• IBM to Recycle Silicon Wafers for Solar Cells

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is probably best known for its enterprise-class servers and related systems software, but the company is obviously a pretty big player in the chip industry with its various Power and PowerPC chips. IBM’s techies in Burlington, Vermont, where IBM still makes a lot of chips, have been scratching their heads about what to do with defective silicon wafers, which are the inevitable result of any chip-making process, and have come up with a novel idea: recycle them for use in solar cells. An engineer named Eric White from the Burlington factory, which is located there because the Watson family

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• The System i Still Owns the SAP BI Data Mart Benchmark

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s lonely at the top, apparently. In recent posting in her blog on IBM’s developerWorks site, Elisabeth Stahl, who is the program manager of performance marketing for Systems and Technology Group, was lamenting that no one else in the IT industry had yet done a test on SAP‘s BI Data Mart benchmark test as the System i platform was getting another machine tested on it. “When I hike, I love to get to the top of the mountain,” Stahl writes. “Then it’s time to break out the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and enjoy the view. But I do

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• IBM Brags About Its Power6 Server Shipments

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server maker IBM has been pretty quiet about its System p and System i server lines in recent months with the exception of talking up its one product–the 570 machine bearing both labels known internally at Big Blue as the 9406-MMA that scales from one to four chasses and from two to 16 of the new Power6 processors. And IBM has been bragging in recent days that it has hit a major milestone in shipments for the 9406-MMA machines bearing the System p label. Specifically, IBM said that it had shipped its 1,000th System p version of the 9406-MMA machine.

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• IBM to Pump $1.5 Billion into Security Products, Services

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For years, IBM has been focusing on creating more flexible and virtual computing environments and has sunk billions of dollars in research and development into these areas. If last week’s announcements were any indication, then Big Blue will be focusing rather heavily on security and risk management in 2008. As part of a broad array of product plans that IBM put together last week in the wake of its acquisition of Watchfire this year (for an undisclosed sum, but the rumor mill has suggested it was around $100 million) and Internet Security Systems in 2006 for $1.3 billion, the company

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• Neuwing, IBM to Quantify and Monetize IT Energy Savings

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server and storage maker IBM has partnered with New York-based Neuwing Energy Ventures, a specialist in renewable energy and related energy certifications that is owned by a large private equity firm with holdings in real estate and energy companies, to come up with a scheme that will allow companies to document and benefit from increasing the energy efficiency of their data centers. As we all know by now, chief information officers and facilities managers at large companies that have data centers hogging a lot of electricity to process transactions and cool machinery are under increasing pressure from two ends.

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• IT Vendor Market Cap Follies

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world is a funny place. Funny in terms of “ha ha” as well as in funny as “downright strange.” Someone sent me an email last week, laughing because the market capitalization of Apple Computer had surpassed that of IBM. Market cap–the value of all of the shares outstanding in public companies as reckoned by the price of shares on Wall Street–is as good a measure as any about what the world thinks of that company. But considering the amount of flim-flam and nonsense in people’s reasons for valuing companies–well, at least some of the time–maybe market cap goes

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• Ask TPM: Enticing Users to Upgrade Their i5/OS Hardware

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our experts over at Four Hundred Guru get asked a lot of questions and they provide a lot of good answers. But some of your questions are of a strategic or tactical nature, having to do with broader issues in the information technology space or with the i5/OS and OS/400 platform. So if you have a question you want to get my take on–or you want to use me to get a straight answer out of the people in IBM who know what is going on–then send me an email and I will see what I can do. Here’s a

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• BluePhoenix Rides Legacy Modernization to Another Successful Quarter

  November 5, 2007 Dan Burger

  Legacy modernization software vendor BluePhoenix Solutions turned in record financial results for its third quarter ended September 30. During the third quarter, BluePhoenix completed the acquisition of ASNA, one of the leading application modernization vendors in the System i market. Prior to the ASNA deal, BluePhoenix concentrated its efforts in the mainframe arena. The company’s had revenues of $23 million in the third quarter, which was an increase of 34 percent compared to $17.1 million in the third quarter of 2006. Revenues from the most recent quarter were also 9.4 percent higher than the $21 million in revenues that

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• Project ECLipz Surfaces, But Not the Way You Think

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tongues are a-wagging out there again in IT Land about IBM‘s ongoing “Project ECLipz” server convergence initiative. In a PDF document that has an internal name “ECLipz-DCT,” one of the key IBMers responsible for the decimal floating point unit inside the current Power6 and future z6 mainframe engines compares and contrasts the two processors. The Power6, of course, is the chip used in the System i and System p server lines, which support i5/OS, AIX, and Linux. The good news for mainframe shops is that System z mainframes are going to get a lot more processing oomph and other

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• The Latest i5/OS V5R4 PTFs: What Is Going On?

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our faithful i5/OS and OS/400 PTF guru, Doug Bidwell of DLB Associates, has been putting together his PTF Guide for a decade now. (Hard to believe, isn’t it Doug?) His PTF Guide has been associated with my AS/400-based newsletters across many different companies through all that time, and I would like to thank him for the service that he performs each week to consolidate the information concerning the PTFs down into something that can help a system administrator figure out what to do. Two weekends ago, as Bidwell was putting together the System i PTF Guide Volume 9 Number

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