• IBM Offers Upgrade and Trade-In Promotions to Bolster System i Sales

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With new user-priced System i 515 and 525 boxes out the door a month and a half ago to address the entry server market and no expectation of a revamping of the System i line with the Power6 processors until early 2008–unless, of course, market conditions force IBM to change its plans–the company last week announced a number of promotions that are designed to lower the cost of buying a modern System i and get customers to spend now rather than later. The upgrade and trade-in promotion deals that IBM announced concurrently with the launch of the first Power6-based server–a

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• The X Factor: Small Is Beautiful

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past five decades of the computer industry, three forces have been at work that have determined the trajectory of all hardware and software technologies. The first, and perhaps the most important, is the desire by companies and individuals to want to automate processes and store data. Without this desire, Moore’s Law–the ability to put more transistors on a chip to boost processing or memory capacity–would be meaningless. Data centers would be the size of a pack of cigarettes, and they would only cost $100. This desire to computerize processes and information that were otherwise done by people and

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• IBM Announces New HMCs for System p and System i Servers

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the launch of the System p 570 Power6-based server last week, IBM also announced three new Hardware Management Consoles, or HMCs. These devices have been necessary since the advent of the Power5 processor three years ago to control the logical partitioning and capacity on demand (for processor cores and main memory) inside System i and System p servers; mainframes have had HMCs even longer, by the way. System p 575, 590, and 595 boxes, whether they are running AIX or Linux, require an HMC, and the i5 595 box requires an HMC as well. AIX and Linux

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• Big Blue Offers Free Monitoring to Server Customers

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Remote customer support provided via modem was one of the big innovations that IBM brought out with the AS/400 back in the summer of 1988, and the idea continues to evolve as server platforms and networking technologies change. Last week, IBM announced a free monitoring service to customers who buy its servers–that’s System i, System p, System x, System z, and BladeCenter–or its high-end DS8000 disk arrays. As long as the products are under IBM warranty or you have a maintenance agreement once the warranty has run out, you can use the Electronic Service Agent. This software is available for

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• IDC Projects Disk Capacity to Grow, But Revenues to Flatten

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thank heavens for the Internet, rich media content, governance, and regulatory compliance. That is what executives at the vendors of disk arrays must be saying to themselves each night as they go to sleep. The voracious appetite for disk capacity in enterprise systems has been growing at 60 percent a year for so long that people think it is a law, and if the projections made by IDC are correct, then the IT community’s appetite for disk capacity in the coming years is not going to abate. According to a recent report entitled Worldwide Disk Storage Systems 2007 – 2011

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• InfiniBand Finds Its Place in the Data Center

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is tough for any new networking or peripheral interconnect to break into the computer market, and it is particularly tough for a new technology that seeks to be all kinds of connectivity for all kinds of devices. So it has been for InfiniBand. But, InfiniBand has found its niches in the data centers of the world and has become an established technology for workloads that demand the highest bandwidth and the lowest latency. When the Future I/O spec from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and the then-independent Compaq was merged with the Next Generation I/O project from Intel, Sun

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• Magic Software Boosts Revenues and Profits in Q1

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Development tool provider Magic Software Enterprises has reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2007 ended March 31, and business has picked up enough to flip the company solidly into the black. In the first quarter, Magic Software’s total revenues came to $16.4 million, up 7 percent from the first quarter of 2006 and even up 1 percent compared to the sales level the company set in the final quarter of 2006. The company had an operating profit of $1.1 million, which was better than the $200,000 operating loss in the year ago period, and brought $1 million

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• NetManage’s Losses Grow as Sales Decline in the First Quarter

  May 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While NetManage, a maker of host connectivity and legacy application modernization tools for i5/OS and mainframe servers, managed to close some high-profile deals in the first quarter ended March 31, the company nonetheless saw revenues fall off, pushing NetManage into a loss. NetManage, which has resisted the temptation to be acquired so far and which remains a publicly traded company, reported sales were down by 9 percent in the first quarter to $7.7 million. While services fees rose by 2 percent to $5.9 million in the quarter, software license sales fell by 35 percent to $1.8 million. With costs

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• IBM Tweaks i5 515 and 525 User-Based Prices

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After getting lots of feedback from customers, resellers, and independent software developers who have been reacting to the announcement of the user-priced System i5 515 and 525 Power5+ servers, IBM has made some modifications to the way software is priced on the boxes. The change in pricing gives the i5 515 and 525 servers a better fit into the way certain kinds of customers make use of the box, and it also shows that IBM wants to react fast to any feedback from customers to get the pricing right. When the i5 515 and 525 servers were launched on April

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• An i5 Platform: Q&A with Marlin Equity’s Top Brass

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  An i5 Platform: Q&A with Marlin Equity’s Top Brass Two weeks ago, Marlin Equity Partners, a relative newcomer in the private equity business that was founded by people with more than a passing familiarity with the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem, acquired Aldon, one of the big providers of application lifecycle development tools in the System i market. The top brass at Marlin Equity, which has big plans for the i5 market, took some time out of their schedules to chat about those plans and to explain why they are entering the market as an investment platform for the

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