A Peek Inside IBM's Smart Analytics System
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While The Four Hundred was on holiday at the end of July, IBM hosted a shindig at one of its adjunct T.J. Watson Research Center campuses in Hawthorne, New York, which is just a 30-minute drive from my house in Upstate Manhattan. And even though I was busy with a bunch of non-work work--you know what I am talking about here, people--I decided to put on some clean clothes and go listen to some of the top brass at Big Blue talk some about this business analytics and optimization (BAO) opportunity that IBM is chasing and the systems it is deploying to chase it. READ MORE >

Maximum Availability Foresees Growth with 20/20 Program
by Alex Woodie

If its new 20/20 promotional program has its desired effect, Maximum Availability will have more installations of its *noMAX high availability software suite to look forward to. Under the program, which the company announced late last week, Maximum Availability is enticing users of other System i HA products to switch to *noMAX with the promise that they will pay 20 percent less than they do under their current contract. READ MORE >

Vision Solutions Promotes Two Flavors of Continuous Data Protection
by Dan Burger

Although the number of IBM iSeries shops that run AIX, or backup AIX, in a partition on the iSeries is pretty much a speck on the map, a considerably larger number of iSeries shops share their data center space with significant AIX systems. Disaster recovery and high availability vendor Vision Solutions sees this mix on a regular basis. Although well-known on the i side, the company is looking for a similarly commanding position on the AIX side. READ MORE >

As I See It: Daniel, Part One
by Victor Rozek

Unless you're a statistician or a baseball fan, statistics are boring. The numbers generated by the seizing economy and the ill-chosen efforts to resuscitate it, are sterile, too big to grasp, and void of back story. For the purpose of understanding, statistics are to experience what birth certificates are to giving birth. In other words, stripped of all consequence, there can be no understanding. William Greider, in his groundbreaking book Secrets of the Temple, an in-depth exploration of the workings of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged that each time the Board of Governors voted to increase interest rates, they understood that their decision would spike suicide rates. Such real-life consequences of economic policy, however, are seldom reported. READ MORE >