In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I gave you the scoop on the Power6+ rack, tower, and blade server announcements that Big Blue was making at the COMMON midrange trade show out in Reno, Nevada. A lot of the details about the new machines were not available at the time, and I have done some digging to get you more information on the new boxes.

(That story talked about a lot more than the new boxes, so if you missed it, you should check it out here.)

You will recall that IBM announced that it was

Looking back, we’ll likely view the 2009 COMMON conference held last week as a turning point for the user group, and perhaps the midrange industry as a whole. Despite the significant drop in attendance compared to last year’s show, conference-goers expressed a glimmer of optimism that things are about to get better. And while COMMON coped admirably after being dealt a mixed hand in Reno, the group’s financial situation means significant changes are likely before the group’s big 50th anniversary show a year from now in Orlando.

By most accounts, the System i industry’s biggest conference of the year, which

Will the BladeCenter serve the IBM i community along the same lines as the AS/400 served the System/38 community? It could happen. And if you are Ian Jarman, manager of Power Systems software, you make the crossing from “could happen” to “will happen.” Moving from the current BladeCenter on i installed base of several hundred to thousands and tens of thousands seems like a long row to hoe, but Jarman says the pieces are coming together.

In typically IBM i fashion, there’s no rush in putting all the pieces on the table. After all, the i community does not welcome

It looks like Oracle is going to buy Sun Microsystems. This will probably happen soon, but it’s hard to be sure. Not long ago it looked like IBM was going to buy Sun, at least according to a passel of ace reporters, but it didn’t happen. However as events unfold, one thing seems clear: Sun’s role in computing is huge. For an America suffering economic collapse, Sun is a necessity, which makes it a mother of invention. Sun is akin to hope, that strange invention, which may have feathers. And we need hope so much right now.

As readers of The Four Hundred have been anticipating for more than a year, IBM has finally gotten around to adding flash-based solid state disks, or SSDs, to the Power Systems lineup. SSDs are all the rage because of the much higher data transfer rates they offer compared to traditional hard disk drives and the lower prices they have relative to main memory, which is still considerably faster than flash. For this reason, all the cool servers are getting flash-based SSDs.

Flash-based disk drives fill a gap between disk and main memory speeds, much as Level 1, 2, and 3

As I explained in last week’s issue, I was not surprised that IBM was making server announcements relating to the Power6+ processor. What I didn’t expect to learn was that Big Blue already began the rollout out of Power6+ machines last fall and decided to not tell anyone about it. What good is a kicker if you don’t kick up the clock speeds and brag about new features? This is still the IT industry, right?

For many years now, the i platform folks have been trying to shy away from talking about feeds and speeds and talk about the benefits

IBM‘s North American PartnerWorld business partner organization canceled the IBM Systems Conference last week, which was to be held in Orlando, Florida, between May 18 and 21.

In an email sent out to business partners, IBM did not provide any explanation for the cancellation. The Systems Conference was to have a three educational tracks: one track on IBM’s servers and storage, one on solutions relating to IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure initiatives, and the third for professional development (teaching project management, negotiation, and economic analysis of IT solutions). This sounds like the kind of thing IBM’s Systems and Technology Group would

The economic meltdown got you down? Well, you’re in good company, apparently.

Kronos, the privately held application software company that provides various human resources management tools to companies on a wide variety of platforms (including the i platform), and the Workforce Institute, a think tank set up by Kronos in 2006, did a survey of 1,265 full-time and part-time workers between January 30 and February 3 to get a sense of how the economy was affecting their work lives.

As you might expect, employees say they feel more pressure to go to work now than they might when

Now that IBM is no longer interested in acquiring Sun Microsystems, and Oracle is sweeping in like an angel (or a vulture, we’ll see which), it is back to business as normal between IBM and Sun.

So Big Blue wasted little time jacking up the dollar value of its Power Rewards program for trying to dislodge Sun iron from IT shops, pushing the value up to $8,000 per UltraSparc or Sparc64 core in servers that are taken out of the shop and replaced with Power Systems machinery. IBM doesn’t give customers money, but rather points that are good for

Climbing the world’s tallest mountain is first a quest and then an achievement. The first to reach the summit of Mt. Everest were a pair of explorers in 1953. One name you are likely to recognize is Edmund Hillary. The second name is the lesser known Tenzig Norgay. Knowledgeable sources say Norgay, a Tibetan Sherpa who had been near the summit on several previous climbs, was chiefly responsible for the amazing accomplishment.

Don’t thank me for this short trip into mountain climbing history. Thank Martin Pladgeman, who just renamed his company 10ZiG Technology. You are probably familiar with this