Life has patterns, and Big Blue tends to be fairly regular. It’s July, so it is reasonable to expect some kind of Power Systems storage announcements. And indeed, last week IBM did make some tweaks to various storage products to bring the i 6.1 platform into the fold as a peer to other operating systems using some of its more sophisticated storage technologies.

Last week, IBM announced support for i 6.1 with the XIV Storage System, the clustered disk arrays that Big Blue acquired when it bought the Israeli company called XIV, which was backed by one of EMC‘s

With the entire server market in the tank right now thanks to the poor economy just about everywhere, you can understand why IBM didn’t really want to talk all that much about systems when it announced its financial results for the second quarter last Thursday after the market closed. The irony is, even as bad as IBM’s server sales were in the second quarter, it probably gained share in the key RISC and X64 server rackets.

For the quarter ended on June 30, IBM’s overall sales worldwide dropped to $23.25 billion, down by 13.3 percent compared to the year-ago quarter

Big Blue is cleaning house once again in the Power Systems product line. Or more precisely, in the products that were actually known as the iSeries and pSeries and then the System i and System p in the Power4 and Power5 generations. Get out your flashlight and your old paperwork, and maybe your bifocals if you sit at a computer screen too much like I do, because if you have Power4 or Power5 iron, you will need to see if you need to buy any of these vintage features, conversions, or activations before IBM stops selling them itself or through

About the only time I set foot in a shopping mall is during the holiday season–coincidentally the same time everyone else does. So it’s no surprise that as I circle the parking lot for the fifth time, looking for an empty space that isn’t there, my frustration mounts. I can almost feel the holiday spirit leaching out of every pore. But just when I’m ready to run over Santa and be done with it, the answer to my problem glares at me from the front of every row. There, in the primo spot, at the head of every line, as

Martin Fincham, the general manager of application modernization tool maker LANSA‘s EMEA region and an increasingly well-known blogger in the i community thanks to his My Midrange Meddle blog, is trying to get the independent software vendors, resellers, consultancies, and distributors in Europe to emulate the iManifest marketing program that was started in Japan earlier this year.

The Four Hundred reported on the iManifest initiative last month, and followed up with an article penned by Gordon Davies, a vice president at LANSA’s Asia/Pacific operations who has been reaching out beyond the AP region to let the rest of

If you believe none of what you hear and half of what you see, you might be inclined to think the worst of the recession is over and the economy is on the rebound. Not for everyone and not in every county and state in this country, and not in every country around the world, but there are trustworthy indicators that at least back up such a belief. I say trustworthy because I’m not talking about casual observations such as red sky at night, IBM AS/400 customers’ delight. And I’m not echoing the shouts of swollen TV talking heads.

The

The deed is done, the die is cast, and unless the antitrust regulators in the United States or Europe throw a spanner in the works, the deal is going to be signed on the dotted line. I am referring, of course, to software powerhouse Oracle‘s $5.6 billion acquisition of server, storage, and operating system maker Sun Microsystems.

Last Thursday morning, shareholders of Sun gathered in its Santa Clara, California, headquarters and voted on the proposed acquisition of Sun by Oracle. And 62 percent of the aggregate shares were tendered in favor of the deal, which means that Oracle,

If you are one of the many OS/400, i5/OS, and i shops that are considering a move to Power-based blade servers, here’s a little reading assignment for you. In fact, there’s some homework that just about every i shop can do to brush up on the current Power Systems line, thanks to IBM‘s Redbook technical publishing unit.

On the blade front, IBM just published the BladeCenter JS23 and JS43 Implementation Guide on July 2 (with some updates last week already), which is a tutorial explaining how to set up i 6.1, AIX, Linux and the Virtual I/O Server to

In its recently released mid-year security review, Cisco Systems makes the case that online criminals are using more sophisticated tools and methods of attack, and are increasingly using legitimate business techniques to mask their nefarious goals. A good example of this evolution was on display with Conficker, a worm that began circulating in late 2008 and that continues to infect computers to this day.

When Conficker surfaced late last year and blossomed into the biggest computer worm in more than five years, it took security experts a bit by surprise, according to Cisco, which documented the technology and techniques behind

Patrick Townsend Security Solutions (PTSS), one of the best-known security software developers in the IBM i OS market, has hired John Earl as its president and chief executive officer.

Earl is one of the i community’s most familiar faces. He’s the former chief technology officer and a vice president at PowerTech (a company he founded with others) and a long-time volunteer at the COMMON user group, where he has served on the board of directors and is currently a security subject matter expert for that organization. His IT career spans nearly 30 years.

Patrick Townsend, PTSS founder and president until