• Reader Feedback on Colonizing Endicott and As I See It: A Novel Idea

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In my rant last week about Colonizing Endicott, I forgot the most obvious thing to suggest if IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman didn’t take me up on the opportunity to visit Big Blue’s stomping grounds and take some responsibility for the economic carnage that the absence of IBM in that upstate New York region has created. Send Sam himself to India or China! My thanks to the reader below for suggesting that in feedback. Let’s go one further, just as a thought experiment. What if we took the entire executive team in Armonk and the marketing

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• A Little More Color on Power Systems i Sales in Q4

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you don’t tell people what’s going on, they will often just assume the worst. Especially these days, as the global economy is undergoing some intense changes. But sometimes, that is a wrong assumption, and as I have said in the past year, I think IBM‘s i platform business is not doing as badly as many people might assume from the numbers Big Blue has been putting out. Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy for the Power Systems division, used to run the Linux-on-Power efforts and then AIX and Linux marketing in the formerly independent System p

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• Warning: IBM Says Some SATA Disks Are Going to Sleep

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have a BladeCenter blade server or a System x tower or rack server in your shop sitting alongside your AS/400, iSeries, or System i machinery, listen up. IBM is warning customers that SATA drives made by Seagate Technology and sold by Big Blue are, in very rare cases, going to sleep and not waking back up. IBM has posted a note in its disk subsystem support pages that explains what machinery could be affected. The short of it is that after power cycling a server or a storage array using the SATA drives, the drive refuses to spin

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• Dataram Hit by the Economic Downturn, But Ready to Do Biz

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  John Freeman, the president and chief executive officer at clone memory maker Dataram, sure picked a tough time to come on board when he took the helm last May. Almost immediately, the economy went on the rocks, but Dataram, which makes relatively inexpensive memory for lots of different servers (including IBM’s System i, System p, and Power Systems iron) is hanging in there despite the tough economy. For the fiscal third quarter ended January 31, Dataram reported sales of $5.64 million, down 15.6 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. Even though the company trimmed back engineering costs, research and

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• New IBM i-Related Redbooks, and a Bunch More in the Works

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past few weeks, IBM and the team of techies who put together its Redbooks, Redpapers, and Technotes have updated two relevant i technical documents and are cooking up an important one that all i shops should keep their eyes out for later this year. The IBM BladeCenter JS12 and JS22 Implementation Guide, SG24-7655-00, is a good starting point for your nightly reading if you want to install i 6.1 AIX, or Linux on IBM’s JS12 or JS22 Power6-based blade servers. This blade guide, which came out on December 29 last year, was updated with new information

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• Colonizing Endicott

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  “All politics is local.” That was the lesson that Tip O’Neill, the legendary Speaker of the House of Representatives, learned when he lost his first political battle, which was to try to get onto the Cambridge, Massachusetts city council. It was the only election O’Neill ever lost, and he had pretty good job security in his district and in Washington until he retired in 1987. Like many of you in the IT sector, I am beginning to wish that all employment was local. And it just isn’t. Get some coffee, put on your walking shoes, and take a walk with

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• PHP Forges Ahead; Consultant Propels Multiple Projects

  February 23, 2009 Dan Burger

  PHP has had a place at the IBM System i table for the past three years and somewhere close to 12,000 System i application developers have sat down to taste the popular Web-enablement language. Some are eating it up. Last week, I spoke with Larry Nies, president of NSC, a company with a System i focus and a flair for PHP application development that depends on the Zend Framework. Dan Burger: How did PHP come onto your radar? Larry Nies: We were working on a customer site. We work with a number of foundries in the United States. In

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• i Shops Get Some Power Rewards Action, Finally

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a special deal for Power Systems i shops that you can only know about if you are talking to high-level IBMers from time to time, as I get to do in the course of my job. I haven’t seen an announcement letter on any of this out of IBM, but the deal I am about to tell you about went into effect on February 10 in conjunction with the Dynamic Infrastructure extravaganza that I told you about last week. As I explained last April in the wake of the Power Systems launch and the convergence of the

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• As I See It: A Novel Idea

  February 23, 2009 Victor Rozek

  As the Feds apply money like defibrillation paddles to the chest of the seizing economy, some still-healthy bystanders (think IT vendors) are openly wondering why they don’t just let the patients die. Of course, the onlookers wouldn’t phrase it so fatalistically, but they question the strategy of rewarding failed companies for their greed and stupidity. As anyone who has ever played a team sport knows: When the game is on the line, you don’t call on your weakest player. And if you play with the big boys at the professional level, you understand that no one in their right mind

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• Virtualization Takes Off on Entry Power Systems

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like server virtualization really is heading to the mainstream on Power Systems machines, if some figures provided by the top brass at IBM are any indication. While logical partitioning has been available on OS/400-based servers since V4R4 was launched with the Northstar PowerPC servers back in 1999, it has been embraced mostly by big shops with big iron even as Linux and AIX partitions were added to the logical partitioning mix. But not so any more, says Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM’s Power Systems division. Handy keeps track of the attachment rate of

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