Well, IBM doesn’t do it very often, but last week it raised the monthly and annual maintenance on AS/400 and iSeries servers and related auxiliary expansion boxes and peripherals associated with the vintage OS/400 servers that populate its vast installed base. The OS/400 server platforms out there in the world were not the only machines affected. Vintage RS/6000 and pSeries, System/390 and zSeries, and other Netfinity and xSeries platforms also had increased maintenance charges. So did various older models of IBM’s tape and disk products.

If you want to check your own product numbers against those IBM raised maintenance fees

As we go to press with this issue of The Four Hundred, IBM has just begun, on March 21, shipping i5/OS V6R1 operating system for its System i server line and for a relatively minor number of System p shops that run AIX and i5/OS side by side in logical partitions. And if history is any guide, it has probably been a long weekend for a number of intrepid iSeries and System i shops who spent the weekend doing an upgrade to the new operating system.

Of course, it is not just end users who need to get their

It isn’t very often that an OS/400 or i5/OS upgrade has involved big changes in the microcode underneath what users and programmers see as that operating system, at least not changes that affect compiled applications. One of the brilliant things about the AS/400 architecture is the way it kept applications from talking directly to the iron–what we would today call virtualization–and thereby allowing applications compiled for one set of software and hardware to appear to run on radically different software and hardware in the future.

The move from System/38s to AS/400s in 1988 with OS/400 V1R1 and the move from

There may be a lot of things that are slowing down in the information technology sector or among businesses in general, but enterprise-class data storage is not one of them. In fact, according to recent reports from IDC, sales of disk storage systems kept humming along at historical rates in the fourth quarter of 2007 despite some of the turbulence in certain sectors of the global economy in various geographical areas.

In many ways, the disk array market is as complex as that of the systems that they plug into to feed them the data they need to do

Server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems is known for being a player in the data center, but its servers are not known to be popular among small and medium businesses. And Solaris, like Linux and unlike Windows, is not exactly known as an appropriate platform for SMB shops. But, with a new focus on SMB sales, Sun has committed itself to chase down the SMB customer base to peddle its entry servers, mainly because IT spending in SMB shops is growing a lot faster than spending in the big data centers where Sun is a player.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The drama in the private equity markets continued last week as credit continues to tighten despite the efforts of the world’s central banks, and in the case of the $2.2 billion proposed acquisition of VOIP wannabe 3Com, one of IBM‘s key partners as it pushes server-based telephony, the drama has taken a political turn as Bain Capital Partners, which said it would buy 3Com last September, said the deal was coming under pressure from Uncle Sam and therefore killed it.

In a statement released last Thursday, Bain Capital Partners said that the Committee on Foreign Investment in

As part of its price change announcements last week, IBM radically increased the prices it charges for various production PHP software for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform from Zend Technologies. The company also tweaked some prices up and down for the new DB2 Web Query database query kicker to Query/400, which IBM created through an OEM partnership with Information Builders, and changed some support prices on its recently acquired DataMirror high availability clustering software.

The price changes on the Zend tools will be a bit shocking to customers, particularly small companies who might have been under the impression

Last week, Big Blue snapped up another small software company to build out its portfolio of products, specifically aimed at improving the single sign-on (SSO) capabilities of its Tivoli security and access control products.

The company in question that IBM acquired is called Encentuate, which was founded by Peng Ong in 2001 after he took another company of his, called Interwoven, public. Interwoven is one of the big players in enterprise-grade content management systems, and is traded on the Nasdaq National Market. Before that, Peng was also a co-founder in a company called Electric Classifieds, which launched an

Those with the cash can make the big deals now in the IT sector, and intrepid and entrepreneurial companies that might have otherwise been snapped up by competitors backed by private equity firms or just by the firms themselves are now being snapped up by larger IT players. And so it is with BMC Software‘s acquisition of BladeLogic, a maker of IT operations management software.

BMC, which is probably best known in the midrange for its Patrol line of systems management tools, is betting pretty big on BladeLogic, which was founded in 2001 in Lexington, Massachusetts. To my

For a number of years, IBM has been hosting a sub-site on its collection of Web sites called the System i Find And Compare Tool, or FACT for short. If you have been using this tool, IBM put a note up recently saying that any new and additional products added after March 3, 2008, would not be added to this tool.

I didn’t even know the thing existed, to be honest with you, and having looked at it last week because someone told me it was not being updated any more, I can tell you that I wish that