The Power 750 might have come to market first among the Power7-based machines, but it has taken me a bit longer than usual to cook up some comparative price/performance analysis for this midrange box, which was announced in February. I have done the work for comparisons between old and new Power blades and their alternatives in the Unix and Windows market (the two platforms that really matter for i shops), and now I will begin working my way up the product line and back down again when the entry Power7 machines (710, 720, 730, and 740) and the high-end Power7

Well, I put a gun to my own head two weeks ago and guessed that the Power 710 and 720 machines being launched tomorrow would have a single Power7 processor socket with 128 GB of memory and that their companion Power 730 and 740 machines would have two sockets with 256 GB of memory. I guessed wrong, and I know this because IBM briefed resellers last week ahead of the launch (slated for tomorrow morning) and people’s tongues are a-wagging.

As it turns out, the Power 710 and 730 servers are using a 2U chassis that has long been missing

It seems every time IBM‘s Lotus division makes an announcement, some heckler in the crowd shouts out a crack about Notes/Domino users migrating to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. Last week, two Lotus software announcements came to my attention. One detailed Notes/Domino 8.5.2 and the other LotusLive 1.3. Coincidentally (conspiracy theorists might find fault with that word), a Gartner report on Notes migrations became available. And that lit the fuse on the Lotus powder keg that goes by the name of Ed Brill.

Brill is the director of messaging for the Lotus division and is likely the company’s best known

Ah, morning in the campground. The tops of evergreens bathed in amber; sunlight filtering through the haze of campfire smoke; crisp, pine-scented air; and the only sounds are the crackle of wood and the sizzle of bacon. Well, not exactly.

It used to be that way, before cruiseship-sized RVs came to dominate the terrain like oversized dinosaurs. You know, those monstrous, four-wheeled condos that turned campgrounds into something resembling Wal-Mart parking lots. Now, instead of rising each morning to a sensory feast, all other sensations are drowned out by the annoying drone of generators.

I was in California this past

Despite the worries among some economists that the U.S. economy might be heading for a double-dip and Europe might be dragged back into recession by the faltering economies in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland, the wizards at Forrester Research still think the prospects for the IT sector on a global basis are pretty good for 2010.

Andrew Bartels, who is a vice president and the principal analyst who builds the economic and IT spending models at Forrester, has put out a report saying that global IT spending will increase by 7.8 percent this year, hitting $2.46 trillion. IT spending

Just to fill in a few details on your article on the IBM i license transfer.

There has been a PRPQ around for years that allows a customer with P30s and above to transfer any IBM i license that is not considered part of the hardware (based on how the machine was originally ordered) from one machine to another within their enterprise.

What is new with this announcement was that it came out of the shadows and is now a “normal” feature that doesn’t require you to know someone in Rochester.

You can transfer from and to any 550/750 and

The economic meltdown put system and electronic component sales on a sharp decline, and as far as master distributor Avnet is concerned, these two markets have bounced back as the company closed out its fiscal 2010.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 ended July 3, Avnet posted $5.21 billion in total revenues, up 38.5 percent from the year-ago period. The big boost in revenues helped Avnet swing from a $30.9 million loss in Q4 of fiscal 2009 to a $141.1 million profit this time around.

“The V-shaped cyclical recovery in the technology markets we serve continued this quarter, with

As we report elsewhere in The Four Hundred, the IT and electronics components distribution businesses seem to be on the mend with master reseller Avnet showing a sharp rise in revenues and a return to profits. Rival Arrow Electronics has just turned in a decent quarter as well, and is buying its way into the expanding unified communications business.

In its second quarter ended July 3, Arrow brought in $4.61 billion in revenues, up 36 percent, and even with $5.6 million in restructuring costs was able to bring $116.2 million to the bottom line, up by nearly a factor

IBM‘s spending spree continued last week with two more acquisitions, including the purchase of Datacap, a leader in optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Big Blue has big plans for Datacap, which will become the centerpiece of IBM’s entire document capture strategy and bolster its records management offerings, particularly for customers in heavily regulated and paper-intensive industries like healthcare, government, and financial services.

Datacap had developed a niche for itself with Taskmaster, its flagship suite of Windows-based document capture and forms processing software. The Tarrytown, New York-based company boasts of Taskmaster’s capability to recognize and extract any kind of

If you thought that IBM was not in the application software business, you are wrong. It is just not in the ERP and related software businesses, but Big Blue most certainly is interested in boosting its software portfolio and therefore its revenues and profits. And to that end, IBM last week snapped up another software company in the e-commerce space, called Unica, for a stunning $480 million.

Unica is a public company that specializes in interactive marketing, something that Big Blue itself sure could use a little help with–particularly when it comes to the AS/400 iSeries System i Power