IBM has a tiered approach to processing capacity for Power Systems hardware using Power7 chips, with smaller machines costing a lot less per unit of capacity than midrange boxes, and enterprise capacity costing even more. As I showed in last week’s issue, the difference in a unit of processing capacity is quite large across all the Power7 machines. When you add in the costs of IBM i 7.1 and Software Maintenance support for the complete system, the numbers get a lot bigger and it becomes obvious why customers don’t really want to buy anything other than a Power 720

The timing was probably coincidental, or the result of some vestigial impulse to make announcements during the fall COMMON midrange user group meeting, but IBM late last week announced a slew of new high-end hardware disk arrays (which don’t have much to do with most IBM i shops) and tweaked its Power Systems and BladeCenter lineup a bit.

IBM scattered these announcements all over the place last week, so let’s go through them one letter at a time. In announcement letter 110-199, IBM made some changes to both Power Systems and BladeCenter platforms.

On the Power 710 and 730

The fact that Microsoft is making an impact in IBM i shops is no shock. Sometimes the sparks fly and you can feel the electricity in the air though depending on who is doing the talking and what the listener wants or doesn’t want to hear. Many of the AS/400 faithful bristle whenever Windows or .NET is mentioned, but you can’t ignore the growing need to integrate these two systems.

Two weeks ago in The Four Hundred, Microsoft platform migration executive Dee Hester talked about the successes his company is enjoying in the IBM midrange market. His calculations

He could have easily become one of the disposable people. Born in Compton, he grew up in the shadowlands of the urban nightmare, in an area highjacked by gangs, drugs, and despair. He lost his best friend to street violence, and his family home to a predatory lender. His parents divorced. He started numerous failed businesses and, for a time he was homeless, living out of his car. Yet he went on to advise presidents, participate in global economic forums, and become the founder, chief executive officer, and chairman of America’s first nonprofit social investment banking organization, Operation HOPE. His

IBM shook up its LotusLive suite of business collaboration and social networking tools last week. First, it added a new feature called “communities,” which gives companies new ways to collaborate with their customers and business partners. IBM also unveiled a new pricing scheme that gives users all LotusLive functions for $10 per user per month.

When you think of “social networking,” the name IBM probably isn’t the first one to pop into your head. For one thing, the company is almost 100 years old. That’s like 95 percent older than Facebook. Also, Big Blue’s products have a reputation for

The fourth quarter push at IBM is on, and it is a wonder that we haven’t seen more deals to help drive sales of Power Systems gear running the IBM i operating system. The only official deal action coming out of Big Blue last week was a rejiggering of a deal that came out in August, giving customers some discounts on user-based fees for IBM i on selected entry blade, rack, and tower servers.

Under that deal, which came out in announcement letter 310-241, IBM gave customers who bought new Power 520, 710, or 720 servers or JS12, JS22,

The U.S. Department of Labor said in its latest jobs report, which came out last Friday, that the unemployment rate remained at 9.6 percent in September, even as the private sector added jobs because Uncle Sam is still shedding census workers that helped pad the numbers earlier this year. And thus making the unemployment rate not be as high as it might otherwise have been.

According to the September report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the non-farm full-time employment dropped by 95,000 people last month, with Federal, state, and local government shedding 159,000 jobs. About 77,000 census workers were

If you are not a reseller of IBM systems and you want to become one, then Arrow Electronics, one of the largest master distributors of servers in the world, has created a new tool called Skill Builder that will get you all trained up and ready to attack the market.

The Skill Builder tool, which is completely online, is used by resellers to track the training of individual people and the whole company as they train to gain skills and certifications to peddle different IBM hardware, software, and services. Skill Builder has step-by-step instructions to help you become a

Is the Fibre Channel protocol for linking servers to storage area networks going to go the way of all flesh, like Token Ring for networks did? Can anything survive the onslaught of the unstoppable Ethernet protocol, which steals every good idea from any new technology?

Fibre Channel over Ethernet may be available on many 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches today, but companies have made huge investments in Fibre Channel switches and adapters and they are not so keen on getting rid of those quite yet. Moreover, while everyone is talking about the latest Ethernet protocols being beefed up with the lossless

Your budget for IBM i training and education probably doesn’t have “The sky’s the limit” penciled into the first line. But it’s a fact modern skills go a long way toward making the IBM i a modern platform. Here’s your chance to bump up your skills, become a more productive and valuable programmer or system admin, and go easy on the budget. As a reader of IT Jungle newsletters you can save yourself or your company some money. That’s never been discouraged to the best of my knowledge.

Your opportunity comes next month at the 12th Annual iSeries DevCon,