IT Jungle has confirmed that Help/Systems and its private equity backer, the Audax Group, have acquired Bytware, the developer of security and management tools for the i OS platform. The purchase, for which the companies plan no formal announcement, comes just a month after the combination of Help/Systems and Audax snapped up i OS security tool vendor PowerTech, and lays the groundwork for more acquisitions in the months ahead.

A tip from an IT Jungle reader prompted Help/Systems to confirm speculation that the privately held Reno, Nevada, company had become the latest i OS software vendor to

Now that Intel has its “Dunnington” six-core Xeon processor into the field, it would seem to be a good time to see how the Power Systems 570 i Edition servers stack up against Windows machines equipped with enterprise-class hardware features and systems software. It is a good time, with the fourth quarter under way and IT shops looking to buy–or not, as the case may be. Unless, of course, you were looking for some good news on the i pricing front.

Aye yi yi yi yi, Power Systems i.

As I pointed out in last week’s story comparing the

Last week, Ross Mauri, the general manager of the Power Systems division, published an open letter to the i half of the merged System i and System p communities. The open letter follows a few weeks after IBM hosted two Power Systems Technical Universities in Chicago, one for the i base and the other for the AIX and Linux bases. Given the state of the global economy, the letter was meant to be reassuring to IBM’s 200,000-strong customer base, which spans most industries and countries.

In the wake of technical conferences, there is always a lot of talk about what

One of the things in life that drives me crazy is paying for insurance. Okay, I realize it’s necessary and the responsible thing to do, but it just feels like I pay a premium and I get nothing in return. Then one thing happened. It rained. No, it rained a lot. Here’s something you don’t see every day. It was raining in my kitchen. Some $10,000 later, our house was back to normal, and thank heavens for the insurance.

As someone that teaches performance management and capacity planning, I am often asked what software and methodologies I use when I

As part of Power Systems general manager Ross Mauri’s open letter to i shops around the globe last week, IBM pointed to a new white paper put out by IDC to espouse the virtues of the i platform. Now, I know a lot of us have complained about the lack of marketing for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform, but there is another–and potentially larger–problem: a lack of critical thinking and empirical data that shows, beyond a doubt, the quantitative as well as qualitative benefits of the i platform.

This IDC report that Mauri is pointing to, called IBM

You got peanut butter in my chocolate; you got chocolate in my peanut butter. As you might imagine, any time Victor Rozek gets a burr under his saddle about something political or economical, we get a range of positive and negative feedback about why we even put such content into the newsletters. Well, to put it bluntly, last time I looked, my business card said president and editor in chief, and the buck starts and stops here. These matters impinge on our IT lives, and sometimes, you just have to speak your mind.

As many of you did last week

High availability technologies come in a variety of flavors, including software with logical replication, hardware-based replication, cross-site mirroring, and switched disk. The options are not exclusive. Companies often deploy a combination of technologies that tie high availability, disaster recovery, and storage. Part or all of this, depending on the company strategy, fits into the category of clustering, and that leads to an announcement last week from Vision Solutions that it has a new distribution agreement with IBM for the i environment.

The focal point of this arrangement is Vision’s Cluster1 and IBM’s PowerHA for i.

IBM PowerHA for i was

Enterprise resource planning software is as comfortable on IBM midrange computers as a cowboy is in the saddle. It’s been that way since the debut of the AS/400 and even earlier with the System/38 and System/36 boxes. But last week, when Lawson Software released its first quarter 2009 financial report, the lack of System i-based business was one of the reasons the bean pot was not as full as expected.

In releasing its Q1 2009 report October 2, Lawson was pleased to report revenues were up slightly thanks in large part to maintenance renewals, customer migrations to Lawson Total Care

Market researcher Evans Data has carved out a nice little niche for itself keeping track of the popularity and usage for application development tools, compilers, and such, but it talks to end user companies about their application servers, too.

This summer, Evans Data did a survey of 700 developers and IT managers to assess their opinions on various application servers that they have actually had some experience with. Based on the survey results, Evans Data put together a report ranking eight application servers. You probably know all of their names: Adobe ColdFusion, Apache Geronimo, Oracle WebLogic Server (which came to

Now that Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disks are starting to be deployed as a standard feature on servers of all shapes and sizes–they came to the Power Systems servers this year, after a lot of crabbing–it is time to ramp up the SAS specification and get more bandwidth.

The SCSI Trade Association announced last week that the next-generation SAS-2 disk interface, which sports a 6 Gbit/sec interface, is ready to rock. That’s twice the bandwidth available in the current SAS spec, which offers 3 Gbit/sec and the original SAS drives, which came out at a much less useful 1.5 Gbit/sec