Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Server Sales Chug Along in the Third Quarter
December 6, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is still plenty of pent up demand out there in the data centers and data closets of the world for servers thanks to the dearth of server spending during the Great Recession. According to the box counters at Gartner, who released the market stats for the third quarter last week, companies shelled out some $12.3 billion acquiring 2.19 million servers in the 13-week period running from the beginning of June through the end of September.
Everyone wants to throw a party because that represented 15.3 percent revenue growth and 14.2 percent shipment growth compared to the third quarter
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Candescent Buys Quadrant Software as IntelliChief Spins Out
December 6, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYet another private equity firm has taken a stake in the IBM i marketplace. Last week, Boston-based Candescent Partners bought document management company Quadrant Software from the company’s founders, Peter DePierro and Gary Langton, for an undisclosed sum. Under the deal with Candescent Partners, DePierro and Langton are selling the Quadrant Software side of the business, which includes FastFax and Formtastic, to the private equity firm while retaining control of IntelliChief, the workflow management tool created by Quadrant.
According to Langton, the IntelliChief business has been a standalone company for the past two years and neither he nor DePierro
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Admin Alert: Prototype Instructions for Running TCP/IP in i5/OS Restricted State
December 1, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreA reader recently wrote asking how to configure i5/OS to use TCP/IP communications while in restricted state. Here are my prototype instructions for accomplishing this task. Due to constant uptime demands on my machines, however, I haven’t yet been able to fully test this process. But I invite any interested readers to test these instructions and write in with suggested changes. I’ll publish the best comments in a future article.
Getting Started with Restricted State TCP/IP
If you’re running recent versions of i5/OS or the i operating system, you should be able to run a subset of TCP/IP functions in
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The Top 10 IBM i Security Exposures, Part 1
December 1, 2010 Wayne O. Evans
… Read moreIn today’s highly security-conscious network environment, it’s important that you be aware of some of the common security exposures that could lead to a security breach of your systems. Even though there are excellent security features built into IBM i, today’s network environments often open your systems to exposures not even dreamed of a few years ago.
Based on numerous security reviews I have conducted across different industries, the same types of security exposures appear over and over again. In this series of articles, I describe the top 10 most common security exposures and provide suggestions for minimizing your risk.
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IDC: Hardware Spending To Cool, But Maintain
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHardware spending is a leading indicator for overall IT spending, even after you adjust for Moore’s Law improvements, because the appetite for processing, memory, and I/O capacity has not in the past 40 years abated much. But spending does rise and fall with the economy, and even though late 2009 and through 2010 has seen some good growth, it doesn’t look like we are in the middle of a new dot-com boom.
I just happened to be browsing IDC‘s Web site when it randomly kicked out a hardware spending forecast for 2009 through 2014 in a daily graphic that
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Big Blue Runs the Power 740 Through the SAP Data Warehousing Paces
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNow that the entry and midrange Power7-based servers are out there, IBM is releasing a smattering of benchmark tests on the boxes to show how they stand up on real-world workloads. The latest is on a data warehousing benchmark test based on code from SAP that Big Blue has been favoring in recent years.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not just to highlight the very good SQL processing of the DB2 for i database, but also because no one else runs this benchmark test and therefore IBM can avoid odious comparisons.
As you know, SAP’s ERP software
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Jury Says SAP Owes Oracle $1.3 Billion Over TomorrowNow Theft
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreGerman software giant SAP acquired the defunct TomorrowNow software unit to try to steal away some business from application rival Oracle, and by doing so it may have inadvertently helped fuel a new wave of acquisitions by the database, application, and increasingly serious systems vendor. That’s because the jury deciding the TomorrowNow lawsuit has said that SAP should pay Oracle $1.3 billion in damages.
When the trial started four weeks ago, there was some talk that Oracle and SAP were possibly going to settle the issue, but that didn’t happen. You can’t pay for the kind of adverse publicity
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IBM Puts Power Systems and System z Server Under One Manager
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSometimes it takes a lot longer for information trickling out of IBM to reach us than you would think. Back in July I told you all about Big Blue’s merger of the Systems and Technology Group, which makes servers, storage, and chips, and its Software Group, which makes operating systems, databases, and middleware. What was not apparent when IBM consolidated systems and software as well as reconsolidated its services units back into the Global Services behemoth, it had also converged its Power Systems and System z mainframe server lines under one general manager.
The System z and Power Systems machines
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Reader Feedback on Crazy Idea Number 528: Apple Mac OS X on Power Systems
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe admittedly crazy idea I had to have IBM step in and offer to re-port Mac OS X back to Power Systems and make some arrangement with Apple to sell the operating system on Power7-based servers now that Apple has killed off its own X64-based Xserve products did not meet with universal enthusiasm with readers of The Four Hundred. But not everyone thought it was completely nuts.
–TPM
You are right. This is one crazy idea.
Unfortunately, having IBM put out an Xserve replacement using a PowerPC processor is just plain dumb. Apple went to all of the trouble
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IBM Tosses In Freebie RHEL Linux with Power Express Servers
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has been hoping for years that Linux would drive new workloads on Power-based systems where OS/400-i platforms are the back-end systems just like Linux-based partitions have, to a certain extent, been the salvation of the System z mainframe. It is hard to say for sure how much traction Linux has gotten at OS/400 and i shops–or even AIX shops for that matter–but what I can tell you is that Big Blue wants you to give Linux a shot so badly it is willing to fork out the cash to get you to try the first license.