• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Expect i5/OS V5R5 in 2007, Power6 for System i Maybe in 2007

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan and Dan Burger

  Whenever IBM‘s top brass in the System i division attends a major trade show event like COMMON, the IBMer in charge of development of the System i platform is always on hand to give a sneak preview of the technologies that Big Blue is putting together for the next release of hardware and software. The COMMON event in Miami Beach was no exception, and Jim Herring, director of System i product management and business operations, was on hand to answer questions. Because I have been fortunate enough to be called to serve for four weeks in New York

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• Venture Capitalist Thoma Cressey Acquires Vision Solutions

  September 25, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a story that the i5/OS and OS/400 community didn’t hear in two decades of history, but which in the past year has happened more than a few times. Another prominent player in the community has been acquired by a prominent venture capitalist. In this case, late last week, Vision Solutions, which is owned by a holding company from South Africa called Idion Technology Holdings, said that it was going to be acquired by Thoma Cressey Equity Partners. The deal, which has been approved by the Idion board of directors and which will presumably be approved by

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• The iSociety: System i Users React

  September 25, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Newcomers to the iSociety community that was announced last week at COMMON are invited to register to be part of that community. The registration process begins with the iSociety Creed, which states: “I believe in one system that fully integrates all things visible and invisible, and provides abundance to business everywhere. I believe that this only system was created to enlighten business people, and to free them from the tyranny of the technologists. And I believe that, one day, there will be just one system, and that all others will be pale imitations of it.” The visitor then has

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