Well, the rumor going around that IBM is doubling up the processor core counts on its Power Systems servers, which are based on the company’s dual-core Power6 processors, turns out to be true. Last Tuesday, IBM announced that it has doubled up the cores in the Power 570 to a maximum of 32, and now is also offering a 16-core box called the Power 560 that slides in underneath it in the product line. As expected, IBM also doubled the core count on entry Power 520 and midrange Power 550 machines when running the i 6.1 (formerly OS/400 and i5/OS)

Last week’s announcements for the Power Systems product line did not just have to do with the doubling up of core counts on Power 520, 550, and 570 servers plus the debut of the new Power 560 box. (See IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems also in this issue for more on that.) There were a bunch of other hardware and software announcements that are interesting to i shops.

First, there is a new processor option for the Power 550, which has been using 4.2 GHz Power6 cores until now for i Editions and AIX and Linux Editions.

Breaking down boundaries is maybe the most worthwhile goal an IT department can under take. The IT industry that helped build all the walls–we like to call them silos these days–is helping to eliminate those obstacles, and this is to the credit of those companies that are wholeheartedly participating. Also deserving of some credit are the companies that have gotten past platform bigotry to pursue business interests. They all deserve a pat on the back, if you can find any of them.

OK, that may be an undeserved slight. In actuality, there are many examples of increased efforts toward interoperability,

The economy may be in shambles, but the surge appears to be working. No, not that surge, the IT Surge. At least that’s what Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson call it. The silly war metaphor (silly, because the similarity between business and war ends when the first shot is fired) is used to describe the period between 1995 and 2005 when investment in all things IT jumped from about $3,500 per worker to around $8,000.

That’s a hefty increase, as surges go, but what did it actually accomplish? Cause and effect are often elusive, still it’s worth noting that during

IBM last week shuffled the alphabet soup that is its suite of development tools for the i OS platform, and delivered several updates that System i customers intent on staying on the latest tools will want to know about. This includes a new macro workflow editor for its Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) tool, and a statement of direction for its Eclipse-based Rational Developer tools that promises to bring new AJAX and Web 2.0-style capabilities with another release later in the fourth quarter.

Keeping track of IBM’s development tools has never been easy. Big Blue continuously changes the product names

In case you been visiting relatives on Mars and haven’t been able to catch up on your reading, the global economy and its (formerly and possibly never) related financial markets have been swooning. And last week, as a number of brokerage houses started putting out reports suggesting that some tech players might have taken it on the chin, IBM did something it rarely does: Last Wednesday, it preannounced its financial results for the third quarter.

Not that IBM’s preannouncement did all that much to quell Wall Street’s fears. While there was something of a bounce on Thursday morning attributed to

If you were paging through the Power Systems section of the IBM Website last week, you might have been convinced that the new Power 560 midrange server was based on the Power6+ processor, not the Power6 chip.

This screen certainly confused me, and a whole bunch of readers who emailed me last week:

As you can see, it clearly says Power6+, not Power6. I checked with my sources at IBM, and the Power 560 is not based on the Power6+, but rather the existing Power6 chip, which is implemented in 65 nanometer processes. And IBM is not, as it did

While all of us greeted the delivery of the i platform on Power-based blade servers with much enthusiasm, and most of us had wished this had been accomplished many years ago, the way that IBM implemented i on blades has not been as broad or as simple as many of us had hoped.

Among business partners I have spoken with, there has been much complaining about the requirement that the Power6-based JS12 and JS22 blade servers require the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), an intermediary between the operating system and its peripherals created initially for AIX logical partitioning a few years

You would think, with the economy in such a bad way and IBM wanting to help its resellers as much as possible, it would be giving them a little extra margin to peddle iron that, in turn, helps Big Blue make more sales. And this would be particularly true for X64 servers, which sit side-by-side with AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers at the vast majority of OS/400 and i shops.

And maybe IBM is offering its System x and BladeCenter resellers some extra margin as we try to negotiate the fourth quarter of 2008. But if it isn’t, you

While IBM did its best to try to calm Wall Street down last week when it preannounced its earnings for the third quarter on Wednesday after the market close, enterprise software juggernaut SAP had already undermined confidence in the IT space on Monday morning when it warned that it would not make its numbers in the third quarter.

“The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses. These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter,” said explained Henning Kagermann, the co-chief executive officer