This New Year’s Eve, three weeks from now, AS/400 fans around the world will raise a glass and say a toast to Frank Soltis, who is set to retire from IBM after an incredible career spanning five decades. And while there will be some mixing of tears and champagne–especially upon the frozen tundra of the Rochester campus–you don’t have to say your goodbyes just yet. Soltis aims to remain active in the System i community, as he explains to The Four Hundred in this exclusive one-on-one interview.

Alex Woodie: So you’re leaving at the end of the month. That

In last week’s issue, I told you that IBM has launched the Smart Cube appliance server and its related Smart Market for distributing systems and application software, in India rather than the United States. There wasn’t a lot of detail about the Power and X64 boxes that are being configured as Smart Cube appliances, since IBM is really just doing a test rollout in India now and, very quietly, with selected customers in America to get feedback on how to make it all better before a full rollout in the States later in 2009.

The Smart Cube server appliances,

With more than 65,000 students enrolled at nearly 100 locations in 26 states and Canada, DeVry University qualifies as one of the largest degree-granting higher education institutions in North America. So, for IBM to get its Academic Initiative program plugged into DeVry, there is reason to celebrate. Beginning in March 2009, students aiming for bachelor’s degrees in computer information systems have the option of taking enterprise business computing courses that will incorporate IBM i, AIX, and z/OS coursework.

DeVry University is the first educational institution to incorporate multiple IBM Systems technologies into a single degree program track. As is the

Ask any old Kwakiutl or young Kwakwaka’wakw, as these Native Americans of the Northwest are now called, and you will find that winter was the favored season for a potlatch. A potlatch is a ceremony that includes a variety of rituals, some involving the redistribution of wealth and others the destruction of wealth. It’s a bit like what is going on around the world as governments try to keep us warm and loyal during a severe economic winter. It’s a bit like what liquidators say is going on in the server business, too.

A potlatch was a huge party thrown

Well, it didn’t take much of a crystal ball to figure out that this was going to happen. With the torrent of bad news coming out of the financial, banking, manufacturing, and retail sectors of the North American and European economies, and stock markets around the world freaking out, it will come as no surprise to most of us that server sales were off a bit in the third quarter as vendors slashed prices to try to move boxes.

The box counters at Gartner and IDC released their stats for server sales and shipments for the third quarter last week,

There is a lot of bad economic news out there, and it is easy to despair in it sometimes. But, there is some good news if you are on the IT staff here in the United States. According to Robert Half Technology‘s latest survey, which asks CIOs and IT managers about their staffing plans for the first quarter of 2009, the vast majority of companies are planning to keep the staff they have, with only a slightly larger number of shops saying they would be making layoffs compared to a year ago.

RHT is an IT headhunter and employment

Only a little over a month ago, retail and supply chain management software maker JDA Software was pretty proud of the fact that its business managed to grow in the third quarter, hitting record profit and sales levels, and was looking ahead to boosting its business through its impending $346 million acquisition of i2 Technologies.

What a difference an economic meltdown makes in a company’s life. i2 announced last week that it had terminated the acquisition agreement with JDA because the latter company was finding it difficult to raise the $450 million in cash it wanted to get from

Sometimes, like when you are supporting online transaction processing, you need lots of little, fast disk drives with lots of arms chasing random bits of data spread across those drives. Sometimes, when you are storing big wonking media files, you want a single, fat disk, and the rotational speed is not nearly as important as the raw, cheap capacity. The latter reason is why IBM has put a new 1 TB drive in its BladeCenter S blade server chassis for small businesses.

The disk, which goes by the product number 42D0547, isn’t fast, spinning at 7.2K RPM as it does

COMMON, formerly the AS/400 and successor user group and now billing itself as a Power Systems user group, is getting ready to elect a new board of directors.

As November was coming to a close, the user group announced a slate of candidates for the COMMON board, with five candidates chasing three open positions on the board. COMMON members will get to vote on the candidates between March 30, 2009, and April 28, 2009; people will also be able to vote on site at the beginning of the annual COMMON meeting, which is being hosted in Reno, Nevada, from

Having long since turned in the reins at IBM and presumably keeping himself plenty busy as chairman of private equity player Carlyle Group, Louis Gerstner still has time to think and lecture about the state of the educational system in America. And last week, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Gerstner did just that.

If you have access to the WSJ, you can read Gerstner’s prescription for what amounts to the nationalization of our schools at this link. Gerstner said that he had “realized rather glumly” that he had personally been advocating for