“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A good question, posed by English poet Robert Browning. I don’t know if the data center can qualify as a kind of heaven, though I do suspect that if there is a heaven, the temperature is always perfect, and I can imagine the faint humming of the workings of the Universe being audible. Anyway, you can’t blame IT vendors for having their reach exceed their grasp, which happens all the time. This is, apparently, how progress is made–through stretching. Sometimes the truth, sometimes our minds. Sometimes

We’re almost into the fourth quarter and just finishing up the last couple of business days in the third quarter, and that means IBM is looking to cut some deals on CPU cores and i5/OS licenses to make some dough out of the System i installed base.

Let’s cover the hardware deals first. Last week, IBM announced a promotion that will run until December 31 that gives shops with System i 550, 570, and 595 servers rebates on processor activations on Power5 and Power5+ processors that are already inside their boxes and in a latent state. (IBM calls this capacity

In a toughening economic environment, which many companies and individuals are facing these days in the Western economies, there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the stress. One of them is to look around to try to cut personnel, to streamline processes to try to cut costs for manufacturing or distribution of a product, or to argue harder for discounts from suppliers. While IT projects often are the first things to get cut, maybe the smart thing to do is to invest in a better ERP system. Or be grateful for the good one you might be lucky or

As you read this on your display screen, you are a potential (if not actual) teleworker. Maybe you’re in the office, but you could as easily be far away. In principle, people in many jobs could work outside the office, and, with gasoline at a buck a quart, it’s no longer hypothetical. These days, teleworking might be practical not only for employees but also for employers. It is a topic that requires fresh scrutiny, some new technology, and appreciation of its roots, which go back 2,500 years.

The possibility that people whose work is based on using a computer could

Systems and application software maker Oracle reported its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2009 last week, and both sales and profits were up smartly in the quarter. But, somewhat ominously and not really all that surprisingly given the jumpiness in the world’s economies, sales of new application software licenses were soft.

In the three months ended August 31, Oracle’s overall sales rose by 17.7 percent to $5.3 billion, and net income shot up by 28.2 percent to just under $1.1 billion. It would be hard to find a company, large or small, that did better in a

Well, my decision to shut down IT Jungle’s mainframe, Linux, Windows, and Unix newsletters took many of you by surprise. No surprises there. I would like to thank the many, many people who called, instant messaged (yes, a lot of you are online with me every day), or sent email, commending our efforts to stay in the AS/400 game while letting me make a decent living (so I hope) by having two jobs. It shouldn’t take two jobs, but that’s life in general and my life in particular.

Not all of the feedback was positive, of course. This first bit

Since October 2007, IBM has been offering free BladeCenter blade server configurations to i shops, particularly for those acquiring System i iron or upgrades to it. In March, IBM tweaked this deal, making the spending limits on new or upgraded i machines larger and requiring customers to buy more features to get their free BladeCenter H chassis with a few HS21 Xeon-based blades inside. Last week, IBM killed off that deal, and replaced it with a nominal Web discount on switches used in BladeCenter boxes as well as on the chasses themselves.

The Web discount deal is not limited strictly

It’s no coincidence that many of the people who deride the i platform as being a relic often have no idea about the analytical tools and automated operations available for this platform. This isn’t a problem tied to a lack of tools or a lackluster technology. Modern business intelligence (BI) and system automation tools are available from a variety of vendors for the box. The fact is, the AS/400 and its successors have had features that are just now available on other platforms–features that are hyped as if they are leading edge.

One real problem at i shops, however, is

The electronics division of Japanese tech conglomerate NEC has joined up with IBM and its chip partners in New York state, known as the Fishkill Alliance, to work on perfecting 32 nanometer chip-making processes.

IBM and its partners, which includes Chartered Semiconductor, Freescale Semiconductor, Infineon Technologies, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, and Toshiba, are working through the alliance to perfect the high-k/metal gate process technologies that will be deployed using 32 nanometer etching equipment. IBM’s current Power6 chips use 65 nanometer processes, and Big Blue is getting set to ramp up the water-immersion 45 nanometer processes, possibly for a Power6+ bump in

As expected, Chinese PC and server maker Lenovo Group last week launched its first X64 servers that it is selling outside of its home market. The five new ThinkServers, as the machines are called to mirror the ThinkPad laptop brand Lenovo got when it acquired IBM‘s PC business in late 2004, are ironically based on Big Blue’s own xSeries (now Modular Systems) rack and tower servers.

Lenovo is launching two rack servers and three tower servers, which it says it will sell to small and medium businesses directly and through its own (and non-IBM) channel on a global basis.