TFH Volume: 15 Issue: 39 Archives

IBM Shoots Down Quad-Core Power5+ Modules for the System i

October 2, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Several weeks ago, after I became irritated by the relatively poor showing that the System i5 machines using the new Power5+ processors had in the Bang for the Buck series of articles that have been running in The Four Hundred, I wrote a story that basically said that if IBM cannot tune i5/OS and DB2/400 to take advantage of the iron the way it has done for AIX and DB2 UDB, then it should just throw hardware at the problem and move to the quad-core module (QCM) variants of the Power5+ and drop these into the System i5.

This

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AIX’s Partition Relocation Support Pushed to 2007; i5/OS V5R5 Support Unclear

October 2, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Earlier this year, the executives who are in charge of the development of IBM ‘s AIX Unix variant said that the company was working on an extension to its logical partitioning technology that would make logical machines portable across physical machines. That technology has been delayed, and is being pushed out into 2007, probably to coincide with the launch of Power6-based servers. This technology is widely expected to eventually make its way into the System i5 servers.

In January, Satya Sharma, the lead architect of the AIX platform at IBM, said that Big Blue was planning a maintenance release of

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Bang for the Buck: Big Iron Boxes, Even Bigger Bucks

October 2, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the past few months, I have examined the price/performance of baby, small, midrange, and enterprise System i5 servers against their competition in the Windows, Linux, and Unix counterparts. But there are bigger boxes still, the so-called big iron machines, which are the largest single-system image servers that any vendor puts into the field. While the System i5 machines do poorly compared to their peers at the low end when it comes to value for dollar, on the biggest boxes, the System i5 can be competitive.

That’s not to say that there is not plenty of room for improvement, so

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IBM to Try Selling Technical Services as Products

October 2, 2006 Alex Woodie

When you think IBM technical services, chances are you think Global Services and the Fortune 500 companies that typically can afford these valued specialists. Over the next two months, IBM will be trying to change that perception, and its underlying reality, with the introduction of a series of bundles that combine the services of specialists with hardware and software, as part of a product-oriented sell designed to attract more small and mid size business (SMB) customers. But can Big Blue pull off the nimble transition?

IBM’s Global Services arm is a sprawling business that brought it more than $46 billion

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Shearer Talks Up the Strengths of the System i

October 2, 2006 Dan Burger and Alex Woodie

Mark Shearer has been general manager of the i5/OS and OS/400 platform through two name changes and four COMMON events, which makes him one of the longest-running GMs in recent times. He is the face of the System i for thousands of organizations and millions of users. Shearer sat down with IT Jungle at the COMMON conference in Miami to give us an update on how the System i is doing, and where it is going.

Being the GM of any of IBM’s server divisions is a bit of a challenge. When IBM’s system and server units were separate fiefdoms

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LTO Tape Drives a Smashing Success

October 2, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape drive format that was created through the collaboration of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Seagate Technologies, has essentially rolled all over its competition in the tape archiving market.

According to the three LTO partners, more than 1.5 million LTO Ultrium tape drives and more than 50 million LTO tape cartridges have shipped since the LTO format first became available in September 2000.

Products meeting the Ultrium LTO 3 specification, which adds write once, read many (WORM) capabilities to the tapes, have just begun shipping. Now, the LTO partners are working on adding native

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Chip Makers Embrace Co-Processors, Again

October 2, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If chip makers could put enough transistors on a chip, you could bet that by now they would have hard coded operating systems, middleware, and applications onto their circuits. Perhaps someday we will see such a feat, but in the meantime, the current crop of chip makers are looking to move beyond the familiar central processors with their cache hierarchies and memory and I/O buses to do what might be called asymmetric processing.

The idea of using a co-processor, which does specific tasks and coordinates work with a central processor is far from new. The most famous early co-processor was

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InfiniBand Gets iSCSI Tweaks to Support Storage

October 2, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The InfiniBand Trade Association, a standards body that babysits the standards and protocols associated with InfiniBand switched fabrics and interconnections, said last week that it has ratified the iSCSI Remote Direct Memory Access storage protocol for use on the InfiniBand architecture.

The protocol, which is known as iSER, will allow for iSCSI links between servers and storage over InfiniBand fabrics rather than over Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet. And, according to the InfiniBand enthusiasts, such connectivity will even do better than Fibre Channel links, too. Fibre Channel links, which are now available in 4 Gigabit/sec speeds, are commonly used

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COMMON is Fun Again

October 2, 2006 Brian Kelly

Over the last ten years, I have written a number of articles about COMMON and how the board of directors has siphoned out the fun and has actually made it prohibitively expensive for the fun-loving programmer analyst or other attendee to have a pleasant experience without using personal funds. But COMMON is getting better, in my opinion. And here’s why.

I’ll admit it. A lot of the reduction in fun at COMMON over the years, as far as I am concerned, came from cuts in the number of scheduled hours for the formerly open-bar CUDS–COMMON Users Discussion Session, once known

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BOS CEO Steps Down, Company Brings in Outsider Replacement

October 2, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Better On-line Solutions, the Israeli maker of midrange connectivity products sold in the U.S. through BOSaNOVA, said last week that its president and chief executive officer, Adiv Baruch, has turned in his resignation and will leave the company at the end of the year.

Baruch has been president and CEO since January 2004, and he was responsible for a number of acquisitions and divestures that have substantially changed what BOS does for a living. When Baruch came on board at the end of 2003, BOS had sales of $5.5 million and a net loss of $2 million. As

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