server should have been first, and should continue to be, the predominant server for Web integration? The System i, of course. It is, after all, business applications that need to get to the Web so the functions they perform can be viewed, interacted with, and integrated with other business functions, customers, and suppliers. For a host of reasons, though, the applications that run on the Application System introduced by IBM in 1988, have, until now, had a tenuous relationship at best with the technology that brings business functionality to the Internet. Where have we been? On an island. Where

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• Wheeling and Dealing to Move System i Iron

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week was IBM‘s semi-annual i5/OS and OS/400 platform announcement, and that means it is time to tell a new story about the platform with a new set of products, which Big Blue did with its new user-priced System i 515 and 525 servers. It also means, as Yogi Barra once said, déjà vu all over again, as the company trotted out its traditional two-step rebate deal to try to encourage customers to buy an i5 520 or i5 550 machine now rather than wait until later. The AS/400 and iSeries to System i5 Trade-In Promotion is an oldie,

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• IBM Upgrades High-End System i5 Servers

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rumor mill panned out on this one. Two months ago, I told you that I was hearing that IBM was considering upgrading its high-end System i5 595 server with its fastest Power5+ processors, and that has indeed come to pass. In addition to upgrading the i5 595 processors, the company has also tweaked its i5/OS pricing on the midrange i5 550 and 570 servers as well as on the 595 box to make it more amenable and economical to use i5/OS as an application serving platform. The move to the 2.3 GHz cores in the Power5+ multichip module is

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