• So Where Is PureXML for DB2/400?

  March 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With much fan-fare last week, IBM rolled out its “Viper” database technology into the version of DB2 for its z/OS-based mainframes. Viper is not just a relational database, which can store information in the traditional format that is friendly to SQL and other query methods, but also can store information in an XML format as well–and do so natively. IBM calls the native XML capability PureXML, and unlike past approaches, including prior releases and versions of DB2 for the mainframe as well as the Unix/Linux/Windows variant andcurrent approaches with DB2/400, PureXML allows XML documents to be stored without losing the

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• IBM Tops HP in Latest Gartner Disk Array Ranking, Both Trail EMC

  March 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the reasons why Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq more than six years ago was to get its hands on its lucrative and large server business; the other was to get its hands on Compaq’s disk array business, which had an even more dominant piece of that pie. For years, HP has outsold IBM in the disk array business, but in 2006, according to research by Gartner, Big Blue finally surpassed HP to take the number two spot in the external RAID disk array market. IBM is, however, well behind EMC in this space, and HP may or may not

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• IBM’s Plan for an Adjacent, Custom Systems Market

  March 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In seven years, server maker IBM has come a long way. As the millennium turned, Sun Microsystems was growing so fast that it looked like it would overtake the top spot in the server racket in a year or two, and then Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq, and looked like it would unseat Big Blue as the world’s largest revenue generator in the market for general purpose servers. Back in 2000, IBM’s revenue share had fallen to 22 percent, and now it is pushing up toward 40 percent. To be fair, IBM dodged two bullets, and that was because Sun and HP

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• Zend and IBM Sponsor Wiki for System i PHP Redbook Development

  March 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In an effort to share the knowledge that is embodied in the software labs of Zend Technologies and IBM as it relates to PHP on the iSeries and System i5, and to help in the creation of a new Redbook for PHP on that platform, Zend and IBM have announced a collaborative Wiki for PHP on the iSeries. The Wiki is being housed underneath its Redbook technical publications operation, and is therefore being called a RedWiki. You can read the short announcement about the RedWiki on Zend’s forums. Basically, it explains that the RedWiki will be used to solicit

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• WDSc Version 7.0 Standard Edition Is Missing Two Key Features

  March 12, 2007 Bruce Guetzkow

  Two weeks ago, when IBM announced the latest version of WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc), version 7.0. I was pleased to see the list of enhancements. If you or your company purchased a compiler for your System i, you and all of your company’s developers are entitled to a “free” (meaning that you’ve already paid for it) copy of the Standard Edition of WDSc. But the Standard Edition is missing two key features, and this is a problem. When I looked over the feature set for WDSc V7.0, these are the features that caught my eye: System i Data table

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• Rumors Say Farm Bureau to Dump AS/400s for Windows Boxes

  March 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two months ago, I told you that the Farm Services Agency, which is within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had put out a request for proposal out to get some help upgrading its 2,384 vintage AS/400 Model 170 class servers and their S/36-style applications to better serve the 8,000 agricultural counties in the United States serve the farmers in those counties. The machines, which provide the farm subsidy checks, credit, and other financial services stipulated by Congress, have been showing their age. But according to a report last week in Computerworld, the situation may be more dire than

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• Is Upgrading a Silly Waste of Time and Money?

  March 12, 2007 Hey, Brian

  We currently have an AS/400 Model 720 at V5R1 and it runs perfectly fine. Two years ago, our business partner told us we were at the end of the line with the Model 720, which has with 512 MB of memory, is rated at 225/35 CPWs, and has 105 GB of disk (after RAID striping) on nine 4 GB drives and five 16 GB drives. We are not at 80 percent of disk capacity. I couldn’t find any good reasons to listen to him. I still can’t see any good reason to upgrade my software from V5R1 to V5R2, V5R3

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• DataMirror Grows Revenues in Q4, Boosts Bottom Line Even More

  March 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability and data integration software maker DataMirror closed out its fiscal 2007 on January 31, and despite intense competition in its two key markets, the company was able to grow sales and grow profits even faster. DataMirror said that, for the quarter, it had $6.3 million in software licenses, up 3 percent. The company’s maintenance revenues rose 11 percent to $6.3 million, while services sales fell by 10 percent to $710,000. Total sales for the quarter came to $13.3 million, up 5.5 percent. DataMirror cut costs as it grew sales (with the exception of a small uptick in marketing

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• As I See It: The Digital Life

  March 12, 2007 Victor Rozek

  It’s situated about 40 miles from Seoul, on 1,500 acres of man-made island off the Inchon coast. When completed in 2014, it is intended to become a living laboratory, a shining microcosm of technologically enhanced life in the new millennium. Think of it as Korea’s version of Disney’s Tomorrow Land; a place where imagination and IT intersect, backed by a huge investment of cash. It will be clean, modern, and efficient. A place where everything is tracked, every action recorded, every service personalized, and every transaction automated. But unlike Tomorrow Land, people won’t just visit, they will actually live and

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• Gates Says Infinite H1-B Visas, Scholarships Needed to Boost Tech Competitiveness

  March 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Mr. Gates went to Washington last week, and as part of a series of hearings on American competitiveness in the global economy, the richest man in the world and the founder of Microsoft, politely told the United States Congress that they had a lot of work to do to clean up the American educational system and that, in the meantime, what the U.S. economy needed was the ability to import highly skilled technical labor from other countries without any of the visa caps that are in place today. “Any discussion of competitiveness in the 21st century must begin by

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