The Power7 machines are out, and some of them started shipping last Friday. Others will start shipping in a matter of weeks. Now, the sales pitching and smooth talking by IBM and your local business partner will begin. So what, exactly, will that sales pitch be? That all depends on what gear you have installed, how old it is, who made it, and what applications it runs. One thing is for sure: IBM is trying to get out in front of a whole lot of upcoming server iron to show some good numbers.

Business partners make their own

It is no surprise at all when hardware features outrun software’s ability to keep up with those features. This is the computer business, and it has always been this way. If we waited for software to be perfectly aligned with hardware before the hardware was delivered, the pace of change in the IT business would be cut in half. Some might argue that this would be a marked improvement over the current way of doing things, but they would not be employees of IT vendors, who have been engaged in a feature and scalability arms race long since

With only a few machines launched in the actual Power7-based Power Systems lineup and additional machines not expected for a while, I have plenty of time to continue the conversation with you about my theoretical and completely hypothetical System iWant, 2010 Edition boxes. I have been through small machines, midrange machines, big iron, and blades and cookie sheet servers. I have wrestled with Windows and its place in i/OS shops and a few other issues worth thinking about as the Power7 machines were on the horizon. That leaves us with clustered machines.

There are a number of different

What do the Christian Coalition, MoveOn.org, AARP, and the Gun Owners of America have in common? On most issues, not so much. Amazingly, however, at least one concern has them standing shoulder to shoulder, rather than nose to nose. What issue, you ask, could possibly unite progressives and regressives, the old and the young, the cross and the gun? (The president, who has been searching unsuccessfully for such an issue, should take notice.) It’s none other than Net neutrality.

I never held out much hope for Net neutrality. Where there is a great deal of money to be

It looks like the Las Vegas Strip at midnight as analyst firms try to outshine one another with new reports flashing sunny forecasts for 2010. After the lights flickered and dimmed for many companies in 2009–and went out for others–some good news is cause for exuberance. But let’s not drink too much of this predictive analysis, or, for that matter, too little.

Let’s start on the bright side. IT operational budgets are trending upward at the majority of companies. No one is saying they will soar, but a little nudge of 1 or 2 percent is welcomed news.

By virtue of its dominance over the global microprocessor market for PCs and servers, Intel is just about the only CPU maker that can afford to do chip design, process design, and wafer baking in its fabs all by its lonesome. Everyone else has to partner, including IBM.

IBM had a slew of partners to push its chip technology to 90 nanometer processors, then down to 65 nanometers, and further tightened to the 45 nanometer tech that is used to make the current eight-core Power7 processors, including customers Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, which use variants of

Just about every i/OS shop in the world has some sort of Windows-based system installed, and by the very nature of the OS/400 platform, these companies are undaunted by virtual or logical machine partitioning and understand immediately the value of driving up utilization on expensive iron to make the budget numbers come out.

That’s why a new Xeon-based blade server from IBM BladeCenter boxes might be intriguing to i/OS shops. The HS22V, you see, is tuned specifically to support virtualization hypervisors that in turn run virtual Linux or Windows instances.

The single-wide, full-height HS22V blade has 18 DDR3

Agilysys has restated its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 ended December 31. The IBM hardware reseller and i/OS software developer shifted revenue down $1.4 million, or 0.6 percent, and shifted net income down $1.3 million, or 9.5 percent. Shareholders for the Cleveland, Ohio, company also approved a request by its largest shareholder, MAK Capital One, to increase its stake in the company.

Following the markdown of results originally announced on February 3, Agilysys’ revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2009 came in at $219 million, down about $5 million, or 2.2 percent,

For readers of The Four Hundred in the United Kingdom, an IBM i business partner there has just announced it is distributing and supporting document management and disk optimization products from San Clemente, California-based S4i Systems.

Howard Myers, director of Life IT, says in a press release the cooperative venture with S4i is an opportunity for his company to present its clients with affordable and scalable ways to manage content and documents. He described S4i software as “the most advanced multi-function products on the market today.”

Life IT offers services for System i, iSeries, and AS/400

If you are looking to automate your provisioning operating systems on your servers, IBM has a deal for you. Well, yet another deal, I should say.

Just ahead of the Power7 systems launch a few weeks back, in announcement letter 310-113, IBM announced that it was slashing the price in half of its Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.1 software for slapping operating systems onto bare-metal servers and logical partitions. The deal is available in the United States and Canada and only through IBM’s Passport Advantage online store, and expires on March 31.

The deal applies to the Tivoli