TFH Volume: 17 Archives - Page 30 of 47

IBM Cuts CPU Prices on Power5 and Power5+ Servers

May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about modern servers is their ability to have extra and latent capacity hidden away inside their processor complexes, just waiting to be activated in the event of an emergency spike in application usage or as part of a normal system upgrade to permanently add new software to the box. This capacity on demand approach to building systems has been around since the end of the dot-com boom in the RISC/Unix space, and it has been a great thing for companies with modest workload growth and a desire to avoid system upgrades.

But there is a

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IT Managers Are Under Pressure to Cut Costs, Says IDC

May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Only a few weeks ago, a report issued by Gartner based on surveys of chief information officers and other executives in charge of IT spending suggested that budgets for computers and related software and services are holding up, more or less. The word from IDC for the IT sector in the United States only a month later is a little less sanguine.

Of course, IDC only did in-depth interviews with 27 IT shops as part of a recent presentation it put together, and while depth is always appreciated, breadth is necessary to determine a trend, too. That said, information is

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Power 570 and 595 Servers to Get Hot Add and Repair for CPUs

May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here’s something that every computer should have today–and probably will at some point in the not-too-distant future. This Tuesday, the high-end, Power6-based Power 570 and Power 595 servers start to ship, but one technology that allows for the hot addition and repair of server motherboards–what IBM calls processor books–without having to power down the systems is still slated for later this year.

According to a statement of direction from Big Blue, a future firmware upgrade for the Power 595 will allow for a Power6 processor book to be added to the machine without powering down the server. In the past,

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SafeData Praises Vaulting with Recovery Services

May 5, 2008 Dan Burger

Understanding your risk and controlling what you can is the best defense. No matter what the risk, this is sound advice. What are the risks in your IT department? Haphazard growth, lack of focus and coherent planning, and investment avoidance are just a few points that indicate a lack of interest in controlling risk. What can you do to have some control over risk?

Dealing with system recovery after your system has failed is the subject of a just-published white paper by SafeData, a Rhode Island-based business that hosts high availability and disaster recovery services offering managed services as

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SAP Profits Take a Whack as Business ByDesign Ramp Slowed

May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The weak greenback has been a boon of sorts to IT companies based in the United States that export a lot of hard and soft wares to foreign companies, but it is no fun at all for companies headquartered outside the United States that do a lot of business there. Such is the case with ERP software giant SAP, which last week said its net earnings took an 22 percent dive to €242 million on sales of €2.46 billion, actually up 14 percent, in the first quarter ended March 30.

SAP’s profits were hit not just by the dollar-euro

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JDA Software Has Its Best First Quarter Ever

May 5, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

While plenty of IT firms are feeling the pinch in the past two quarters as they try to push products in the United States, this is not the case for all software companies. In fact, retail and supply chain management software maker JDA Software Group just finished the best first quarter of software license sales in its 30-year history. However, the company’s net earnings fell a tiny bit, and for once–and probably thanks to a lot of worse news out there–Wall Street seemed to take it in stride and cut JDA some slack.

In the first quarter ended March 31,

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PowerVM: The i Hypervisor Is Not Hidden Anymore

April 30, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you want to blame someone, go ahead and blame people like me. Or, if it makes you feel any better, just blame me alone. For years, while I have praised the integrated nature of the AS/400 and its progeny, I have railed against the practice that IBM has had of bundling most of its software features on the platform and lumping it all together with a big, fat, single, hardware-software price tag that would give the wealthiest SMB shop a big sticker shock. Perhaps big enough to scare them off, even if a complete Windows stack cost the same

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IBM’s Power Systems Sales Plan and Various Gotchas

April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Language is a funny thing. As part of the ongoing merger of System i and System p product lines and the obliteration of separate marketing and sales divisions for these products in lieu of the single Power Systems division, which creates Power-based servers, and the Business Systems and Enterprise Systems divisions, which sell all of IBM‘s products to SMB and enterprise data centers, respectively, Big Blue is trying to control the language that its sales reps and business partners use as they pitch the new Power Systems products, pricing, and approach to OS/400 and i5/OS shops.

Language, as it

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Power Systems Performance: First Up, SAP BI Data Mart

April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The performance statistics of the new Power Systems machines running the i 6.1 operating system (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) are starting to come out, helping customers who are looking at buying one of these new boxes and moving to the new operating system try to figure out what throughput the new systems have. Performance benchmarks on real-world workloads have been pretty thin for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform for a number of years, and thus far IBM is sticking to the relatively small number of benchmarks plus its own Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) ratings to help customers gauge relative

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As I See It: That Competitive Bug

April 28, 2008 Victor Rozek

It has become an article of faith that competitiveness is inherently good, historically inevitable, and the fountainhead of economic dominance. It’s rare that business-related nouns appear in print without their default companion adjective “competitive.” The job market, global markets, wages, and prices all share the same pugnacious descriptor. As any first-year business student will attest: in order to be successful, companies must pursue competitive advantage by developing competitive solutions and executing competitive strategies.

It’s a word that describes everything and explains nothing.

With the emergence of India and China, and the maturation of the European Union, old economic relationships no

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