Big Blue’s desire to kick Sun Microsystems when it is down in the Unix business as the Oracle acquisition and Sun’s failed “Rock” processor have left customers wondering about the platform, and to steal some accounts away from Hewlett-Packard where customers are perhaps are a bit annoyed by the delays in the “Tukwila” Itanium servers, is playing into the hands of Power Systems i shops, who some days seem to be an afterthought for IBM.

Here’s the deal, and actually, what IBM is doing really is a deal. Last week, as noted in announcement letter 309-879, the company

The session grid at the COMMON Annual Meeting is almost 100 percent filled as the organization’s biggest event of the year takes shape in light of financial belt tightening, a scaled back educational schedule, reduced compensation for volunteers (particularly speakers), and questions about how the user group should be defined. Ever since the convergence of IBM‘s traditional AS/400 and AIX hardware platforms into the Power Systems division, there have been debates about whether COMMON should remain all i.

IBM makes no bones about its indifference to platform specific-ness. Religious wars on IT turf can never be won, Big Blue

The other day I was at an office supply store picking up a flash drive for my wife. As a teacher, the inexpensive technology is just perfect for her storage needs. Did you chuckle when I said the technology was inexpensive? I remember when a flash drive cost over $50, and now they are practically giving them away. I purchased a 4 GB flash drive for less than $10!

Does any remember what we paid for our first VCR? As a passionate golfer, I see this phenomenon in the golf club industry, too. At the beginning of the year, the

Moshe Yanai became successful by taking enterprise storage business away from IBM. He led the team that created the EMC Symmetrix, which became the leading storage product at IBM’s glass house accounts. EMC and Yanai parted ways in 2001 and after a decent interval Yanai founded a new storage venture, XIV (pronounced Ex Eye Vee). IBM acquired XIV at the start of 2008, naming Yanai an IBM Fellow. Yanai may be able to clobber EMC for IBM, but to succeed he will also have to kill off IBM’s flagship DS8000 array with his XIV boxes.

The reason XIV

At the SC09 supercomputing trade show in Portland, Oregon, last week, I got a tour of the very first Power7-based server that IBM is talking publicly about. It is called the Power7 IH supercomputer node, and it is one of the 2,048 nodes in the “Blue Waters” massively parallel machine that Big Blue is building for the University of Illinois.

There is not a lot of i5/OS angle to this machine, I will admit, but some of the nifty chip and networking technologies that IBM is deploying in Blue Waters can–and probably will–be deployed in commercial servers running AIX, Linux,

If you want to get the juices flowing, just talk about how one might revive the Power Systems i platform. In the prior issue of The Four Hundred, we did a story on how IBM was expanding its Smart Cube i appliance into Italy and growing its Smart Business application portfolio in the United States and India. (See this link for that story.) Here’s what one reader had to say:

I quote: “When you look at what the application-centric approach did for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i, and you bring the attributes into the context of a solution,

Last year, IBM started offering enhanced financing deals to IT shops in the United States who would be bold and buy gear even though the global economy was on the skids so they could take advantage of an accelerated depreciation scheme set up by the Bush administration and extended by the Obama team. In June, the company said it was allocating $5 billion in funding to chase “smarter infrastructure” projects around the globe, which generally have an IT component. Now, IBM is aiming some financing deals at mid-market shops and expanding the financing it is offering to cover more regions

Buying applications and raw infrastructure as a service is getting a push globally thanks to the maturation of software and networking technologies (particularly improved Web interfaces and low-cost, high-speed Internet access) and a pull from companies who are trying to cut costs and only pay for what they use.

According to a recent report from Gartner, the company’s market wizards expect that global software as a service (SaaS) sales will grow by 17.7 percent this year, to $7.5 billion. This market is a lot more than just Salesforce.com.

“The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within

Researchers at Rutgers University and Georgetown University have just completed a major longitudinal study of how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students move from high schools to the high tech labor force. And guess what? The number of students graduating from American colleges and universities with STEM degrees is not a problem. Getting STEM students to stay in STEM careers is, however.

The report, called Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students through the Science and Engineering Pipeline, was put together by Lindsay Lowell, director of public policy studies at Georgetown, and Hal Salzman, professor of public

Nick Donofrio, who retired last year after spending 44 years as a chip and technology guru at IBM, has been appointed to the board of directors of X64 chip maker Advanced Micro Devices.

Donofrio got his start at Big Blue as a logic and memory chip designer, and has run a number of divisions at the company, including its Unix server businesses when they came to market in 1990 and its mainframe business when it was being revitalized in the early 2000s. Before Donofrio retired last May, he had risen to the position of executive vice president