The Official 2008 TPM System i Wish List
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is the beginning of a new year, and a time when IBM is not only readying a new line of Power-based servers and an improved i5/OS operating system, but also rejiggering its Systems and Technology Group to do a better job chasing server sales among small and medium businesses and to preserve its strength in the enterprise server space. Before the concrete is poured into the 2008 forms, it is probably a good idea for all of us to give Big Blue a sense of the things we would like it to do with the System i product line. READ MORE >

Bracing for i5/OS V6R1 and the Winding Down of V5
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the two decades I have been watching the systems and server racket, the OS/400 and i5/OS family of operating systems have probably given their nearly 300,000 or so unique customers the least amount of trouble possible for a complex computer system running mission-critical applications. While some people have crabbed about bugs in particular releases since 1988 or were upset in 1995 and 1996 by the troubles they had making the CISC-to-RISC jump, software upgrades have been a comparatively easy process. READ MORE >

IBM Gets Clustered Storage and EMC Founder with XIV Buy
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The company's name is pronounced 'Ex Eye Vee,' and it stands for the Roman numeral for 'fourteen,' in honor of the fourteenth class of the Talpiot technical university, run by the Israeli military, that XIV Limited's founders all hail. And now the Israeli startup specializing in clustered disk storage is part of IBM's System Storage unit, which has its hands on the small company's substantial expertise in block-level, virtualized, clustered storage arrays. READ MORE >

As I See It: Weighty Matters
by Victor Rozek

The package arrived the day before Christmas. It came all the way from the East coast courtesy of my in-laws. As soon as my wife saw it, she got a sly look on her face and urged me to open it because, she said, it was 'time sensitive.' But my father-in-law is to packaging what Madonna is to restraint, so opening one of his packages requires a great deal of patience and resolve. Having a modest cache of explosives wouldn't hurt either. So I gathered a chisel, a hammer, a sharp knife, and a sturdy pair of pruning shears and set about penetrating the sedimentary layers of packaging. READ MORE >