• The Database Is the Computer

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So many smart technologies have been created for and embodied in the successive generations of IBM‘s midrange platforms over the past four decades that it is hard to single out any particular idea of merit. If you put a gun to my head and made me choose, I would probably ask for the ability to single out one hardware idea and one software idea, which is a kind of cheating, I admit. But what else would you expect? On the hardware side, I think that single-level storage, which masks the complexities of where data is in cache and main

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• InfiniBand Gear Maker Voltaire to Go Public

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  InfiniBand switch and software maker Voltaire, which is one of the few players in this part of the server and storage interconnection market, said last week that it plans to take itself public. Voltaire was founded in 1997 and has its main headquarters in Herzeliya, Israel; its headquarters in the United States is in Billerica, Massachusetts (which is along the Route 128 high-tech corridor). The company plans to do its initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange. According to the company’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Voltaire and its current backers are going to put

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• Infor Expands Offerings in IBM’s System i Vertical Industry Program

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  ERP software giant Infor, which by virtue of its acquisitions has become the largest supplier of such software for the i5/OS and OS/400 platforms in the world, said last week that it expanded its offerings in the Vertical Industry Program (VIP) set up by IBM this spring to do surgical-style marketing on a global scale for the System i. The VIP initiative, which was launched by IBM and its independent software vendor partners in February, carves the world up into niche markets by industry and tight geographical focus where IBM and those partners think they can make System i

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• Vision Solutions Partners with Asian Banking ISV Silverlake Group

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability and data replication software maker Vision Solutions said last week that it has signed a partnership with The Silverlake Group that will help Vision expand its presence in the Asia/Pacific region while also offering HA software to Silverlake’s banking customers. Vision, of course, is the conglomeration of the formerly independent Vision Solutions, iTera, and Lakeview Technology, who all sold HA and data replication software for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform. Private equity firm Thoma Cressey Bravo has acquired all three firms over the past nine months, giving it a dominant position when it comes to HA software on

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• Aldon Inks Agreement with Nordic Distributor

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application lifecycle management software maker Aldon last week said that it has partnered with SOSY as its distributor in the Nordic countries. SOSY, which is based outside of Copenhagen in Denmark, was founded in 1989 and has become a distributor of a number of different AS/400, iSeries, and System i products as it has grown its business over the years. The Danish company started out selling the Robot systems management and automation products from Help/Systems, and in 1998 it began reselling DataMirror‘s high availability and data replication software in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. In 2002, software change

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• Study Ranks IT Competitiveness By Country

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The market research unit of The Economist magazine has worked with the Business Software Alliance to gauge the competitiveness of the IT industry on a geographical basis. The goal of the study is to figure out which countries and regions around the globe have the best business, social, and skills factors to foster a productive and indigenous IT industrial sector. The report, which is called The Means to Compete: Benchmarking IT Industry Competitiveness and which you can download at this link, looked at 64 different countries with a sizeable IT industry within their borders, and found that where IT

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• i5/OS and OS/400 TCP/IP Vulnerability Surfaces

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security may not be able to fill thousands of posts in its organization, but the department’s National Cyber Security Division is on top of things. Last week, the National Vulnerability database maintained by the DHS division reported that there is a vulnerability in several OS/400 and i5/OS releases relating to the TCP/IP stack. According to the report, which you can read here, OS/400 V4R2 through OS/400 V5R3 have a vulnerability in their TCP/IP stack such that when the stack is pinged with TCP SYN-FIN combinations to cause the TCP/IP stack to respond and therefore

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• Mad Dog 21/21: To Avatar and Avatar Not

  July 16, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  In the Hindu tradition, an avatar is the physical manifestation of a god; the principal avatars are incarnations of Vishnu, but there are others, too. Similar concepts exist in other religions, even ones that are not dharmic. In computing, an avatar is an animated sprite or icon that represents a real or invented player in a virtual amusement such as Second Life. In finance, an avatar is what IBM set up in Holland to obtain favorable tax treatment for a $12.5 billion stock repurchase, provoking the IRS to ban future incarnations of that particular caper. So,

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• System i Skills: Building Bridges Over the Generation Gap

  July 16, 2007 Dan Burger

  Jim Buck is an IBM AS/400 and RPG veteran. He’s an old school guy with a career timeline that parallels OS/400 development. Five years ago, he was a one-man IT department at a small hospital in Iowa where he minded two 400s. His boss, the hospital’s chief executive officer, saw no reason to invest in upgrading technology or Buck’s education and training. Buck felt differently, so he left. His belief in technology and education are being applied to the System i curriculum at Gateway Technical College. Gateway Technical College (GTC) is tucked into the northwest corner of Kenosha, Wisconsin,

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• Another i5 Pricing Tweak: No User Cap on i5 515s

  July 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM continues to tweak and tune its pricing for the new user-based pricing model that is embodied in the System i5 515 and 525 servers. Back in May, IBM shifted from counting all users that access the system as users to merely counting concurrent users on the system, thereby making the pricing more accurately reflect how customers use the machine. On July 8, IBM made further changes to the user pricing on the entry i5 515 server, which will remove some complaints by customers looking to acquire that box. Back in April, when the i5 515 was announced, the base

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