It has been a quiet summer in Lake Woebegone, er, rather Rochester, Minnesota, and its Silver Lake. The run from late June through September is traditionally a quiet one, with a few nips and tucks here and there in the Power Systems lineup. But as we all know from reading The Four Hundred, IBM still has a little unfinished Power Systems business for 2008. And the word on the street is that some tweaked gear might be coming down the pike any day now.

Heaven only knows if what I am hearing is true, because Big Blue doesn’t usually

One of the key reasons why IBM merged the System i and System p product lines this year was to get the i platform more competitive with the rest of the system market. By converging the Power server family and stopping its practice of overcharging System i customers for hardware and software, Big Blue has made the entry Power Systems i Edition lineup–that’s the Power 520 and the BladeCenter S with JS12 blade servers–absolutely competitive with equivalent Windows boxes running online transaction processing workloads.

This is the second time in two years, with two generations of products, that this has

The urge to virtualize servers and a resurgence in mainframe sales has helped buoy overall server sales in the second quarter, according to statistics compiled by IDC, which reckons that the corporations and organizations of the world bought an aggregate of $13.9 billion worth of iron. Compared to the prior year’s quarter, sales rose by 6.4 percent, hitting the highest revenue level in a second quarter since 2000, the peak of the dot-com boom. Server shipment growth in the quarter rose by 11.1 percent, driven substantially by 2 million X64 servers that went out the door in the quarter–a

This year, I was introduced to a concept called the law of attraction. For those who have never heard of the LOA, my laymen’s interpretation of the concept is the following: Based on the science of quantum physics, the law of attraction explains how everything in our universe is made up of energy. The net affect of this energy is that every person has the ability to manifest things into their lives based on the negative or positive energy they project.

While the concept boggles my mind, I love the idea that I can manifest success simply by putting myself

IT distributor Arrow Electronics gets a lot of its sales and profits from the midmarket, and it likes to take the pulse of small and medium businesses so it knows how to position its products and services and polish its sales pitches. To that end, the Midmarket Group of Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions division, which distributes servers, storage, and other IT gear to a network of resellers around the globe, did a survey to find out what midrange shops are and are not concerned about.

You can take a look at an executive summary of the survey at this link

Whenever the economies of the world start getting dicey, as they certainly are in the United States and in parts of Europe, IT personnel start looking around to their left and right to see what the pecking order might be if job cuts become necessary. With the American workforce shedding jobs at an alarming rate and continuing issues in the housing market and financial services industries, it is no wonder that IT managers, programmers, project managers, system administrators, and other IT staff are a little jumpy. But, apparently IT is doing alright in the States.

According to the most recent

As many of the i platform intelligentsia know, IBM‘s educational and technical teams for the AS/400 Division and its successors have hosted two technical conferences (one in spring and one in fall) in North America and one in Europe each year for as long as anyone can remember. When the System i and System p were merged into one line earlier this year, IBM said it was going to create a unified set of tech conferences for Power Systems. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

As it turns out, there are two Power Systems Technical Universities being hosted

The promise of IT interoperability often feels like the brass ring that is just out of our grasp. Yeah, it seems closer each time we pass it on the IT merry go round. But if you never lay your hands on it, what difference does it make whether it’s close or far away?

A good example of this reach not meeting grasp is the configuration management database (CMDB). For most organizations, any talk of a CMDB follows a familiar story line that leads nowhere. The lack of budget and resources gets much of the blame, but the gulf between IT

Application software vendor and i platform enthusiast VAI is taking a page out of the IBM Vertical Industry Program (VIP) marketing effort and establishing specific partnerships to help push its software into targeted industries.

In particular, VAI, which is based in Ronkonkoma, New York, said last week that it is partnering with BFC Associates, of West Chicago, Illinois, to go after the food services industry as a tag team. VAI sells a variant of its S2K Enterprise ERP suite that is tailored to food distributors–called S2K Enterprise for Food Distribution, of course–and BFC Associates sells a food distribution warehouse

The Linear Tape Open (LTO) form factor for tape drives just keeps hitting higher and higher numbers. Last week, the three big players behind LTO–IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum–said that since the first LTO products were announced at the turn of the millennium, a large number of tape decks and a huge number of tape cartridges have been sold.

How many? As of last week, some 2.5 million LTO drives have shipped, with a million of those units shipping since the third quarter of 2006. The LTO format was launched in 1998, and products started coming to