The word on the street a little more than a year ago was that Big Blue would be packaging up some feature enhancements and patches and would roll out an interim i 6.1.5 interim release of the venerable OS/400 operating system sometime in the first half of 2009, maybe in May, to be followed up with an i 6.2 full release in early 2010, perhaps in January. This information came out of people attending the i variant of the Power Systems Technical University in Chicago last September, and was reasonably credible.

It also turned out to be untrue, inasmuch as

Last week was a big week for operating systems. Microsoft delivered Windows 7 for desktops and started shipping Windows Server 2008 R2 for servers. And IBM, as The Four Hundred reports about elsewhere in this issue, put out a dot release of its current i 6.1 platform, which is called i 6.1.1, and started talking about the next major release of the i platform, which is due next year.

Getting information about the future i release has not been easy, but The Four Hundred is the only place where you can find this information for the past year–unless

Last week, in the wake of an insider trading scandal that has implicated Bob Moffat, senior vice president and general manager of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group, the company rejiggered its executive ranks after putting Moffat on a leave of absence as he copes with his legal issues. Big Blue quickly named a new head of STG and acted like nothing at all had happened, which is the best and really only course of action that it could take.

“In view of the U.S. Federal investigation into his personal activities,” explained Ed Barbini, a spokesperson from IBM, “Mr. Moffat

Jobless recoveries, working retirees, and President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. We live in a land of contradictions. For fans of the oxymoron, it’s a target rich environment. Leaders who don’t lead, lenders that don’t lend, and health care so expensive it makes you sick. We’re heading toward Halloween and there’s plenty of things out there to scare us. Haunted houses worth less than their mortgage, skeletal 401(k)s, and a vampire financial system designed to suck every last dollar from your wallet. Oh, and by the way, the ghouls who helped orchestrate the Great Recession are now running the

While the i 6.1.1 interim operating system release and the future i 6.2/7.1 major release was the Power Systems i news as part of the quarterly Dynamic Infrastructure announcements from IBM, there were a bunch of storage and networking announcements that are probably equally important to i shops.

First up, a patch for i 6.1 and the new i 6.1.1 interim release supports the feature 5903 SAS disk controller that was announced back on April 28 for AIX and Linux operating systems, fulfilling a statement of direction to support this controller on the i platform. Feature 5903 is a

It’s the fall, and that means that most of us are starting to look forward to the holiday season and better prospects for the next year. It would be hard to have a worse year than 2009 for a lot of companies and a lot more people, and everyone seems to be ready for some kind of rebound, a return to something called normal, in our work and financial lives. Last week, the analysts at Gartner offered some glimmer of hope that 2010 would be better, at least in terms of IT spending, than 2009.

By the way, Gartner is

The iManifest initiative in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) gained momentum last week by adding some heavyweight corporate entities to the roster. For iManifest to climb the ladder of success, representation and financial backing by high-end companies is almost a requirement. iManifest Japan, the oldest and most well-developed of the iManifest initiatives, has achieved widespread support from the ISV community in Japan, including some big names. EMEA’s program just took a big step up.

Martin Fincham, leader of the iManifest EMEA band, happily noted that Avnet, an IBM master reseller, and Infor, one of the largest

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers of The Four Hundred about the timing and configuration of entry Power Systems servers based on the future Power7 processors. People are not only worried about when the entry machines are going to be available and what their configurations might look like, but like me, your peers out there in AS/400 Land are more than a little bit worried that IBM might somehow not put the i operating system on the entry Power7 boxes, even as it does put AIX and Linux on them.

I haven’t heard anything from inside Big

There’s a straight line that connects education and training with higher productivity and career satisfaction. It’s a great investment for organizations to make in their employees and it’s a wise investment for people to make in themselves and their futures.

When the Young i Professionals (YiPs) started networking a few years ago and began talking about what they could accomplish as a group, one of the things on their “to do” list was to provide a source of free educational materials for the IBM i community.

Consider it done.

Actually, it’s not done, but it is available. Let’s call it

Hitachi‘s Global Storage Technologies, the division of the Japanese tech giant that ate IBM‘s disk drive business a few years back, has kicked out two new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disks that spin at 15K RPMs, and one of them is in a 2.5-inch form factor. This means Hitachi’s server OEM customers (and therefore end users buying servers) no longer have to resort to fatter and hotter 3.5-inch drives to get 15K RPM performance.

If late 2007 was when SAS drives in the small form factor went mainstream, then it looks like late 2009 is when these drives