That Faster Power 750 Motor Is Made for IBM i Shops
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you pay for your operating system on a per-core basis, not a per socket basis, and that operating system includes a relational database and costs as much as Big Blue charges for the IBM i platform, there is one thing I can tell you for sure: you want the fastest processor that IBM can ship, and you don't want to pay for extra cores you will never need, to get the best bang for the buck. READ MORE >

All Kinds of Goodies Added to IBM i 7.1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's no secret that I like hardware, but I am the first to admit that the endless progression of hardware improvements is merely there to make software run better, faster, or more reliably. The hardware is the easy part; the software is the hard part and it therefore moves a lot more slowly on the evolutionary scale than hardware. That said, companies like to roll out new software releases with new hardware releases to give customers twice as many reasons to think about spending some money. READ MORE >

Power Systems Sales Jump 19 Percent in Q1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Systems business is finally hitting on all five cylinders: blade servers, entry servers, midrange servers, enterprise servers, and the big bad box. It took IBM the better part of a year to get the entire Power7-based server lineup into the field, and the first quarter of 2011 was the first financial period when all of the new iron was available and, perhaps more importantly, when customers thought business conditions had stabilized enough for them to actually spend money. READ MORE >

As I See It: 'He Kindly Stopped for Me'
by Victor Rozek

Richard was at work when his wife died. Although it was a Saturday, he was hunched over a keyboard, stringing together lines of code that would become a customized inventory control system. He had hoped to join his wife and some friends for a bike ride, but the project was late, the client was impatient, and Richard prided himself on being conscientious. When his phone rang, the caller ID said it was his wife, but the voice on the other end was male and the tone was grave. Afterward, he could not recall all of what the man said, just the four words that ended life as he knew it: There's been an accident. . . . READ MORE >