Last week, I gave you the first pass analysis of the four new entry Power7-based servers from IBM in our Four Hundred Stuff newsletter on announcement day. This week, in The Four Hundred, I will drill down into the Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 servers, giving you some of the pricing information that was missing when we went to press on August 17.

For all the feeds and speeds, read the original announcement story here. To recap briefly, the Power 710 and Power 730 are 2U machines that come in a rack format only with one or

Since May 2008, IBM has been bundling up different configurations of its Power6-based blade servers with the i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 operating system, a slew of features, and giving the whole shebang a discounted price that puts a blade-based i setup closer to the price of an entry Power 520 rack or tower server that is the workhorse of the i market. As part of last week’s Power7 entry and high-end server rollouts, this i Edition Express for BladeCenter S configuration was tweaked to include Power7 blades.

As was the case with the prior i Edition bundles on the

In last week’s issue of Four Hundred Stuff, I gave you the basic feeds and speeds of the top-end, Power7-based Power 795 server that was announced on August 17 by IBM. At the time of writing, lots of the feeds and speeds for the machine as well as its pricing were not yet available, so let’s circle back and fill in some of the blanks.

You can see our original coverage of the Power 795 system here, but here’s a brief recap. The Power 795 has eight processor books, each with four processor sockets. One variant of

It’s a human sign when things go wrong
When the scent of her lingers and temptation’s strong
—Sacrifice

Who knew Elton John was singing about Hewlett-Packard? Yep, things are going terribly wrong at old HP, where temptation was apparently strong enough to cost yet another CEO his job. Think of it as the venerable “HP Way” adjusted for narcissism. Once highly regarded for its progressive leadership, the company is now a place where maladjusted CEOs go to commit career suicide.

More than a half-century ago, Bill and Dave set off on their most excellent adventure and, in the process,

The auditors are knocking at the door. You knew this day would come. Preparations were in place. When the PCI audit team looked for cross-platform data security measures, your bases were covered. The point of sale (POS) software was taking care of everything for you. But then, just a few days ago, it was discovered that credit card information that was encrypted on Microsoft SQL Server could not be decrypted on the IBM Power Systems i.

“This year we’ve had five or six incidents where this has happened,” says Patrick Townsend, chairman of the board and chief technology officer of

For a bunch of years now, IBM and its key application software partners on the OS/400 and i platform have used special lower-cost iSeries, System i, and Power Systems machines called Solution Editions to make it more attractive for customers to buy new application software and put it on an OS/400 or i box rather than Windows or Linux. The new Power 720 and 740 4U rack servers have been added to the ranks of i Solution Edition machines.

The basic idea of the i Solution Edition machines is simple. Configurations of hardware and systems software are setup to support

The Power Systems community was focused last week on the new entry-level Power7 servers from IBM. But for organizations that have already purchased one of the larger Power7 servers unveiled earlier this year, there was a piece of good news from Dataram. The clone memory maker announced it is now selling memory modules for the midrange Power 750 and 755 servers, which gives mid-sized IBM i shops the capability to save a lot of cash on their Power 750 memory upgrades.

Two weeks ago Dataram announced the availability of 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB memory upgrades

Jobs are scarce. Competition intense. Although predictions for the technology job market continue to be for double-digit growth for at least the next four years, it’s the skills that will separate the sheep from the goats. Companies need skilled IT folks. But those skills aren’t often the ones that were taught 20, 15, or even 10 years ago. Frequently, ongoing training hasn’t kept pace either. The question is where will companies find newly skilled employees?

If you are on the outside of the employment window looking in, you’re going to need skills that put you at an advantage. A green-screen

Big Blue has wanted you to run Linux and AIX on your OS/400 and i platforms for the better part of a decade now, and maybe you have and maybe you haven’t. Maybe Linux is now commercial enough that you feel like ditching Windows for certainly infrastructure and application serving jobs. If you do, and you have some latent capacity sitting around in your Power6, Power6+, and selected Power7 machines, then IBM has a deal for you.

In the Linux on Power Systems Capacity Upgrade on Demand offering, announced as part of the August 17 announcement blitz, which you can

When the Power 770 and 780 servers, which span up to 64 Power7 cores in a single system image, were announced back in February, one of the things that was necessary for these two boxes to be useful was a set of dense memory features that allowed the boxes to scale up to its full 2 TB.

That fat memory, which is known as feature 5602 and which is actually comprised of four 32 GB DDR3 memory modules running at 1.07 GHz, was expected to be delivered on November 19. That was pretty far put from the March 16 ship