• IBM Goes Stateless and Cooler with iDataPlex Servers

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The evolution from tower to rack to blade to future servers continues apace, and IBM is cooking up a new line of custom-built servers called the iDataPlex that it hopes will make it the king of the so-called Web 2.0 hill. While the details on the iDataPlex server line, which will begin shipping in June, are sketchy, IBM is talking generally about the product and throwing around some pictures to get people interested in what is coming down the pike. The iDataPlex offering is being billed as a complete hardware, software, and services stack that is more energy efficient than

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• Reader Feedback on There’s No i in Future, But Is There a Future in i?

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, as you might expect, Neil Palmer’s story last week, There’s No i in Future, But Is There a Future in i?, touched off some heated conversation last week about the future of the i platform. Contrary to one item of feedback that I saw posted on the Midrange-L forum, IT Jungle did not just publish Palmer’s comments to create some sort of artificial controversy. Ever since the late 1990s, IBM created controversy around the AS/400 platform by its own actions and inactions, and all we did was give Palmer a chance to voice his concerns about the future

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• Live Migration Will Make Virtualization Mainstream

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The ability to teleport running applications around the network–what most vendors are calling live migration these days, but which comes in various names and server virtualization flavors–is probably one of the coolest technologies to come along in the data center in quite some time. And it may turn out to be the technology that pushes server virtualization through its tipping point, finally making such virtualization truly mainstream. The ability to virtualize servers with a hypervisor and then get multiple (and sometimes incompatible) operating systems to share a single box was useful for server consolidation (getting rid of some boxes) and

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• IBM and HP Do SAP ERP Bundles for SMBs

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While application software giant SAP has made a lot of noise in recent months before and after the launch of its “A1S” Business ByDesign suite of online, SaaS-style applications, that software ramp is taking longer than expected and therefore SAP needs to double down with its existing licensed software products to attack the small and medium business space. And to do that well, SAP needs to rely on its key platform partners, particularly IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Last week, at SAP’s Sapphire customer event in Orlando, Florida, the company announced bundling deals with both IBM and HP that will see

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• Avnet Expands in the United Kingdom and Ireland with Horizon Buy

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server and storage distributor Avnet has expanded its reach into Ireland and the United Kingdom by acquiring Irish systems reseller Horizon Technology Group. Horizon Technology, through its various divisions, is a big player in the distribution of servers manufactured by IBM and Sun Microsystems. The company is public, and its stock trades on the Dublin and London stock exchanges. The company was founded in Ireland as a reseller of Sun Unix gear back in 1991, and in 1994, the company expanded its Sun reseller business into the much larger market of the United Kingdom. In the past several

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• BluePhoenix Grows Sales and Profits on Legacy App Modernization

  May 12, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Legacy application modernization tool maker BluePhoenix Solutions has finished out its first quarter of 2008, and despite any uncertainties in the economy in the United States, the company is riding the wave of legacy application projects that are helping dozens of tool vendors for IBM mainframe and AS/400 platforms make a decent living. In fact, it booked a record quarter. BluePhoenix, which is based in Herzliya, Israel, was focused mainly on the mainframe market until last summer when it acquired ASNA, which has a set of tools that take RPG applications and move them to Windows and .NET using

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• IBM Previews “Blue Business” SMB System Sales Approach

  May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, at its Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles, IBM gave its partners and customers a sneak peek at a future application and systems strategy, code-named the “Blue Business Platform,” that Big Blue could roll out this year or next. While that doesn’t sound like much of a code-name, the Blue Business Platform project represents a new and potentially game-changing way in which IBM will chase the $500 billion IT market driven by small and medium businesses worldwide. According to Mike Prochaska, program director for the Blue Business Platform, the project has been underway for the past nine

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• Micro Focus to Acquire NetManage for $73.3 Million in Cash

  May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In these times of tight credit, cash is without a doubt king. Or at least a knight, considering how inflation is affecting the cost of the consumables we all buy to live. Nothing demonstrates the power of cash more than the contrast between Rocket Software‘s failed $69 million attempt to acquire host connectivity and application modernization software maker NetManage, which was launched in December 2007 and withdrawn in March because Rocket Software could not raise the capital it needed, and an a $73.3 million all-cash deal announced last Thursday by COBOL and application modernization tool maker Micro Focus

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• Power Systems: The Feeds and Speeds

  May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This week, IBM begins shipping the new Power6-based Power 570 and Power 595 servers that support the i, AIX, and Linux operating systems. And Big Blue is in the process of ramping up sales of the entry Power 520, which started selling in AIX and Linux edition in late January and which started shipping in i Editions on April 18, and midrange Power 550 servers, which also shipped earlier this year in an AIX and Linux Edition and which will hit the streets in an i Edition on May 23. Of course, IBM is also shipping the JS12 and JS22

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• There’s No i in Future, But Is There a Future in i?

  May 5, 2008 Neil Palmer

  Editor’s note: IBM hosted its New Power Equation merger of the System i and System p server brands at the COMMON midrange user group meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, a little more than a month ago, and Neil Palmer, a long-time midrange expert and member of both COMMON and the Toronto User Group, prepared a statement, chock full of criticism and questions, to read to the top IBM brass. He didn’t get a chance to get the whole thing vocalized at the meeting, so we are giving him a chance to speak his mind, on your behalf, in The

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