We’re coming to the end of what has probably been one of the longest years in the decade and the beginning of a new decade at the same time. Now is a natural time for us to review the state of the AS/400 platform, now cumbersomely known as the Power Systems server running IBM i 6.1. I am going to take my time and think this through, so I hope you are in no hurry. I have been hurried enough this year for an entire lifetime, and this is a topic that takes some slow thought.

That said, it is

Virtualization and the heavier server configurations that are necessary to take advantage of it are simultaneously helping and hurting the server racket. According to statistics released last week by Gartner, worldwide server revenues continued to slide in the third quarter, falling by 15.5 percent to $10.7 billion as shipments fell by 17.1 percent to 1.92 million machines. This is a far cry better than the more than 30 percent drop in both sales and shipments in the second quarter of this year, and represents the first time in five quarters that there was sequential growth in server sales.

The

Most of us can agree that for IBM to be successful in the midrange it will have to get across the idea that it is a better application company than its competitors, the primary one being Microsoft. For a company that is entrenched in the enterprise market, like Big Blue currently is, working in the midrange presents a challenge. To take on that challenge, IBM has a program called Smart Business. ISVs, particularly the application software companies, will play a big role in this.

In the IBM i environment, approximately 80 percent of the customer base fits comfortably in

Twice I’ve traveled to Portland, Oregon, to see Al Gore and twice I’ve been punked. The first time was 16 years ago when he and Bill Clinton presided over the Northwest Forest Summit. The conference was organized because environmentalists were successfully blocking timber sales in court. The Forest Service had been repeatedly found guilty of what one federal judge called “systematic and deliberate” violations of law. The fact that the agency was peppered with former timber industry executives probably didn’t help its cause. Now, the two highest elected officials in the land were in Portland to hammer out a plan

Power Systems users are becoming more stringent over how much time it should take them to recover data following a disaster, according to Vision Solutions‘ second annual “State of Resilience” report, which the vendor officially unveils tomorrow. That’s the good news. The bad news is that organizations are still not prepared to actually recover as quickly as they want, says Vision, which also tried to shed light on IBM i and AIX usage in Power Systems shops as part of the year-long study.

In a perfect world, everybody would have zero tolerance for lost data and downtime as the

A long-time supporter of COMMON and the AS/400 market had some more input on the changes coming at the user group, which The Four Hundred detailed last week.

Hi, Dan:

I need to correct an error in your COMMON article. Speakers are the least affected by COMMON’s recent change to volunteer compensation, not the most affected as you stated. In the past, they needed to give four sessions to earn a full refund of the registration amount. It’s now five sessions. Where a small number of speakers have been hit is that COMMON used to pay additional compensation for

The Department of Labor Statistics put out is monthly report on the jobs situation in the United States last Friday morning, and the good news is that the economy shed only 11,000 jobs, compelling the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate to drop by two-tenths of a percent, to a flat 10 percent. Economists had been projecting somewhere around 125,000 jobs to be chopped, so this was some much-needed good news on the economic front.

Generally speaking, the BLS, which is the part of the Department of Labor tasked with counting everything having to do with the working person (except the number

The idea of putting servers, storage, and networking gear into metal shipping containers and linking them together into a data center cluster is not a new idea–Sun Microsystems was the first to propose the idea back in October 2006–but it is catching on enough that IBM is endorsing the concept and shipping a product.

Big Blue was showing off its riff on the containerized data center, which is called the Portable Modular Data Center, at the 28th annual Gartner Data Center Conference, in Las Vegas, last week. And as you can see, it is a shipping container with a

Master IT distributor Avnet is furthering its expansion into the Asia/Pacific market by acquiring one of the major value-added resellers and IT distributors in Vietnam.

Avnet said last week that it had acquired “certain assets” of Sunshine, a reseller based in Ho Chi Minh City that also has operations in Danang and Hanoi. Sunshine, which was founded in 2001, resells PCs, printers, servers, storage arrays, and software from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, and according to Avnet, generated about $33 million in revenues in 2008. The company has 120 employees and 1,400 customers.

No word on what

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an enterprise application software vendor under the gun to increase revenue and profits that decides to hold off on doing a maintenance price hike. At least for now.

Last week, German software giant SAP put out a fluffy statement thanking the global federation of a dozen SAP-related user groups–known as the SAP User Group Executive Network, or SUGEN–for participating in an enterprise support program, which apparently is a means for them to grouse about SAP’s software and support in a formal way. In typical bureaucratic fashion, SAP says that it has formed a