• Let’s Be Frank

  December 18, 2006 Dan Burger

  We can’t all be Frank Soltis, IBM‘s chief scientist for the System i. It’s a shame there aren’t a few more Franks to go around, though. Makes me wonder whether Big Blue has thought about having him cloned. His engineering accomplishments inside Fortress Rochester have made him a legend. He’s the personification of the AS/400, despite the name changes. And he’s the most important spokesperson the platform has–regardless of whether you call it the AS/400, the iSeries, or the System i. The AS/400 faithful love Frank. His sessions at COMMON are standing room only. Same thing when he speaks

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• What 2007 and Beyond Might Have in Store for the System i

  December 18, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Human beings are forward-looking animals, which is probably why we have our eyes in the front of our heads. (Well, actually, we have our eyes in the front of our heads so we can see in 3-D, and the effect is that we are turned into forward-looking creatures.) In any event, as the year winds down and we all approach the holiday season, it is a natural time to extend our view to a more panoramic vista. And so, with this special edition of our flagship AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 newsletter, that is what we intend to do. Before

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• As I See It: Predictions and Poetry

  December 18, 2006 Victor Rozek

  It’s that time of the year when pundits predict the coming sunrise and other longshots. Let’s face it though, whether the guesswork is educated or not, it’s still guesswork; and if you’re in the prediction business, it’s best to have a short memory. Or hope that your readers do. Unlike picking stocks, however, which dart-throwing monkeys do as well as stock brokers, IT offers even the most obtuse prognosticator the opportunity not just to get lucky, but to get it right. So here goes. Drum roll please. . . . I predict computer components will become smaller and faster and

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Greetings Season

  December 18, 2006 Hesh Wiener

  When it comes to getting mail, the best thing that happens this time of year is the arrival of Christmas cards. It’s nice to hear from people who, without the greeting card tradition, might not get in touch at all. The same can’t be said about e-mail, particularly this year. Any electronic greetings you receive will be grains in a mountain of spam chaff. This year’s spam mountain is likely to be the biggest ever. When the holiday season ends, the spam will not stop; if anything, it’s likely to increase. And there’s worse to come. The number of spam

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• In Memorium: Christian Scott Ward

  December 18, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The people in your life matter, but some people matter more than others. For all of us, there are a handful of people who set the path of our lives as it twists and turns, who steer us toward our future and the people who are waiting for us there. Christian Ward was one such person in my life. Although we did it 25 years apart, Christian and I both came from rural America to New York to become writers. Christian hired me straight out of college nearly 18 years ago to work with him at Columbia University. It was

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• The Business Case for the System iWant

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Excel spreadsheet associated with this article is available for download Last week, I fleshed out a hypothetical user-capped System i5 line that is based on the machines that IBM announced in October and that, as far as I can tell, represent the most cost-competitive alternative to Unix, Windows, and Linux servers that Big Blue has fielded running OS/400 and i5/OS in the past decade. I would be the first to admit that the so-called System iWant user-capped machines have some issues, but still, I wanted to build a business plan and see how these machines might help or

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• Rocket Software Inks Deal to Buy Seagull Software

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What do you get when you cross a rocket with a seagull? Newtown, Massachusetts-based Rocket Software, which has been on an acquisitions tear for the past few years as it builds up its software business, is about to find out. Rocket last week announced that it was willing to spend more than $55.7 million to acquire Seagull Software, a provider of host connectivity and SOA-related middleware tools for mainframe and i5/OS platforms. The acquisition is yet another big deal in the i5/OS and OS/400 ecosystem. Software companies from outside this market have been swooping in to take over

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• Saving the System i: Fight Pervasive with Pervasive

  December 11, 2006 Brian Kelly

  In a few years, there will be nobody sitting at a desktop or laptop PC anywhere in the world whose machine bears the letters “IBM.” Can this really be good for IBM? Does the principle of “out of sight, out of mind” jump out at anyone? The information technology adepts (fondly referred to by peers as “geeks” and “nerds”) who run Windows, Unix, and Linux shops on non-Blue systems will see no little letters “IBM” in the whole of their organizations. This would not simply be because there are no IBM servers, X64 or otherwise, but because there are no

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• As I See It: Sweating the Little Stuff

  December 11, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Meteorologist Edward Lorenz was in a hurry. The year was 1961 and he was running weather simulations. Lorenz plugged equations into his computer and waited. And waited. He was working on a Royal (as in typewriter) McBee LGP30, a 740-pound “portable” desk system, and the going was slow. Today, of course, computers crunch numbers with the efficiency of an elephant stomping on a peanut, but in the 1960s, computers crunched numbers with all the vigor of a squirrel gnawing on a coconut. So when he decided to run one last simulation, he took the numeric results from the middle of

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• Azul Systems Revamps Compute Appliances with 48-Core Vega2 Chip

  December 11, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server appliance maker Azul Systems is not letting its legal battle with Sun Microsystems stop innovation with its Compute Appliance servers, which offload Java workloads from general purpose servers. Last week, Azul announced four new systems that are based on its 48-core Vega2 processor, which doubles the scalability of the Compute Appliances. According to Scott Sellers, one of the co-founders of Azul Systems and the company’s chief operating officer, the second generation of the Compute Appliances includes some other tweaks, such as using common system boards across the line, to make them upgradeable in the field. He says Azul Systems,

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