How big and healthy is the base of customers for the IBM i operating system and its related Power Systems platform? Those are two questions that are very difficult to get answers to except in very special moments when some IBMer somewhere makes a slip of the tongue–or intentionally lets the data out to try to comfort the multitudes in AS/400 Land. Depending on how you want to look at it, the latest numbers tossed around by IBM can be chilling or comforting.

First, let’s get the number out there for the size of the AS/400-iSeries-System i-Power Systems running IBM

Last summer, when IBM launched its first CloudBurst virtualized private cloud infrastructure stacks, they were built on its BladeCenter blade servers and used the company’s Xeon-based HS22 blades. Last week, as Big Blue updated the X64 variants of the CloudBurst stacks, it rolled out the first versions of the cloudy infrastructure based on Power7 processors. But instead of using its PS700 or PS701 blade servers, IBM chose the workhorse Power 750 server as the building block.

The CloudBurst setups, you will remember, are a pre-integrated stack of virtualized systems that include servers, storage, switches, virtualization hypervisors, management tools, and a

Somewhere someone is about to take a stab at upgrading an IBM i operating system to version 6.1 or 7.1. The probability of mistakes being made is pretty high. The trouble resulting from those mistakes will range from easily correctable to call in the cavalry. The difference can be nailed down to two factors: poor preparation and too little time allotted for completion. Yes, we’re talking about program conversion, which often has more bark than bite.

When you do more than 75 of these OS upgrades in the past year, and more than 200 total, you see the commonly made

Henry Ford started selling Model T cars in 1908 at $825 a pop. Ten years later the price had come down to $360, and every one made was the same color. As Henry Ford said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Despite this lack of variety, the Model T accounted for half the cars in the USA. Today, Henry Ford might not make cars; he might build machines for cloud computing, where he could tell customers to take an X64 or take a hike.

You might think that

Let’s get one thing straight. Well, two things, actually. One, it was a colossal blunder on the part of IBM and all of its software aspirations to have let the Java programming language and runtime fall into the hands of rival Oracle in the application development and database spaces. And two, no matter how much love Oracle professes for hardware and the Solaris operating system, the main reason that the software giant ponied up $5.6 billion net of Sun Microsystems cash on hand to acquire the beleaguered server makers was to get absolute control–or what passes for it in a

IBM last week slashed selected charges on its DB2 Web Query development kit support charges and jacked up prices on its Backup Restore and Media Services and integrated fax server for the IBM i platform.

The price changes, which you can see in announcement letter 310-270, were not across the board for DB2 Web Query, but were selective for various features and nonetheless consistent at a 50 percent chop on the price. IBM cut one year of support on the DB2 Web Query development kit to $116 and chopped the after license charge (the fee Big Blue slaps on

IBM bolstered its risk management software portfolio last week when it acquired PSS Systems, a provider of information governance software for some of the biggest companies in the world. With the company’s Atlas Suite, IBM will offer its customers a new way to minimize their legal risk by disposing of potentially legally damaging information as soon as they are allowed.

Public companies and other organizations in highly regulated and litigious industries are required to keep detailed records about their finances and operations. Failure to maintain these records can have consequences, ranging from a stern rebuke from a judge, loss

Two years ago, I was monkeying around with word clouds to give a visual image of the magnitude of various server brands and technology job related searches. My point was to show the relative important of different platforms based on how many times people mention a brand or post a job for that platform. Last week, I ran across Google Trends, a Web analytical tool that the search giant gives away and pumped in some IBM i-related terms.

Google Trends plots real-time charts for search terms that you pump into it and shows their relative popularity in searches over

The soap opera between Oracle and Hewlett-Packard has taken another bizarre turn and now it looks like Oracle is going to drag Leo Apotheker, former CEO at SAP and recently named CEO at HP, up on the stand in its ongoing lawsuit against SAP concerning its former TomorrowNow unit.

In August, several months after Apotheker had been shown the door and two new co-CEOs had been running SAP for a while, SAP’s lawyers said that SAP accepted financial responsibility for the damage that might have been done by TomorrowNow, but balked at the idea that the damages were in excess

Remember that Power Systems deferred leasing deal in North America that I told you about last month for HP-UX and AIX shops moving to big AIX iron? Well, the deal has been expanded to cover Europe, Asia, and a bunch of growth markets, but guess what? IBM is still not offering deferred leasing to i5/OS or IBM i shops moving up to new releases and iron.

Under the original deal, which I went through here, customers who move from Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and presumably Fujitsu Unix iron to a Power 770, 780, or 795 machine can push the