What if you were the president of a company and somebody told you that the locks to your building were broken. You would fix them instead of taking the chance millions of dollars worth of goods would be stolen, right? Now instead of physical locks, say you were told the security mechanisms that protected your company’s data weren’t working. You’d fix those too, right? Actually, if you’re a typical System i shop, you would do very little to address the problem year after year, according to the latest security survey from PowerTech.

Despite decades of warnings about the lack

The Power7-based Power Systems lineup got a little rounder and fuller last week as IBM kicked out two new blade servers based on the eight-core Power7 chips that made their debut in midrange rack-based servers back in February. The new Power Systems 701 and 702 blades pack a serious performance wallop, as they must do to compete with very aggressive X64 alternatives from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

The new PS701 and PS702 blades also offer a lot better bang for the buck compared to the prior Power6+ JS23 and JS43 blades they replace, at least based on the

It has been a long time since the OS/400 and i platform got a big software release, and considering how much of the changes that come with the just-announced i For Business 7.1 relate to the integrated database, the virtualization hypervisor, related systems management tools, compilers, and Web application serving middleware, you could make a credible argument that there is not a huge difference between the 6.1 release and the 7.1 release. But, the whole point of the IBM midrange systems for more than 40 years is that there is not really an operating system so much as an integrated

Of all the things that are coming out with the new i For Business 7.1 operating system for Power Systems, perhaps the most exciting to both end users and software developers is what was called Open I/O when it was in development, was briefly called Open Access for RPG in the months ahead of the i 7.1 launch (when that operating system was lovingly referred to as “i Next”), and what we now know as Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. Call it what you will, it is all the same good thing.

As The Four Hundred has been hinting for

Most people think Apple is terrific. It not only invents machines but also invents markets for its machines. But Apple isn’t quite as well loved within the high-tech world. Some outfits that make a big effort to be on customers’ A lists, including Adobe and Amazon, lack warm and fuzzy feelings when they think about Apple. Apple’s adversaries want Apple to become iCarus, who crashed and burned, not in that order, because he didn’t listen to his dad, Daedalus. Apple can be a poor listener, too. But Apple has been soaring.

Envious rivals want Apple to soar

Here we grow again. IT spending in 2010 was already projected to increase according to the analytical minds at research organizations Gartner and Forrester, but these post-doldrum days are calling for a little revision work–all for the better.

Over in the Gartner stable, they’re pitching a growth spurt of 5.3 percent, which would take IT spending to $3.9 trillion. It’s nice to see the economic wheels gaining some traction after slipping, sliding, and spinning for a painfully long two-plus years. At the start of 2010, the IT spending machine was predicted to churn out a 4.6 increase, which was

The Power7-based Power Systems 701 and 702 blades, which have eight or 16 activated cores in their base configurations and which we detail in the lead story in this issue, are a bit overkill for a lot of SMB shops. And so IBM has sensibly created a preconfigured BladeCenter PS700 Express configuration with fewer cores activated.

The PS700 Express has the same basic hardware as the PS701 blade, except that it only has four cores that work and only eight DDR3 memory slots instead of 16. The clock speed on the Power7 chip is the same 3 GHz, and

In addition to the new Power Systems 700, 701, and 702 blade servers and the i 7.1 operating system, IBM tossed a few Power Systems features into the product catalog.

First, there’s a new cryptographic co-processor that plugs into PCI Express peripheral slots in the Power Systems server lineup. I know what you are thinking: isn’t that what the on-board AltiVec vector math units and floating point units in the Power6, Power6+, and Power7 chips are for? Well, sometimes, you need something even more powerful, and that is what features 4807, 4808, and 4809 are all about. They are also

Just like any business would do, COMMON communicates with its members (same as a business does with customers) to discover what it can do to be more responsive to their needs. The annual conference, for which COMMON is best known, bundles the largest and most diverse educational and networking opportunities pertaining to the IBM Power Systems platform into a single conference package, but timing, location, and cost make the annual event unfeasible for some folks to attend. Therefore, the COMMON board has to deliver attractive options for those who find the main event an uncomfortable fit.

That’s not to say

A new Power Systems development cycle is starting with the delivery of i 7.1 and the expectation that IBM will deliver another new version, hopefully called something sensible like Power OS 8.1, in two more years means now is the time to start telling Big Blue what you need and what you want in the platform.

COMMON Europe, the European IBM midrange user group, is doing its part by gathering up the top concerns that OS/400 and i shops. The way it works, COMMON Europe has 37 initial top concerns that customers have, and it wants input from the