Take Power Systems Training for a Test Drive on IBM’s Nickel
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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It’s not every day I see IBM give away anything for free, much less see it two times in the same week. As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere in this issue, Big Blue has a try-and-buy program where it is letting companies and individuals tool around with a Power 520 server for two months. The company has also announced via its Web site (but not a formal announcement letter) some free Power Systems training courses. IBM is offering seven of its online, instructor-led training courses for Power Systems shops for free, and some of them actually have something to do with the i platform. But don’t get the wrong idea. This is a four-hour snapshot of what is usually a three- to five-day online class. IBM doesn’t really give anything away for free, as you know full well as a long-time AS/400 customer. Two of the courses that IBM is giving a taste of are basic introductions to the i and AIX operating systems, and these courses are basically only suitable for newbies who are coming out of college with experience with Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. The other courses, which you can see listed here, go over the PowerHA clustering technologies for i and AIX, the PowerVM hypervisor, DB2 Web Query for i, and the Systems Director systems management tool, which spans i, AIX, and Linux on the Power boxes. If you are negotiating a deal on a new Power7 server or an upgrade to one, you should look at the IBM training catalog and see if there are some courses that would be useful to your IT shop. IBM may not be willing to discount much on Power7 iron and hardly at all on the i 6.1.1 or i 7.1 operating system, but you can probably take at least something out of Big Blue’s hide in free training. RELATED STORIES IBM Does a Try-and-Buy for the Power 520 Sun Backs Into the SMB Customer Space Sun Builds on Growth in Fiscal Q1, But Profits Still Elude Sometimes You Have to Think–and Look–Inside the Box
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