• IDSync Comes to IBM i from Trucking World

  September 18, 2012 Alex Woodie

  One of the new software vendors you might have seen at IBM i conferences this year is InnerApps, the Ohio-based developer of an identity management solution called Identity Syncronizer. The company, which was spun off from an IT services firm with experience in the IBM i trucking software world, is ramping up the visibility of IDSync, which allows companies to extend the power of their Microsoft Active Directory software to manage identities and employee access to non-Windows computing resources. InnerApps was founded in 2010 as a subsidiary of Tranztec Solutions, an IT services and hosting firm that is

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• IBM Redbook Helps Out With PowerVM

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hot off the presses! If you are trying to get your brain wrapped around the PowerVM hypervisor for dicing and slicing IBM late last week just published a new authoritative Redbook on the virty beast. You can see a draft of the Redbook, called IBM PowerVM Best Practices, which was put out on September 14 and which is due to be finalized in November of this year. Presumably with updates for the new versions of the hypervisor with tweaks to support the new Power7+ systems that are due in the next couple of weeks if my server-sense is correct.

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• IT Industry Leads Job Cutting In The U.S.

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Not only does automation help companies reduce their payrolls, the relentless competition among IT and telecom equipment and service suppliers and the drive to ever-higher profit levels is causing them to shed workers instead of adding them. So says the head-hunters and employment analysts at Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. In its most recent report, Challenger said that employers in the United States who actually make their job cuts known (as required when they hit a certain level in states that require filings) said they were going to shed 32,239 workers in August, the most recent data available. The level

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• Big Data Is The Big Winner At The U.S. Open

  September 17, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Andy Murray and Serena Williams may have dominated the courts at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York, during the recent 2012 U.S. Open, but behind the scenes, the real action was being served up by IBM. Sure, it’s easy for the average fan to get distracted by the tennis action, but to Big Blue, each serve, volley, and point is more than just an exciting play between athletes. To IBM, that action is big data. “Big data is impacting so many aspects of sporting events, that it’s no longer a stretch to say

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• IBM Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is On Storwize Data Compression

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Storwize V7000 disk arrays are at the heart of the new Flex System modular systems announced by IBM back in April, featuring converged Power and X86 server nodes, integrated versions of the V7000 arrays, and integrated switching. The arrays can also be attached to plain vanilla Power Systems boxes running IBM i, AIX, or Linux and are the important midrange of IBM’s storage lineup. So when IBM says Storwize arrays can compress files like crazy and thereby save IT shops money, customers want to believe it. To demonstrate its commitment to its compression algorithms (or rather, the ones it

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• Storage Arrays Keep Selling Despite Server Slowdown In Q2

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The need for more storage capacity in the data center is continuing to outpace the need for capacity, at least in terms of growth, according to the latest data from IDC. As The Four Hundred previously reported, the company reckons that the world consumed 2 million servers in the second quarter (down 3.6 percent) and drove $12.6 billion in revenues (down 4.8 percent). Disk arrays, by contrast, drive $8.1 billion in sales over the same three months, up 8 percent from the year-ago period, and total disk capacity shipped in those disk arrays hit an aggregate of 6,667

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• IBM To Stop Peddling Power6+ Processors Soon

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power7+ processors and their related Power Systems machinery looming on the horizon sometime before the end of the year, according to IBM‘s top brass, it is no surprise that Big Blue is beginning the process of winding down sales of new Power6+ system boards and related peripherals. These machines are two generations back, and no vendor likes to sell more than one generation back even if they do support any old iron for many, many years in terms of running software and providing tech support. In announcement letter 912-815, IBM is telling customers to get out

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Malady Of All Empires

  September 17, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  Here we are, more than five years after the debut of the iPhone, welcoming the fifth generation of this iconic product. Actually it’s more than iconic. Late last winter, Forbes pointed out that Apple’s iPhone business had become bigger than all of Microsoft. People like their iPhones a lot, and their Androids, too. They enjoy iPads and Kindles, and soon, perhaps, other tablets. Love for PCs? Not so much. In fact, it’s a tragedy. If the vendors and their suppliers want to survive, they ought to reflect on mythical Greeks, such as Narcissus and Echo and Nemesis. Just in case

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• PowerVM Outshines Other VMs In IBM-Backed Report

  September 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  There are many things that set PowerVM apart from other hypervisors on the market. For starters, the server virtualization products from VMware and Microsoft have a much, much bigger installed base than IBM‘s Power Systems hypervisor. But does that make them better? Not according to a recent report commissioned by IBM, which found that PowerVM is quicker to deploy, more stable at scale, requires fewer people to manage, costs less, consumes fewer resources, and delivers higher availability than the other leading brands. IBM hired Solitaire Interglobal Ltd. (SIL) to gather operational data from companies in various industries with the

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• Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1, And Do It Well?

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We get a lot of questions here at IT Jungle, and we do our best to try to get you answers. With new Power7+ servers coming soon, IBM is getting ready to mothball Power6+ processor cards early next year (as we report on elsewhere in this issue), and i5/OS V5R4 support being ceased on September 30 next year, customers with older Power5 through Power6+ machinery have a lot to think about. One customer who contacted us recently is willing to ponder the jump from i5/OS V5R4 to IBM i 7.1, but none of the documentation that either he

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