Apropos of nothing last week, I was ruminating about the planning that AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops need to do as they prepare for the Power7 generation of servers running a patched i 6.1 or the new i 7.1 operating system. IBM has been slowly lifting the veil on the Power7 chips throughout the summer, but hasn’t said much about the systems that will use them.

Yes, as The Four Hundred reported back in August, IBM has guaranteed upgrade paths for customers with Power 570 servers (with either Power6 or Power6+ chips) or Power 595 servers (which only

The word on the street is that the software engineers at the Power Systems division at IBM and their counterparts at X64 hypervisor juggernaut VMware, are working to get the new ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor–and perhaps many of its vSphere 4.0 extensions–integrated with the i platform. But don’t hold your breath. This will apparently take some time.

As all i shops are well aware, Windows is by far the preferred alternative platform at AS/400, iSeries, and i customers, and tends to be used on infrastructure workloads such as Web, print, and file serving, or as application servers with Java

The IBM i server has an image problem, which is why going on a public relations offensive is the fundamental goal of our iManifest initiative. I am often asked to comment on IBM’s decision to unify the System i (AS/400, iSeries) and System p (Unix) server lines–what we now know as Power Systems. My view is that the resulting engineering efficiencies and economies of scale must bode well for the future of the IBM i platform.

The flip-side is a potential loss of identity and seemingly zero marketing effort by IBM to explain what makes a Power Server running

My wife’s grandmother was born while the Ottoman Empire was still in business–which is to say a long time ago. When she died, she left behind memorabilia from a life that spanned nearly a century. There were photos–boxes of them–some in albums, some loose, some marked, some not, some capturing moments with people known to the family, some showing the smiling faces of strangers. There were letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, mementos, knick-knacks, and memorabilia documenting the lives of four children. It was a mountain of minutia; the physical remnants of a long, full life.

Family members were undoubtedly comforted by

IBM is once again talking up its Lotus Notes/Domino platform and how it’s doing against Microsoft in the war for collaboration software supremacy. In the latest volley, IBM executives say they are tired of the “hot wind” blowing out of Microsoft headquarters, and say that Notes/Domino is actually “winning” over the Exchange and SharePoint products–a claim that contradicts analyst figures. However, IBM says the analyst figures are tainted because Microsoft doesn’t honestly report sales figures.

Divergent viewpoints are nothing new in the ongoing war between Microsoft and its Exchange and SharePoint products on the one hand, and IBM and its

We take competitive claims by vendors with a grain of salt here at The Four Hundred (see IBM Says Microsoft ‘Grossly Exaggerated’ Exchange Sales Data elsewhere in this newsletter). But we also give credit where credit is due, and from the looks of it, customers of warehouse management system (WMS) software developer Manhattan Associates are disproportionably represented on the Chain Store Age 100 list of the biggest retailers in the United States.

For years, Manhattan Associates has been hailed for its “best of breed” WMS, which is designed to help manage their large-scale product storage and distribution activities. And while

To midrange shops, the name Dataram is pretty much synonymous with clone server main memory that is a heck of a lot less expensive than the main memory that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and others peddle (and grossly profit from) for their boxes. But this week, Dataram is taking the expertise it has in memory and that it gained with solid state disks through and acquisition to launch a caching appliance for storage area networks that can radically boost the performance of servers and cut down on the number of disks that servers need.

As

Competitiveness in the global marketplace is a topic that gets pummeled like the loser of a full contact fighting match. And conversations about global competitiveness almost require talking about information technology. The link between key factors such as productivity and financial sophistication–across the business spectrum regardless of specific industry or size of the operation–and IT is a strong one.

The United States sits on top of the world by providing the most competitive conditions for information technology, and that statement is backed up by the IT Industry Competitiveness Index, an annual ranking that assesses and compares the IT industry environments

Over the past few weeks, The Four Hundred has told you about how challenging the server and disk storage markets have been for both customers and vendors. But there are pockets where IT sales have not been hit so hard, and one of them is the add-on software for storage arrays that bring data replication, snapshotting, and myriad other capabilities to storage systems.

According to a report from IDC, such storage software sales only declined by 9.8 percent, to $2.84 billion worldwide in the second quarter. This is quite a bit rosier–and a lot more profitable–than the 18.7 percent

If the PHP programming language is to live on in clouds as well as data centers, applications written in PHP are going to have to be able to flow not only between data centers and their internal server stacks (we are apparently calling these private clouds these days) and external utility computing providers (these are now called public or semi-private clouds), but also around different clouds.

To that end, last week Zend Technologies, the commercial entity behind the open source PHP language and runtime environment, teamed up with IBM, Microsoft, and a couple of cloud providers to