Mirroring what IBM‘s formerly independent System p division did back in May, the Power Systems division–the amalgam of the System p division and the high-end of the now broken up System i division, which was created last week–has announced its first product. It is the first server with the System i brand that makes use of the dual-core Power6 processor. The machine bears a strong resemblance to the rejiggered System p 570 that Big Blue announced back in May.

While IBM may have split the System i division into two pieces, one that merged with its AIX and Linux

Well, the mystery about the naming and timing of the next release of the i5/OS operating system is over as of today. Last year, IBM hinted that it might come out some time this year, and there were even rumors in late 2006 that indicated IBM might ship what was tentatively called V5R5 in March 2007–perhaps on existing Power5+ machines, perhaps on a new line of Power6 servers.

As it turns out, the forthcoming System i operating system will be called i5/OS V6R1, in keeping with the naming convention used for IBM’s AIX Unix variant and the Power6 platform. And

While EMC is best known in the System i world as the platform’s only other provider of external disk besides IBM, a surprising number of EMC’s System i customers also utilize the company’s high availability offerings. What’s more, customers can use EMC’s HA and DR offerings, called TimeFinder and SRDF, not only to augment their System i servers, but to protect their Unix, Linux, NetWare, and Windows servers, thereby reducing complexity while boosting resiliency.

There was a time when only the biggest shops in the land could afford to even think about investing in a storage area network (SAN),

The transformation of System i into a platform for running cutting-edge, open source applications continued today when SugarCRM announced the availability of its customer relationship management (CRM) application for i5/OS. Sugar Enterprise, as the software is called, was written in PHP and uses Zend‘s PHP runtime environment and MySQL‘s open source database.

SugarCRM is a SourceForge success story. The story starts in April 2004, when John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor began an open source application development project on the Sourceforge Web site, which was set up to foster communication among programmers and other advocates of the

System i high availability software specialist Vision Solutions yesterday announced MIMIX for AIX version 3.0, a new version of the company’s high availability offering for AIX running on System p and System i servers.

MIMIX for AIX is a collection of products designed to provide failover protection for critical applications running on AIX-equipped RISC servers from IBM and other hardware vendors. The software includes two main products, including MIMIX EchoStream, which provides continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities, and MIMIX HA Cluster, which provides high availability and clustering capabilities. The software was obtained by Vision as part of its acquisistion of

Cerberus Capital Management announced this week a plan to acquire United Rentals, a large, publicly traded i5/OS shop, and also the owners of InfoManager, a developer of business intelligence solutions for the i5/OS platform.

Cerberus is best known to readers of this newsletter as the private equity firm that helped resurrect i5/OS ERP software developer SSA Global seven years ago, and funded its acquisition spree until SSA Global was eventually bought by another company backed by private equity, Infor, last year.

Lately, the name Cerberus, which is named after the three-headed dog of Greek mythology that guards the

Ericom, a provider of terminal emulation solutions for 5250, 3270, and Windows servers, last week unveiled PowerTerm WebConnect DeskView, a new virtualized desktop offering that enables organizations to run their users’ Windows or Linux desktops in a virtual partition on a server, and access them from any secure computer or thin client.

The move to server-based architectures has left some users behind, according to Ericom. Only about 75 percent of users at organizations implementing Windows terminal services are able to use the services to access their applications. The rest, who are typically power users, use virtual desktop solutions to

Users of Wavelink‘s emulation solutions for barcode scanners will be able to rest easy during operating system upgrades, as the Utah company recently announced it has adopted a way to make the OS upgrades seamless and painless when using Symbol devices from Motorola.

This is quite a departure from previous techniques, according to Wavelink. In the past, updating a device’s operating system required taking the device offline, packaging and shipping the device to the facility where the updates were to take place, manually installing the update, and then reinstalling the host settings. Obviously, the new approach will save

VAI (Vormittag Associates) has formed a partnership with B & C Management Systems (BCMS), a developer of retail solutions for the i5/OS platform, to build a connection between VAI’s S2K ERP systems and BCMS’ 4Sight Retail Management System.

VAI sells a version of its S2K ERP system designed specifically for the retail industry. The product includes Point of Sale (POS), accounting, inventory management, CRM, purchasing, warehouse management, and e-commerce components. BCMS, meanwhile, sells a more specialized merchandising solution, called 4Sight.

According to Joe Scioscia, vice president of sales for VAI, which is based in Ronkonkoma, New York, the partnership with

Global Software, the developer of software that allows users to view and update ERP data in real time through Microsoft Excel, has hired a former director, Deana Mitchell-Tavolacci, from the i5/OS market’s largest ERP software vendor, Infor, the company announced last week.

In her new role as director of channel alliances, Mitchell-Tavolacci’s primary responsibility will be to develop, build, and manage new partner alliances for Global. In particular, she’s expected to use her knowledge of the Infor ERP XA (formerly MAPICS) and Infor ERP SyteLine products to build out Global’s reach in those markets.

“I have been exposed