A business computer, no matter its architecture or applications, is really just a place to have a conversation between a buyer and a seller of a good or a service and the means to record that conversation for posterity. And the tax man. It is amazing to me, some days, that I spend my days as a second or third order derivative of that conversation. I talk about the people who build the platforms that support those transactions, who are themselves once removed from the transactions. It’s all talking about talking about talking. And the funny thing is, all this

Major Correction: In this story, I made two errors. The biggie is that I thought the price to activate either i 6.1 or i 7.1 per core on the new Power Systems 701 blade server was $2,250 a pop plus $250 per user, as it is on the Power Systems 700 blade, since both are single-socket blades. Nope. The PS701 blade has the same ridiculous price as the two-socket PS702 blade. So my analysis below is for the PS701 is not correct. I also thought, through vaguary on IBM’s Web site, that the AIX licenses for the Power7 blades were

Co-opetition is alive and well in the world of high-end System i storage, thanks to a renewal of the technology agreement between EMC and IBM. Last week, the two technology titans agreed to a five-year extension of their landmark 2006 agreement, which promises EMC access to low-level protocols needed to support the System i’s proprietary storage architecture with its line of Symmetrix and Clariion SAN arrays as well as its virtual tape libraries and hardware-based replication offerings.

As the only independent provider of external direct access storage devices (DASD) for System i servers, EMC holds a unique spot in

For all its remarkable properties, the brain is fallible and forgetful. Its formidable powers decline with age. Memories fade, knowledge retention is fleeting, and recall is unreliable. Interpretation of distant events is likely to be incomplete or inaccurate. Painful memories dwarf happy ones. Events are reduced to impressions. Time is compressed. Many people cannot even remember vast portions of their past, as if decades were torn from the fabric of their lives. Memory drifts, and over time the splendid minutia of our lives is forever lost.

While that may be the cheerless reality for most of us, technology is now

Warren Fristensky figures he’s built about a dozen data centers in his 30-year career. He doesn’t see that ever happening again. “I would not build a data center today,” he says. “I would go to someone to provision it and get into a managed services environment that would evolve into a cloud environment over time.” After three decades in IT, Fristensky has done a fair amount of evolving himself. He’s currently CIO at John Wiley & Sons, a global publishing company that has a long and happy relationship with the IBM i.

Wiley is a collection of niche publishing operations.

As you might have expected, IBM‘s decision to open up the RPG compiler and runtime to allow others to create custom data streams to other applications and devices has got a lot of people thinking and even more of them talking.

We told you all about Rational Open Access, RPG Edition two weeks ago, and then BCD Software and LANSA piped up with their opinion on ROA in last week’s issue. There’s been a lot of back and forth at the water cooler, on the newsgroups, and in the press about this, and it won’t subside any

According to a new report from the TechAmerica Foundation, a think tank based on the U.S. capital dedicated to the high tech industry, that industry shed 245,600 tech jobs last year thanks to the economic meltdown. That was a 4 percent decline in the high-tech workforce, from 6.11 million to 5.85 million employees across all companies physically located in America.

The high-tech manufacturing sector shed the most jobs, cutting 112,600 workers, down 8.1 percent, to 1.28 million employees in total. Engineering and tech services firms shed 59,100 workers, to 1.59 million, a decline of 3.6 percent, while communications services

No matter which bare-metal server virtualization hypervisor you choose, you need to have an out-of-band management console to configure and tweak the hypervisor. This, as OS/400 and i shops are well aware, has been the case since the Power5 machines were launched many years ago, and it is equally true of VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor and its vCenter manager, Citrix Systems‘ Xen Server and its XenCenter console, or Microsoft‘s Hyper-V and its Systems Center with virtualization plug ins. To virtualize one machine (or many) requires a physical machine outside of the loop. Which is a pain, of

The crack habit that is buying back its own shares to artificially prop up earnings per share numbers to appease Wall Street continued again last week as IBM‘s board of directors allocated another $8 billion in cash for this purpose. In an effort to get investors to pump up the stock, Big Blue also boosted its quarterly dividend by 10 cents to 65 cents per share.

In the first quarter, IBM blew $4 billion on share buybacks and another $700 million on dividends, so now its quarterly dividend nut will be 18 percent larger, at $826 million, or $3.3

Application software bellwether SAP pulled off a pretty decent first quarter despite all the trials and tribulations at the company that lead to the ouster of its chief executive officer, Leo Apotheker in February. For the quarter ended in March, SAP’s sales rose by 5 percent, to €2.51 billion, and net income was nearly doubled, to €387 million.

In the quarter, new software license sales hit €464 million, up 11 percent compared to a pretty awful first quarter in 2009, and support revenues were up by the same amount, to €1.39 billion. Subscription and other revenues relating to SAP’s online