Stacking Up New Power7 Against Power6/6+ Blades
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When IBM announced the new Power7-based blade servers on April 13, it was pretty obvious from the get-go that the Power7 blades would pack a lot of processing oomph compared to the Power6+ blades--the JS23 and JS43--that they replace. Like around three times the oomph and twice the main memory per blade. This is a great testament to Moore's Law. READ MORE >

RPG Open Access Is No Panacea, Say BCD and LANSA
by Dan Burger

For every up, there's a down. For every left, there's a right. Two people watch the same movie and one says it was everything I hoped it would be and more while the other says it's a poorly done remake of a movie from 10 years earlier. The just-released IBM i 7.1 operating system, and in particular the feature known as Open Access, already has prompted opinions about what it is and what it can do. READ MORE >

Power Systems Slammed by Power7 Transitions in Q1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM may have announced new Power Systems iron based on Power7 processors in the middle of the first quarter, but because they didn't ship until a few weeks later, the new machinery did not do all that much to help Big Blue's finances during the first quarter. But IBM is, by design, an engine with multiple cylinders, and luckily even while the Power Systems and mainframe pistons were sticking a little, X64 servers and software were firing nicely and helped fill in some gaps. READ MORE >

As I See It: Depriving the Senses
by Victor Rozek

One of the more intriguing but seldom quoted lines of English letters comes to us courtesy of James Joyce. It's from a short story called A Painful Case, part of a collection of 15 stories about Irish life titled Dubliners. In one brief sentence Joyce not only introduces his main character, but manages to capsulize the totality of his cheerless existence: Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body READ MORE >