• HP Goes Visual with Application Modernization Tools

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The product side of Hewlett-Packard launched its umpteeth assault on the IBM mainframe and AS/400 server base a year and a half ago, and last week HP Services, which actually does server migrations on behalf of customers, announced its companion set of service offerings for legacy application migration, collectively known as the Modernization Factory. The neat bits of the Migration Factory offering are the tools that HP has created to analyze legacy applications to help customers figure out where and what to modernize. HP is always chasing mainframe and AS/400 accounts to try to talk them into moving to Unix,

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• Let’s Unscramble IBM’s Server Sales in Q1 2008 a Little

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The convergence of the System i and System p Power-based server lines that has been taking place in gradual steps was finalized a few weeks ago. But the bean counters at IBM did not fully converge the Power platforms in Big Blue’s financial reports because this merger was not yet finished when IBM ended its first quarter of 2008. But there was another reason IBM might have waited to just report on Power Systems as a single unit, too. Because if it didn’t, it might have had to show that the delays in rolling out Power6-based servers and AIX 6.1

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• Thanks to Convergence, i 6.1 Shops Get PAVE Linux-X86 Emulation

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So you have an iSeries or System i server or you are looking to buy or upgrade to a new Power 520, 550, 570, or 595 server, and you also want to consolidate some Linux workloads onto your machine to reduce complexity and make better use of the iron you invest lots of dough in. The only problem is that some of the Linux applications you have only run on X86 processors. Last year, if you were a System p customer using AIX or a shop buying what was formerly known as the OpenPower variant of the System p platform

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• IBM Keeps the Power 595 at 254 Partitions, For Now

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, server makers can be perplexing. Every server maker on the planet, and their chip partners if they use them for all or some of their product lines, are keen on showing that they have hardware-assisted virtualization electronics built into their chips. IBM started adding virtualization features into the hardware to better deploy logical partitions a decade ago and a decade earlier in mainframes, so this is old hat to Big Blue even though people make a big deal about it these days on the X64 platform or various RISC or Itanium platforms. In October 2006, I had a long

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• Kodak Buys Intermate for IPDS Expertise

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When most people think of Kodak, the Rochester, New York, technology company, they probably think of film for cameras or, in more modern times, the company that is trying to stay in business by becoming a place where people upload digital photos to have them printed out or buy the paper to do their own photo printing at home. But Kodak is an expert in all kinds of digital technology, and it has aspirations in a market it calls transactional printing. And to that end, Kodak last week announced that it has acquired Intermate A/S, a relatively small

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• IT Shops Worried About Energy, But Cutting Power Isn’t Happening

  April 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With energy costs on the rise on all fronts and data centers running out of room and power to add more servers, the idea of getting green in the data center–conserving energy if possible or getting the most work out of the energy used in computing complexes–has certainly taken hold in the psyches of both the board room and the white noise room. But according to a recent survey, few companies are actually doing anything about it beyond thought. BlueArc, one of a number of upstart vendors of virtualized, power-efficient network storage arrays, recently commissioned a survey of data

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• The 64-Core Power6-Based Power 595 Starts to Roll in May

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  At a customer event that IBM hosted in San Francisco last Tuesday, the company finished fleshing out the big missing piece in its recently unified Power6-based server family: the Power 595. Like the Power5 and Power5+ System p 595 and System i 595 machines that precede it, the Power 595 server scales up to 64 processor cores and thanks to denser memory and a redesigned backplane and interconnect, can scale up to 4 TB of main memory in a single system image. With the high-end of the Power6 line, IBM is taking a slightly different approach from the multichip modules

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• And Then There Was One: The New and Improved Power 570

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, at the COMMON midrange user group in Nashville, Tennessee, IBM formally merged the System i and System p brands, creating a single Power Systems product line with the Power 520 and Power 550 servers while also launching i 6.1 (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) on them. And last week, the company delivered the top-end 64-core Power 595 server, and then did a little product cleanup by merging the formerly distinct System i and System p versions of the 570. So now, the entire Power Systems product line has been consolidated down to only a handful of machines.

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• Sundry Power Systems Announcements

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As is always the case when IBM revamps a server line, there are a lot of little details and announcements that are overshadowed by the new servers and systems software. In this Power6 revamp of the former System i line, which is now but one platform on the unified Power Systems platform, IBM has staggered the operating system and hardware announcements throughout early 2008. And last week, there were still some loose ends to tie up. The existing Power6-based System p and System i servers as well as the new boxes announced in the past two weeks have a whole

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• As I See It: Goldilocks and the Zen of IT

  April 14, 2008 Victor Rozek

  All right kids, grab your blankies and pillows, get comfy, and I’ll tell you the story of Goldilocks, the IT Zen masters, and the three migration options. Once upon a time, there was a CEO everyone called Goldilocks because she had curly blond hair and the people in her company suffered from a paucity of imagination. Goldilocks had a problem. Her enterprise system was toooo old, her employees were toooo inefficient; and, if things didn’t change soon, her annual bonus was going to be toooo small. Goldi had two migration choices and both were real bears. There was the “big

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