• Novell Previews Features in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Novell hosted its annual BrainShare event last week in Salt Lake City, Utah, and probably the key announcement that the company made to the 5,500 attendees at the event and the untold numbers who participated secondarily through the Internet was the preview of some of the features and development plans (in the absence of features) in the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 operating system. But don’t hold your breath waiting for SUSE Linux 11, since it is not coming to market any time soon, apparently. The exact timing for the launch of SUSE Linux 11 is difficult to pin down

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• IBM Puts Out First Cumulative PTF Patches for i5/OS V6R1

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On March 21, which was two Fridays ago, IBM began shipping i5/OS V6R1, the latest iteration and a substantially improved version of the venerable family of operating systems for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform. It is a big set of patches. How big? Well, according to System i PTF Guide editor and IBM System i business partner, Doug Bidwell, chief techie at DLB Associates, the i5/OS V6R1 cumulative patches come on a DVD, and the current crop of patches weighs in at 3.74 GB. “Yep, it’s a biggy,” says Bidwell. “You got to wonder what kind of

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• Ask TPM: Where Is the System i Technical Conference?

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While IBM has been pretty tight-lipped about whatever announcement it has in store for the COMMON user group town hall meeting that is slated for April 2, there is some evidence that is coming to me from a different source–and intended to only answer a separate question–that indicates that my hunch that IBM is going to converge the System i and System p brands is probably correct. One System i shop sent me an email a few weeks ago, asking me when and where the next System i Technical Conference would be held. I made some smart-aleck comment about not

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• IBM and VCs Invest in EnterpriseDB

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  EnterpriseDB, the commercial enterprise that is providing support and services for the open source PostgreSQL relational database management system, announced this week that it has received its third round of venture capital funding, including some dough from IBM. With Sun Microsystems having completed its $1 billion takeover of MySQL last month, it is a bit easier perhaps for the makers of PostgreSQL to get a little more love and attention from the other platform providers who want to support open source databases. Still, it may seem odd, with IBM having a full line of DB2 databases for mainframes

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• IGEL Touts the Green Effect of Thin Clients

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may seem intuitively obvious that a shift from personal computers to thin client computers on the desktop should yield a significant savings in energy, but to be sure, you have to really dig into the costs and account for the differences between the two types of clients, but also apportion some energy consumption of the servers that feed the thin clients. German thin client maker IGEL Technology, like other small end user device makers, wants to use every angle it can to peddle its products, and to that end the company recently put together a comparative study that

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• AMR Says Governance and Compliance Are Big Software Businesses

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If government regulations did not exist, then the software business would have to create them to give itself a market into which to sell products. OK, so maybe the software business doesn’t really work that way, but it sure feels that way. And while no one likes paperwork–even when it is in an electronic format–or the federal, state, or local government snooping into their business, regulations and the need to have and document governance are now a factor of business in the 21st century. And, as it turns out, it is a big business for software companies, and by extension,

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• Recession Alert: IBM Gooses System i Maintenance Prices

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, IBM doesn’t do it very often, but last week it raised the monthly and annual maintenance on AS/400 and iSeries servers and related auxiliary expansion boxes and peripherals associated with the vintage OS/400 servers that populate its vast installed base. The OS/400 server platforms out there in the world were not the only machines affected. Vintage RS/6000 and pSeries, System/390 and zSeries, and other Netfinity and xSeries platforms also had increased maintenance charges. So did various older models of IBM’s tape and disk products. If you want to check your own product numbers against those IBM raised maintenance fees

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• i5/OS V6R1 Ships, And Shops Begin to Move

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we go to press with this issue of The Four Hundred, IBM has just begun, on March 21, shipping i5/OS V6R1 operating system for its System i server line and for a relatively minor number of System p shops that run AIX and i5/OS side by side in logical partitions. And if history is any guide, it has probably been a long weekend for a number of intrepid iSeries and System i shops who spent the weekend doing an upgrade to the new operating system. Of course, it is not just end users who need to get their

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• Global Services Offers i5/OS V6R1 Migration Help

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It isn’t very often that an OS/400 or i5/OS upgrade has involved big changes in the microcode underneath what users and programmers see as that operating system, at least not changes that affect compiled applications. One of the brilliant things about the AS/400 architecture is the way it kept applications from talking directly to the iron–what we would today call virtualization–and thereby allowing applications compiled for one set of software and hardware to appear to run on radically different software and hardware in the future. The move from System/38s to AS/400s in 1988 with OS/400 V1R1 and the move from

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• Disk Array Capacity and Sales Still Growing at Historical Rates

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There may be a lot of things that are slowing down in the information technology sector or among businesses in general, but enterprise-class data storage is not one of them. In fact, according to recent reports from IDC, sales of disk storage systems kept humming along at historical rates in the fourth quarter of 2007 despite some of the turbulence in certain sectors of the global economy in various geographical areas. In many ways, the disk array market is as complex as that of the systems that they plug into to feed them the data they need to do

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