If anything is clear about the upcoming eight-core Power7 processors from IBM due in the first half of next year, it is that these processors are going to have a pretty big chunk of processing capacity. And as I am spending a few weeks in the lead story of The Four Hundred going over the problems and possibilities of the Power Systems i line, it seems appropriate to continue to talk about the issues facing the platform and then, in the new year, set about designing a new and revised AS/400 product line, complete with new pricing and packaging to

I was grousing in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred that the program conversion process that IBM is forcing customers to go through to move to the i 6.1 operating system was Big Blue’s breaking of the covenant between itself and AS/400 shops that they would not have to recompile their applications to move to new hardware and operating system releases. I suggested that IBM do something about it, like give away free servers or porting services to get customers on modern hardware and software. As it turns out, Abacus Solutions has beaten IBM to the punch.

Patrick Schutz,

While the box counters at Gartner and IDC carve up the server racket slightly differently, they came to basically the same conclusion about sales and shipments in the third quarter: things are still bad, but the situation is stabilizing. This will bring good cheer to those who believe that server spending is a leading indicator for the IT economy.

The Four Hundred told you all about Gartner’s analysis of Q3 in last week’s issue, where I did the math and showed how average selling prices are on the rise in different sectors of the server market, thanks in large part

Everyone is an expert now, but two years ago very few economists predicted the coming tumble, much less the depth and severity of the recession now gripping the country. Therefore, a good deal of skepticism is in order when listening to talk of recovery. For one thing, “recovery” is a relative term. Slowing job losses are heralded as proof of recovery–happy signs for economists, but meaningless to the 8 million people whose jobs have been eliminated.

These days, however, even the optimists are cautious. One thing almost everyone agrees on is that things will either get slightly better, or horribly

The operations and day-to-day management of IT systems is a pain point that persistently stabs at small to mid-sized businesses. This may be particularly true for organizations with 100 people or less. In more ways than just the bottom line, these companies operate far differently than the world’s largest enterprises. Costs are examined much more closely. Hundreds of thousands of dollars don’t just fall through the cracks. The IBM AS/400–the Power Systems i–when Big Blue chooses to speak about platforms, has lived here for many years in obscurity.

Obscurity is in the eye of the beholder. As far as IBM

Thank heavens, we made it through 2009 all the way to the holiday season. As we say goodbye to the Naughties–not good riddance, since many good things happened along with the bad during these past 10 years–and reflect on the challenges we all have faced (and hopefully met) since the summer of 2008, when the economy started to melt, it is my privilege to say thank you to the many people and organizations that make our Four Hundred stack of newsletters possible.

So, happy holidays, good readers of The Four Hundred, Four Hundred Stuff, Four Hundred Guru,

Well, I understand that you’re president of your publication, as I am of mine. Since both of us are making a living and a nice profit on what we’re doing, I don’t think there’s much stupidity going on either here or in your office.

Really now, what does it serve to throw a rock in my direction?

“I think the first thing to realize is that things could be worse. Imagine if this newsletter was called The Three Thousand and all of us, seeing the incredible RISC technology that Hewlett-Packard had on deck for its future PA-RISC workstations and servers

British application modernization and development tool maker Micro Focus is doing pretty well despite the weakened state of the global economy and the IT market, thanks in part to acquisitions but also due to some honest-to-goodness organic growth.

For the first half of its fiscal 2010 ended in October, Micro Focus said that its sales were up 46 percent to $198.4 million. The acquisition of compiler maker Borland, mainframe rehosting environment supplier Relativity, and the testing and software quality division from Compuware added $55.3 million to the coffers at Micro Focus, but excluding this additional revenue from acquisitions, the company

The server market may still be taking it on the chin, or in the gut depending on the platform, but the storage racket is doing better by comparison. According to statistics for the third quarter of 2009 put out by Gartner, sales of external controller-based disk arrays fell by only 7.3 percent, to $3.97 billion in the latest quarter.

“The year-over-year decline of 7.3 percent indicates that the economic downturn’s impact on the disk array storage market is loosening its grip,” said Donna Taylor, principal research analyst for Gartner’s global storage quarterly statistics program, who put out a table

IBM two weeks ago bought database security software vendor Guardium. The acquisition nets Big Blue a powerful suite of products that monitor transactions across all major relational database management systems (RDBMS)–including DB2/400–in real time for signs of suspicious activity, such as unauthorized use by insiders or SQL injection attacks by outside hackers.

Guardium was founded in Israel about seven years ago to address what its founders considered a sizable hole in IT security tools and best practices. While most organizations have a range of security tools in place to protect their networks, applications, and data, they typically have very