• Zend Technologies and COMMON Create PHP Advisory Group

  July 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Zend Technologies, the creator of the open source PHP programming language and runtime environment that was last year ported to the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, and COMMON, the largest user group for i5/OS and OS/400 professionals, have teamed up to create an advisory group to help steer the development of Zend’s technologies on the System i platform. Just before the July 4th holiday, Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at Zend, and Ron Newman, who is chairman of COMMON’s Advocacy Team and president of technology consulting firm Newmark Technologies, sent out a joint appeal via email for people

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• Survey Says: Legacy Apps to Get Modernized

  July 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In many ways, legacy applications and the platforms they run on present similar issues to the IT department–almost regardless of the legacy platform itself. Legacy applications have value and are, by their very nature, unique to each company. After years of experience in rehosting, recoding, outsourcing, and offshoring applications, many IT shops are content to leave their legacy applications alone and put another layer or two of software on top of them to make their functionality accessible in new ways. This is what is generally meant by the term legacy application modernization, and according to a survey of mostly mainframe

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• Small Form Factor Disks Go Mainstream, the System i Has Gone Fishin’

  July 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I am not that old, but I am old enough to remember a time when the AS/400 was always at the cutting-edge of storage technology innovations, whether one was talking about cache memory, main memory, disk drives, or tape drives. Those were the days, when IBM‘s Rochester labs were at the forefront of memory and disk technology, inventing the most dense memory chips and the most capacious disk drives in the IT sector. Nothing could make the current System i stand in such stark contrast with its peers in the server space and the attitude of the AS/400 Division

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• IBM Charges 20 Percent Premium for Software Running on Power6 Cores

  July 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last July, in an effort to cope with the complexity of software pricing in a world increasingly dominated by multicore processors spanning a number of different architectures, IBM‘s Software Group created a performance-based pricing scheme for 350 different pieces of software. Now that the Power6 machines have been shipping for a month, Big Blue is setting so-called Processor Value Unit (PVU) pricing for boxes based on the Power6 chip. And the good news is, IBM is actually giving customers a pretty good deal–especially compared to the deal as X64 customers are getting. To recap what processor value unit

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• Project Costs Tell the VoIP Story

  July 9, 2007 Dan Burger

  Technology is the sizzle, but it’s the bottom-line savings that puts the meat on the table. For voice over IP (VoIP), the starting point for asking questions comes from one angle: How can it save money? Budgets are tighter than a rusted lug nut on a ’51 Mercury. Projects are prioritized by how much money they can either make or save. And generally it’s easier to pinpoint how money will be saved rather than how it will be made. VoIP will almost assuredly save money when compared to the PBX phone systems that are standard equipment at almost any organization

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• Oracle-SAP Suit: TomorrowNow Acted Improperly, Admits SAP

  July 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in March, ERP and database software giant Oracle launched a lawsuit against its long-time ERP rival, SAP, asserting that SAP’s relatively recently acquired TomorrowNow had broken the law by stealing a slew of documents out of its systems. On July 3, SAP issued a statement that confirms that some inappropriate downloading did, in fact, occur. SAP’s statement last week is the first formal response that the German software giant has given relating to the suit against itself and its Bryan, Texas, subsidiary. Oracle sued the SAP Americas division of SAP and TomorrowNow on March 22 in the U.S.

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• IBM to Break Petaflops Barrier with Blue Gene/P

  July 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The race is on to build the first supercomputer that can break 1 petaflops of aggregate number-crunching power, and IBM is hoping to be the first company to do it with its future Blue Gene/P massively parallel supercomputer. Blue Gene was conceived in 1999 by IBM Research as a project to test out a minimalist, vastly expansive parallel supercomputer design that would gang up a very large number of fairly simple dual-core PowerPC processors to create an energy efficient Linux box capable of breaking through the 1 petaflops barrier using as many as 1 million processors. By 2002, IBM had

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• Barsa Consulting Inks Reseller Agreement with BOSaNOVA

  July 9, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Barsa Consulting has inked an agreement with BOSaNOVA that will see Barsa Consulting reselling BOSaNOVA’s new Q3 storage encryption security appliance. Barsa Consulting is, of course, the well-known System i business partner where Al Barsa, one of the foundation stones in the System i community, gets his paychecks so he can pay to put Albert Junior through his studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Barsa Consulting works the New York City metropolitan area and is located in IBM‘s stomping grounds in Westchester County, New York. Because of the nature of the financial services sector that surrounds New York City, Barsa

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• As I See It: The All-American Exhausting Vacation

  July 9, 2007 Victor Rozek

  If you can overlook the mosquitos and the natural grandeur, spending a day in Yosemite is a lot like spending a day at Disney’s It’s a Small World attraction. In both locations you will find crowds, long lines, and examples of people who wear exotic clothing and don’t speak English. They come from all points of the compass, speaking a Babel of languages from melodic to staccato, and although their history and customs are as varied as wild flowers, they have at least one thing in common: They get more vacation time than the locals. It’s no secret that Americans

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• COMMON Workshops ‘Focus’ on Hot Topics

  July 9, 2007 Dan Burger

  When the COMMON user group revised its delivery of educational programs, COMMON Focus, a workshop-based, three-day event, was created to replace the second of two full-scale conferences that had been the traditional format for decades. FOCUS 2007 will test whether a smaller, more focused educational format is a better fit for System i professionals who are tight on time and money. To be conveniently located, the organization chose Columbus, Ohio, which is situated within 550 miles of half the population of the United States. The event agenda for FOCUS 2007 is built around 15 workshops that combine lecture and lab

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