IBM's Math on User-Priced System i Versus Vintage Machines
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the phenomenal things about the AS/400, iSeries, and System i machines, and their predecessors, the System/36 and the System 38, is their electronic longevity. These boxes continue to do useful work long after the economic life of the systems is long since expended. OS/400 and i5/OS shops may be willing to pay a premium for such rugged machines, but they sure don't like to do it as often as IBM would like. And so, Big Blue has to make the case for customers using vintage machines to move to new iron. READ MORE >

Midrange Shops Get Disaster Recovery Services from IBM
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM's Global Services group has been trying to find a way to get a larger slice of the budget at small and medium businesses in its own customer base for many years. And with a new offering with the unwieldy name of Disaster Recovery Services for Data Center Recovery--Recovery Express, IBM thinks it has just the right thing to not only help it keep its services business growing, but to help customers who cannot afford a full-blown high availability cluster to use IBM's own machines in its own data centers as hot backups. READ MORE >

Ask TPM: Two System i Questions, and Two Responses
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Our experts over at Four Hundred Guru get asked a lot of questions and they provide a lot of good answers. But some of your questions are of a strategic or tactical nature, having to do with broader issues in the information technology space or with the i5/OS and OS/400 platform. So if you have a question you want to get my take on--or you want to use me to get a straight answer out of the people in IBM who know what is going on--then send me an email and I will see what I can do. Here's a recent set of questions I received from a reader of The Four Hundred. READ MORE >

As I See It: Survey Says . . .
by Victor Rozek

One of the manifestations of human curiosity is our endless need to survey public opinion on every conceivable subject from voter preference to Viagra usage. Periodically, people are asked to identify which professions are most stressful, and I'm always surprised when bomb squad doesn't top every list. Apparently, whether you're a member of an exceptionally stressful profession depends entirely on who is asking and answering the questions. Yahoo recently featured links to several survey results listing the most stressful and depressing jobs. According to one survey, the top five stressors in ascending order were: medical intern, air traffic controller, miner, policeman, and inner city high school teacher. READ MORE >