The price/performance saga continues, and in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we pit the new Power7-based Power Systems 700, 701, and 702 servers against their rough equivalents in the X64 blade server world. Two weeks ago, when I fixed an error I had discovered with the PS701 blade configurations, I showed you that the Power7 blades were a mixed bag, with the entry i blades able to hold their own against IBM‘s AIX on the same hardware and configured with the Oracle 11g R2 Standard Edition One entry database.

As I moved up to the PS701

As previously reported a month ago in The Four Hundred, IBM had a pretty good first quarter to start out 2010. Big Blue’s overall sales rose by 5 percent to $22.9 billion, and net income increased by 13 percent to $2.6 billion. The Systems and Technology Group, which makes and sells IBM’s chips, servers, and storage arrays, managed 4.9 percent growth, to $3.38 billion. But if you drill down into the numbers, as I did, you’ll see that the Power7 transition and the wait for the System z11 mainframes have pushed STG into the red.

As I do each

Back when I started in this AS/400 racket as a newbie reporter who would never dream of asking a mean question of anyone and did not have much of a sense of the business world or how it truly used computers to get work done, I heard something that seemed like a timeless truth even in the late 1980s: No one ever got fired for buying IBM. And no one back then had to justify buying an AS/400. The back-end apps you wanted ran on it, it had an IBM label and a sophisticated, easy to use database and programming

CEOs around the world today place more emphasis on the creativity of their leaders than their rigor, management discipline, integrity, or vision, according to a newly released study from IBM. Indeed, the study finds that the creative management style–which is marked by taking calculated risks and communicating in new ways–will lead to more success as companies struggle to find their way in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

The key message that IBM heard over and over from the 1,500 CEOs, general managers, and senior public sector leaders that it interviewed from September 2009 through January 2010 was that

Because complex issues intertwine business goals and IT capabilities, established companies struggle to keep pace with the modern world. Knowing exactly how to integrate systems, undertake virtualization projects, and implement new hardware and software can exceed the speed many companies can handle, so they seek providers with the expertise to get companies over business barriers. And that’s why IBM and its business partners are increasing their emphasis on skills, education, and certification.

More than ever, companies are focused on IT providers who can demonstrate experience and credibility when it comes to architecting systems as opposed to having an aptitude for

IBM has wiggled and jiggled a few things in the Power Systems lineup that you should be aware of if you are actually in a mood to spend money, as some companies thankfully are.

I had to rub my eyes twice, and not just because of the huge amount of pollen in the air here in New York City, when I saw announcement letter 310-189, but because I could not believe my eyes. That’s because IBM utterly destroyed the pricing on the 5250 Enablement feature for the Power 550 servers using Power6 and Power6+ processors. Prior to the announcement

If you are looking to buy some training for your employees or for yourself in the coming months, IBM has a deal for you.

In announcement letter 310-176, IBM said that it would give customers who buy Education Packs to cover the cost of online training discounts between now and August 6. IBM sells training in Education Pack blocks ranging from a low of $2,500 to a high of $24,900, and under this deal, if you buy packs for online training, IBM will shave 10 percent off the cost of the packs. Under IBM’s current pricing scheme, it does

A lot of areas in the IT business were slammed last year, with double-digit revenue declines, but the market for business intelligence, analytics, and performance management (meaning the performance of the business, not the underlying systems) software was not one of them.

According to the bit and money counters at Gartner, these three interrelated software products accounted for $9.3 billion in combined revenues in 2009, up a modest 4.2 percent from the $8.9 billion companies brought in during 2008.

“Even though growth was nowhere near the levels of 2008, and by no means immune to the recession, BI showed

Sometimes you want to modernize a COBOL application running on an AS/400 or mainframe, and sometimes you want to move those COBOL applications to another platform. Sometimes, you want to do a little of both. And that is why Veryant, one of the makers of cross-platform COBOL compilers that is not part of the Micro Focus collective, has teamed up with BluePhoenix, which sells legacy application modernization tools for mainframe and i boxes.

Under a partnership agreement inked between BluePhoenix and Veryant announced last week, BluePhoenix will be able to resell Veryant’s isCOBOL compilers and runtimes. The goal

The OCEAN User Group of Southern California is putting the finishing touches on its 17th annual meeting, which sports a technical conference as well as a vendor expo. The one-day event will be held on July 16 at the National University in Costa Mesa, California.

The OCEAN meeting will be a full day, running from 7:30 in the morning til 4:30 in the afternoon, and training sessions from IBM midrange luminaries Jon Paris, Susan Gantner, Mike Pavlak, Jeff Olen, John Earl, Craig Pelkie, Paul Holm, Mike Rede, and Terry Larkin are on deck. You don’t have to be an OCEAN