Better Than a Sharp Stick in the i
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A business computer, no matter its architecture or applications, is really just a place to have a conversation between a buyer and a seller of a good or a service and the means to record that conversation for posterity. And the tax man. It is amazing to me, some days, that I spend my days as a second or third order derivative of that conversation. I talk about the people who build the platforms that support those transactions, who are themselves once removed from the transactions. It's all talking about talking about talking. And the funny thing is, all this talk is still interesting to me--and useful to IT shops trying to improve those conversations and therefore their business. READ MORE >

Power7 Blades: The i/DB2 Combo Versus AIX/Oracle
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM sure doesn't like to make it easy for customers to figure out the relative bang for the buck its various platforms offer. And it never has in the more than two decades I've been at this game. With the advent of the Power7-based blade servers, this has not suddenly or miraculously gotten easier. But despite the difficulty of trying to come up with an apples-to-apples comparison, I think it is safe to say this: In many cases, the premium that IBM is charging i For Business shops for configured Power7 blade servers is reasonable compared to what it costs to configure AIX and an Oracle database on the same identical blades. READ MORE >

EMC Keeps i/OS Business Moving Forward with New IBM Agreement
by Alex Woodie

Co-opetition is alive and well in the world of high-end System i storage, thanks to a renewal of the technology agreement between EMC and IBM. Last week, the two technology titans agreed to a five-year extension of their landmark 2006 agreement, which promises EMC access to low-level protocols needed to support the System i's proprietary storage architecture with its line of Symmetrix and Clariion SAN arrays as well as its virtual tape libraries and hardware-based replication offerings. READ MORE >

As I See It: Life Logging
by Victor Rozek

For all its remarkable properties, the brain is fallible and forgetful. Its formidable powers decline with age. Memories fade, knowledge retention is fleeting, and recall is unreliable. Interpretation of distant events is likely to be incomplete or inaccurate. Painful memories dwarf happy ones. Events are reduced to impressions. Time is compressed. Many people cannot even remember vast portions of their past, as if decades were torn from the fabric of their lives. Memory drifts, and over time the splendid minutia of our lives is forever lost. READ MORE >