As I told you a few weeks ago, IBM is apparently cooking up a server called the Smart Cube that is based on its Power 520 hardware, the i 6.1 or a kicker operating system, and a stack of application software. This machine, which may have been under development as the “Blue for Business” platform, which I have reported on for the past year, seems to have a sibling: the Lotus Foundations Smart appliance.

Last week, IBM provided a preview of the Lotus Foundations Smart appliance, which is actually a kicker to an existing set of systems and application

Last week, I was talking to a downstream Power Systems reseller, one of the guys with a few hundred customers that he tends to with new systems, upgrades, software configuration, application tuning, and so on, to make his daily bread. By the sweat of his browser, as it were. And guess what he told me? He had no System i or Power Systems i deals at all in the pipeline for the remainder of the fourth quarter. None. Nadda. Zilch. Zip.

By the way, it has been a long time since this has happened to this particular reseller. We’re talking

According to a posting on the Midrange-L mailing list, where a lot of the AS/400 intelligentsia hang out to talk and gripe, IBM apparently had some layoffs at the Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400 and its successors. And, if what long-time and staunch AS/400 enthusiast Neil Palmer said in the post is true, the chief architect of what used to be called the System i until last year is getting ready to leave the building.

I have tried repeatedly this week to get some kind details on the layoffs that Palmer refers to in one post, but thus

In the world of Jewish mysticism, there is a concept of demonic possession by a creature called a dybbuk. A dybbuk is basically a soul that has somehow broken free of its original body and for one or another reason becomes a spiritual squatter in the body and mind of a living person. IBM is big on this idea, putting the soul of a System i into the body of a System p. It is also doing well with a similar soul transplant that gives a mainframe life on a processor complex that bears some resemblance to a Power

IBM Power Systems head honcho Ross Mauri sat down for a one-hour “fireside” chat with members of the i community last week. The GM fielded a variety of questions, ranging from upcoming disk- and SAN-related enhancements for i-based blades (expected in 2009) to what are the platform’s hottest applications (virtualization and anything written in MySQL/PHP). Mauri was even asked to name his favorite operating system: IBM i, Linux, or AIX? The answer may surprise you. . . . Then again, it may not.

Tuesday’s online forum was the first fireside chat for Mauri, who took the job as general manager

You can hear air leaking out of the tire, but it’s not flat yet. That’s how I view the most recent IT spending forecast by the analysts at IDC. We might be getting close to pulling over to the side of the road and putting on the spare, but, heck, we don’t even know with any certainty whether the spare has any air in it. So let’s keep driving on this one and see how far we get. We’ll just drive a little slower.

Here in the IBM System i user community, there are tendencies to not spend as

It took a little bit longer than expected, perhaps, but IBM has finally delivered its Active Energy Manager plug-in for its Systems Director system management tool. The tool can be used to monitor power consumption and thermal conditions of IBM and non-IBM systems, as well as capping the power that can be used on selected server models.

I told you all about this plug-in back in December 2007 (see IBM Readies Power Management for Power Servers for more on that). The AEM plug-in runs on Linux partitions on Power, X64, or mainframe iron, and it can reach out into Windows,

IT market researcher Aberdeen Group and IBM have teamed up to offer midrange IT shops a survey-driven security assessment tool to help them figure out how secure their IT assets are.

The survey does not involve submitting your systems to any kind of probing by either Aberdeen or IBM, but is rather driven by a database of survey information based on 30,000 midrange shops that Aberdeen has talked to in the past two years, and then its reckoning of what best practices in terms of server, client, and network security should be. After taking the 10-minute survey, Aberdeen tells you

BluePhoenix Solutions, a maker of legacy application modernization tools for midrange and mainframe platforms, reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2008 last week, and said that its revenues and profits were adversely impacted by whipsawing currency exchange rates between its Israeli home market and the North American and European countries where it does a lot of its business.

For the quarter ended in September, BluePhoenix posted sales just a smidgen over $22 million, up 4.5 percent, but the company had an operating loss of $5.2 million, a net loss of $6.84 million, and a net loss

Just after the presidential election two weeks ago, IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And for once, he did something you do not see every day–or even every year–from the head honcho at Big Blue: He spoke his mind about the issues facing the country and the world.

They say a man cannot serve two masters, but in my experience in the IT journalism racket, a man who wants to pay his bills usually has to serve two, or perhaps more, masters. So while