Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Avnet Eats The Rest Of Magirus
July 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe big keep on getting bigger, and now master reseller Avnet has ponied up an undisclosed sum to acquire Magirus Group, an IT distributor based in Stuttgart, Germany.
Magirus has operations across Western Europe and is in every country except Ireland, Finland, and Norway; the company also has operations in the Middle East, centered in Dubai. The company was founded in 1981 and back in October 2007 when Avnet acquired the IBM and Hewlett-Packard systems distribution business from Magirus, the company had sales in the range of €700 million (about $996 million) and had over 600 employees; the IBM
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IBM Lets You Take PureSystems For A Spin On SmartCloud
July 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe new PureSystem modular and hybrid systems from IBM are both familiar and different at the same time, and will require a little tire kicking before customers are comfortable making the switch from standalone machines to converged boxes. That’s why IBM is offering trial capacity for 90 days to customers who want to take PureSystems out for a spin.
The offer, which you can sign up for here at IBM’s developerWorks development web site, was quietly announced on June 1 as a beta program and is available in 59 countries around the world spanning all geographies. The PureSystems are back-ending
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Help/Systems Buys Safestone To Boost Power Systems Security
July 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSystem management, security, and database query software maker Help/Systems has been on an acquisition tear for the past six years, and has done it again with a deal to buy British security software maker Safestone Technologies. The Safestone buy marks the third acquisition by Help/Systems in the past 13 months and demonstrates that the company is serious about extending from its IBM i base out to AIX and Linux platforms.
Safestone has offices in the Yorkshire burg of Sheffield and in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, west of London. Like PowerTech and Bytware, two formerly independent security companies that were acquired
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Some Insight Into Those Future Power7+ Processors
July 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA few weeks ago, I told you that IBM was getting ready to start talking about its future Power7+ and System zNext processors at the Hot Chips conference at the end of August. Like you, I am an impatient sort when it comes to getting some insight into future processors from any vendor, and I like to poke around and see what I can find out about these chips as soon as possible because it is interesting and useful to know as much as possible as soon as possible.
I like rummaging around the Internet for processor roadmaps and such
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Admin Alert: Finding TCP/IP Interface History And More On The NetServer GO Nets Installation Library
June 27, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreFor this week’s column, here’s some interesting information I found about discovering the history of your TCP/IP interfaces and how to retrieve the QUSRTOOL library for installing the IBM i NetServer GO NETS menu discussed in last week’s column.
Displaying The History Of Your IBM i TCP/IP Interfaces
If you’re on i 6.1 or above, here’s an easy way to determine when and how your TCP/IP interfaces were last started or stopped. You can do this by looking at the job log history of the TCP/IP control job, QTCPWRK (formerly named QTCPIP in V5R4Mx and below).
Whenever TCP/IP
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European Server Market Swoons, Quite Predictably
June 25, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe box counters at IDC gave their overview of the server racket in the first quarter on a global basis a few weeks ago, and now the company has done a deep sort on its data and drilled into the data for the EMEA market. And man, it sure doesn’t look good if Europe is any kind of leading indicator for the global economy and server sales are a kind of canary in the coal mine.
As The Four Hundred explained two weeks ago, the overall server market had a 2.4 percent revenue decline in the first quarter, falling
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IBM Says No Passing On Power Systems Rebates To Someone Else
June 25, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSometimes, you don’t know something is going on until someone in authority tells you that you have to stop doing it.
Last week, on the 24th birthday of the AS/400, IBM tweaked a bunch of already-running announcements with an interesting provision, which reads:
“[T]he ability to request that the IBM Redemption Center (IRC) make rebate checks/cheques payable to someone else has been removed. The IRC will disregard this information, if included, on any Rebate request forms it receives, and will send the rebate to the customer that acquired the eligible products.”
You would have assumed that this would have been
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Power7+ Details To Be Revealed At Hot Chips 24
June 25, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf all goes well, I will be flying out west in late August to visit Stanford University and the Hot Chips 24 symposium on processors and other types of chips used in the gadgetry around us in the data center and in our offices and homes. It’s a total geek fest, with presentations that are about 75 percent over my head, and the kind of thing I love to do because being a dummy and admitting it is the only way to learn anything.
A whole bunch of server chips are going to be revealed at the Hot Chips event,
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IBM Tweaks Flex Prices, Offers Flex Services
June 25, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like customers doing some tire kicking on IBM‘s new PureSystems modular systems have been complaining a little about some of the pricing on the boxes and are looking for a little help to get the new iron and its systems and cloud management software up and running. Big Blue last week tweaked some pricing on the Flex System iron underneath the PureSystems configurations, and tweaked some pricing on BladeCenter and Power Systems machines while also rolling out implementation services for Flex System machinery.
First, let’s go over the price changes. In announcement letter 312-070, you will
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The Big Two Four For The Four Oh Oh
June 25, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen you are a computer system of a certain age, you have to count your blessings as well as your aches and pains. As I sit here on June 21, 2012, I just took a walk in Manhattan down on Broadway to intentionally experience the 97-degree heat that is still building toward 100 this afternoon. I didn’t take a walk because this heat wave would clear my head and somehow focus my mind, but rather because for once I would be forced to walk at a lazy pace and let my mind wander through all the many years we have