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  • System Performance Management Is Like Having Insurance

    October 6, 2008 Doug Mewmaw

    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

    …

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  • IDC and i: Next Time, Can You Talk to Some Real i Shops?

    October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    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

    …

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  • Reader Feedback on As I See It: Insult to Injury

    October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    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

    …

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  • IBM and Vision Solutions Align HA Distribution Resources

    October 6, 2008 Dan Burger

    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

    …

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  • Net Loss Clouds Lawson’s Q1 Report

    October 6, 2008 Dan Burger

    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

    …

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  • Evans Data 2008 Survey Ranks Application Servers

    October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    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

    …

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  • The SAS Disk Spec Gets a Bandwidth Boost

    October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    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

    …

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  • IBS Picks Windows Instead of i as Strategic ERP Platform

    September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Swedish ERP software maker International Business Systems, a long-time supporter of the AS/400 and successor platforms, hired a new president and chief executive officer last week in the wake of a recapitalization earlier this year. And, to the chagrin of i enthusiasts the world over, the company also announced a new platform strategy that will see IBS push its IBS ERP suite on Windows platforms rather than on i 6.1 and its successors.

    But don’t panic just yet, AS/400 folks. The majority of the 5,000 customers that IBS has are running RPG or Java versions of its eponymous ERP

    …

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  • The Power Systems i 570 Versus Its Predecessors

    September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Throughout the summer, The Four Hundred has been examining how the Power Systems i Edition machines in rack and blade form factors compare to their predecessors and, for entry and midrange machines, compare to Windows boxes. This week, we climb one step higher on the Power Systems ladder and compared the System i5 570 machines from 2006 with the new Power 570 machines of 2008. Basically, IBM is offering more performance for more money for customers who need it, or the same performance for a little less money.

    We all know, of course, that last July IBM announced an interim

    …

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  • New ASNA President Takes On Modernization Business with Services Emphasis

    September 29, 2008 Dan Burger

    When BluePhoenix Solutions acquired ASNA 13 months ago, it made building the services side of the business a priority. Pieces of that puzzle have been added since the merger, and the latest move has been to put a new president in place. Last week, ASNA announced Greg Schottland would be taking command of the .NET-oriented application modernization software company that has refocused its approach to helping customers with modernization projects.

    Modernization projects are under way in a fair number of IBM i shops, but the traction that many people predicted in the application modernization area has not taken hold. Schottland

    …

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