Do you sometimes think that the part of IBM‘s brain related to the AS/400 and its successor platforms has been put in stasis so it is still, in some way, in 1988? That perhaps the people who do marketing for the IBM i platform are not located in Somers, New York, but rather in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the Groundhog Day just keeps looping and looping, like in that fabulous 1993 film by the same name? Maybe it is just me, but despite all of the technology changes and name changes, the Power Systems-IBM i combo does not seem to

The rivalry between IBM and Oracle, which could define the way enterprise computing gets done at a lot of IT shops, is shaping up nicely. Last week, at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal, IBM’s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, spoke for more than an hour, ranging over a number of topics, including its rivalries with Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. Oracle also posted its financials for its first quarter of fiscal 2011 and laid out its goals for creating “engineered systems.”

The entire interview that Palmisano gave at the WSJ event was not

A new online venture called Focus is looking to shake up the status quo in the market for B2B and IT analysis with a business plan that combines social media mechanisms with mostly “crowdsourced” content. If all goes as founder and CEO Scott Albro plans–and it seems to be so far, considering www.focus.com is attracting 12 million people per month, according to Albro–the big players in IT analysis, such as Gartner, will be forced to change how they produce and distribute content.

Focus, which officially launched its Website in May, bills itself as a source of business and technology

During the early 1970s, the iconic large computer was the System/370-158 mainframe from IBM. It ran at and defined 1 MIPS. Its magnetic core memory technology was boosted by virtualization. But during the lifecycle of the 158, IBM fell behind.

Intel and others made solid-state memory that eclipsed core memory. Several companies made IBM-compatible disks, among them StorageTek, now part of Oracle. StorageTek, for awhile at least, became so good that IBM had to enlist it as a supplier. Now another earthquake is coming. This could be the big one. It could wipe out IBM’s remaining significance

When any server maker gets its systems installed at educational institutions to run their back office operations, there are secondary and potentially huge effects that come from that school using those machines. For one thing, if the school partitions some of the machine to have it be used as a resource for students who are taking computer science or engineering courses, as was the case at my alma mater, Penn State, then a new breed of potential customers learns on your box. And that helps grease a sale down the road.

This was one of the reasons why the Penn

We are in the process of configuring a Power 720 to replace an aging Power 520, and need to increase both CPW and I/O. It turns out that two mirrored 2054/1996 features will give us about 20K IOPS, versus about 3K IOPS for a traditional disk setup. And both end up costing about the same amount.

The disk setup requires a feature code 5615 GX++ card, 30 feature 3677 139 GB hard disk drives, one feature 5796 12X expansion drawer with a feature 6446 interface, three feature 5886 12S disk drawers drawers, and a feature 5908 1.5 GB caching RAID

Tony Morelli has been a member of the Central Florida Midrange User Group since the mid-1990s. He’s served on the local user group’s board of directors for years and has seen the highs and the lows. At the end of this year, he’ll watch CFMUG fade away. At its meeting last month, the board set December 31, 2010, as the final day of business for organization.

“We haven’t had people responding to and attending our meetings,” Morelli. “I believe it is just a lack of interest. We were willing to do whatever people let us know they want. But nobody

Last week in U.S. District Court in New York, Judge Deborah Batts sentenced Robert Moffat, formerly the senior vice president in charge of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group and once in the line to succeed Sam Palmisano to run Big Blue, to six months in prison for his part in the Galleon-New Castle insider trading scam that erupted last October.

The scam centered around Raj Rajaratnam, the (formerly) billionaire founder of the $7 billion Galleon Group hedge fund, and Danielle Chiesi, an employee of hedge fund New Castle Partners, and the information they allegedly gathered on high-tech companies and

I don’t mean to boast, but as a reader of IT Jungle newsletters you are already understand the importance of keeping current with the IBM i community’s array of hardware, software, and services. You get it. You’re connected. And we’re glad you’re with us.

For many of you IBM i enthusiasts (even those who refer to the system by one of its former, more familiar brand names), education and training is a priority. And even as such, ongoing education may not always translate into a reality. So IT Jungle has an incentive to maybe make it your reality this year.

You want to adopt IBM‘s latest server technologies to replace your aging systems, but you are not too sure where to start? You want to talk to some techies with real-world implementation services instead of a salesperson itching to make a sale? Well, Big Blue has a deal for you called Systems Lab Services and Training.

In announcement letter 610-042, the somewhat bizarrely named service is aimed at companies that want to deploy specific Power Systems technologies on Power7 servers and who just want to get some help getting together a plan to stand up these products without