• iSociety Hosts Chat on New DB2 Query Tool

  August 20, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is getting ready to ship the new DB2 Web Query for System i business intelligence tool on September 14, and last week the iSociety System i advocacy group hosted a Web chat to go over some of the features and field questions about the product. DB2 Web Query is a subset of the WebFOCUS tool from Information Builders and is a long-overdue replacement for IBM’s own Query/400 tool. Doug Mack, the marketing manager for the System i DB2 products at IBM, hosted the Web chat. If you missed the chat, the transcript for the chat is posted here.

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• Power6-Based System i Performance: Your Mileage Will Vary

  August 13, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, I walked you through some performance and price/performance comparisons for the new Power6-based System i 570 server, which was announced in July. In that story, I focused on IBM‘s Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) ratings for the new box as well as on three prior generations of 16-core systems. This week, I will go over some other performance metrics that IBM is making available to help i5/OS and OS/400 shops suss out the amount of work these machines can do. Two weeks ago, I went through comparisons of 16-core machines using Power4, Power5, Power5+, and Power6 processors

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• Performance Per Watt on Power6: Same Thermals, More Work

  August 13, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The largest data centers in the world, particularly those that are located on the East and West coasts of the United States or in similarly heavily urbanized areas around the globe that strain their respective power grids, are facing two problems. The first problem is that their data centers are running out of power and cooling capacity to keep servers and their related storage running. The second problem, affecting mostly urban areas on the coasts so far but maybe everywhere on the grid as electricity consumption grows, is that power companies are actually telling corporations that they have to cap

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• IBM’s Reorg: The Good Me or the Bad Me?

  August 13, 2007 Brian Kelly

  IBM has revamped its marketing organization ostensibly “to better target the small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) market” as stated by corporate executives. The System i division had been part of the IBM Systems and Technology Group (STG). System p division had been part of the STG as well. Neither division exists in the new IBM. Instead, there is one sales group that sells large enterprise customers and another that sells to SMBs. As defined by IBM, SMB means businesses with no more than 1,000 employees. Since IBM is in the services and software business (in addition to its systems or servers business),

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Classical Architecture

  August 13, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  In the 16th century, the Italian architect Andrea Palladio designed buildings that reached back 2,000 years to the golden age of Greece for their inspiration. Two hundred years later, during what would be called the neoclassical period, Thomas Jefferson built Monticello, a tribute to Palladio’s work. Even today, classical architecture remains an influence in the construction of buildings that are intended to be monuments to governmental power, educational prowess, or financial strength. Computers have architectures, too, and some of them are indeed classical in their own way. IBM‘s computer architects, at their best, understand classical aesthetics. IBM’s system designers

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• Shearer Chats with iSociety Members About System i Subdivision

  August 13, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Old habits are hard to break, and it is difficult to not say “Mark Shearer, general manager of the System i division.” Shearer is no longer in charge of an IBM division, but rather works as the top executive responsible for the i5/OS platform within the newly constituted Power Systems division. In any event, Shearer hosted a fireside chat with members of the iSociety user community recently, and talked a bit more about the reorganization in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. If you missed the chat (which I did), you can read the transcript here. The chat went over

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• Zend, IBM Weave PHP and Blue Software a Little Tighter

  August 13, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The semi-annual LinuxWorld trade show was hosted in San Francisco last week, and server and operating system maker IBM and PHP creator Zend Technologies used the occasion to announce that they would be working more closely to align PHP and IBM software on Big Blue’s platforms. The two companies have announced a broadening of their partnership, which saw Zend and IBM deliver an integrated development stack mixing the core Zend development and runtime products–known as Zend Core–with IBM’s DB2 Express-C database as well as porting a variant of this software, called Zend Core for i5/OS, to the System i platform

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• Server Makers Dominate Tape Market, Says IDC

  August 13, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The analysts at IDC have cased the tape market for the first quarter of 2007, and the big server makers who peddle tape drives, tape autoloaders, tape libraries, and virtual tape libraries were the big winners. On a worldwide basis and across all kinds of tape products, IBM came out as the big winner in the IDC rankings in the first quarter, with just under $300 million in sales, giving it a 32.2 percent share of the $931 million market. Hewlett-Packard came in second in tape sales in the quarter, with $232.6 million in sales, with 25 percent of the

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• Apache Losing Ground Against IIS on the Web

  August 13, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are the dominant supplier of server operating systems in the world, as Microsoft has become in the past decade, you can bide your time on the Web server front, taking small bites of market share from open source and other alternatives, counting on the weight of OS market share and tight integration of the Web server with the OS to propel your own Web server to new heights. This is what Microsoft has done, and the strategy has worked, if the latest market share statistics from Netcraft are any guide. According to the August 2007 Web Server Survey

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• Agilysys Is Back in the Black in First Quarter

  August 13, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server reseller Agilysys, which has a substantial presence in the System i market, has swung to a profit in its fiscal 2008 first quarter ended June 30, and has done so because sales are up and it got out of the IT distribution business back in January. Agilysys said that in the first quarter, sales were up 20 percent to $128.4 million. About $12 million of that growth (or around 56 percent of that) came because of acquisitions earlier this year, but the company also had organic growth as well. In the first quarter, hardware sales were up 20

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