Well, some of the mystery behind IBM‘s forthcoming and, as we now know impending, Power7-based Power Systems server launch has been solved. I said some of the mystery, so don’t get overly excited. As best as I can figure, I will still have some time to go through my hypothetical System iWant, 2010 Edition, product line before Big Blue actually gets the Power7 machines launched. But it also looks like I had better hurry.

In going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter of 2009 yesterday, Mark Loughridge, the company’s chief financial officer, gave a rundown on the

The word on the street is that IBM is gearing up to get the future release of its i/OS all buffed and polished so it can ship sooner rather than later. Which is good news for the Power Systems i business partner community. A broad new announcement, which the future operating system, to be dubbed i 7.1 unless the current naming plan changes, represents exactly what resellers need to give them a reason to come a-calling on AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops.

According to sources familiar with Big Blue’s plans, i 7.1 is slated for delivery during the third

IBM may no longer be the top provider of IT products and services in terms of annual revenues, but it is by far more profitable than its larger rival, Hewlett-Packard, which became king of the IT hill last year with $114.6 billion in sales (in fiscal 2009 ended in October) but which, at $7.7 billion in net income, only brings a little more than half of what IBM does to the bottom line. In IBM’s full 2009 year, the company had sales of $95.8 billion, down 7.6 percent, but net income was up 8.8 percent to $13.4 billion.

In

Spot Quiz: What’s not a drug, but is addictive? What contains no alcohol, but provides a buzz? What’s not smoked, but alters brain chemistry? What’s not food, but produces cravings. Hint: In recent years, it has become a silent workplace epidemic.

Every day millions of men (and to a lesser degree women) sequester themselves in offices around the country and, in an attempt to relieve stress, assuage boredom, or mollify intense biochemical urges, Google their favorite Internet porno site. “A whopping 25 percent of all daily Internet search engine requests and 35 percent of all downloads are for pornography,” report

The midrange of IBM‘s Power Systems lineup is too complicated as it now stands, and IBM needs to once again simplify the product line while at the same time providing different chassis options to customers who have varying needs for peripheral storage such as disk, flash, and tape drives. With the launch of the Power7-based machines, due for their initial launch in February, likely with more machines rolling out as 2010 unfolds, Big Blue has a clean slate with which to work.

Last week, I talked generally about some of the things that IBM should consider doing for its

Everything may not yet be coming up roses with the economy, but at least it doesn’t smell like the stuff you spread around the plants in the spring. The analysts who monitor the global economy and try to chart IT spending say that they anticipate that IT spending on hardware, software, services, and telecom will be up this year. However, based on surveys with chief information officers, it looks like IT budgets–including internal people costs as well as spending on IT wares–will be flat.

So I guess we all know what that means. Some or perhaps all of that growth

I can hear the gnashing of teeth and see the clenching of fists already from the AS/400 midrange faithful as they rightfully ask: Where’s the i in the Power7 advertising budget?

As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere, the cat is out of the bag and IBM is gearing up to launch Power7-based Power Systems in February, probably sooner rather than later. And last Thursday, on the very morning that Oracle announced it got regulatory approval from the European Union to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, it was no surprise that IBM let loose some advertising in the Wall Street

The many-year drama and 25-year history of Sun Microsystems is nearly over, and a new page in the history of software giant Oracle is about to be turned as Oracle buys a hardware company that controls the Java programming language and attempts to transform itself into a provider of integrated IT stacks.

While Sun’s own shareholders (including a number of venture capitalists who had kicked in funds to the struggling server maker over the years) and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division approved the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun last summer, the European Union’s antitrust regulators have been stalling

In a move that probably has very little to do with the imminent launch of Power7-based servers, IBM last week tweaked a long-running trade-in deal to offer a nominal trade-in credit to customers using Power5 and Power5+ versions of the entry Power 520 servers running the i/OS.

As you can see in announcement letter 310-110, all 9505 variants of the Power 520 lineup as well as 9406 variants of the 520 using processor features 7450, 7451, 7397, 7350, or 7352 are now eligible for a $450 trade-in credit if customers move on up to a Power6 or Power6+ version

IBM last week announced a major technological breakthrough in linear tape design that it says will allow tape cartridges to hold 35 TB of uncompressed data, or 44 times the capacity of an LTO 4 tape cartridge. What’s more, IBM says the new techniques and technologies that it and Fujifilm came up with will allow the storage medium–which seems perpetually on death’s door–to increase in capacity for years to come.

The big capacity breakthrough is actually the result of several separate, but related, innovations that allow for many more tracks of data to be squeezed onto a half-inch wide tape,