When you pay for your operating system on a per-core basis, not a per socket basis, and that operating system includes a relational database and costs as much as Big Blue charges for the IBM i platform, there is one thing I can tell you for sure: you want the fastest processor that IBM can ship, and you don’t want to pay for extra cores you will never need, to get the best bang for the buck.

And lucky for OS/400 and i shops, IBM has added just such a processor to the Power 750 midrange machine.

As The Four

It’s no secret that I like hardware, but I am the first to admit that the endless progression of hardware improvements is merely there to make software run better, faster, or more reliably. The hardware is the easy part; the software is the hard part and it therefore moves a lot more slowly on the evolutionary scale than hardware. That said, companies like to roll out new software releases with new hardware releases to give customers twice as many reasons to think about spending some money.

And so it was with the Power Systems announcements on April 12. As The

The Power Systems business is finally hitting on all five cylinders: blade servers, entry servers, midrange servers, enterprise servers, and the big bad box. It took IBM the better part of a year to get the entire Power7-based server lineup into the field, and the first quarter of 2011 was the first financial period when all of the new iron was available and, perhaps more importantly, when customers thought business conditions had stabilized enough for them to actually spend money.

In the first quarter ended in March, IBM posted revenues of $24.6 billion, an increase of 7.7 percent over the

Richard was at work when his wife died. Although it was a Saturday, he was hunched over a keyboard, stringing together lines of code that would become a customized inventory control system. He had hoped to join his wife and some friends for a bike ride, but the project was late, the client was impatient, and Richard prided himself on being conscientious. When his phone rang, the caller ID said it was his wife, but the voice on the other end was male and the tone was grave. Afterward, he could not recall all of what the man said, just

A fair argument can be made that innovation is progressing faster and is much more keenly needed in the storage arena than in processors and other elements of a system–with the possible exception of main memory technology, which is woefully lagging processor and flash/disk storage innovation. As part of the Power Systems blade and midrange systems update two weeks ago, IBM rolled out a bunch of subtle enhancements to the storage it sells with the Power-based server line.

Disk drives have not been replaced completely by flash memory, and given the relatively low cost of storage capacity, they won’t

IBM is cleaning its Power Systems house again, which stands to reason after the April 12 announcements. It is spring, after all.

As detailed in announcement letter 911-015, a bunch of Power Systems features will be ripped out of the Big Blue catalog later this year and early next, and IBM wants to give you fair warning so you can stock up now on parts you might need later.

The 288-port QLogic InfiniBand switch (product 7874-240) will probably not be missed by most OS/400 and i shops when it is withdrawn from marketing on July 29, but the various

IBM is letting some more of its i5/OS and IBM i software licenses slide from old machines to newer ones to cushion the blow of upgrading to more modern Power-based machinery.

If you drill down into announcement letter 211-108, which discussed a lot of the tweaks and changes Big Blue did for IBM i 6.1.1 and 7.1 in conjunction with the launch of fatter PS7XX blade servers and faster engines for the Power 750 midrange server, you will see that the Power 520 (both the 9405-520 and the 9406-520 machines) as well as the new PS703 and PS704 blade

Live from Minneapolis . . . it’s COMMON LiveTrack. Although you may be blue about missing out on the educational sessions, the vendor expo, and the networking with your IBM Power Systems brethren at the COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition, you have an opportunity to see what and who you are missing during the May 1 through 4 event. Portions of the largest event exclusively for IBM i and Power Systems users will be free and a separate smorgasbord of educational sessions can be viewed for a fee ($299 for COMMON members and $399 for non-members).

The free

Based on the results of a Webcast earlier this month, iManifest EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) is reported to have had a successful re-launch. The group is planning a second Webcast May 17.

According to a press release from Andrew Nicholson, sales and marketing manager at Utilities 400, an IBM i vendor based in the United Kingdom, the keynote speech by Frank Soltis “rallied the troops with his thoughts on why the movement is necessary in EMEA and his aspiration for the platform in the future.” Soltis, the chief scientist of the platform when it was known as

NetWare and Linux distributor Novell has managed to get the approval of antitrust regulators in the United States and Germany to sell off 882 patents to a holding company that many in the IT industry regard with suspicion because it is backed by Microsoft, EMC, Oracle, and Apple. And that means the $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell by Attachmate can proceed.

Attachmate announced that it wanted to buy Novell last November, and under the acquisition deal it negotiated, the company said it would be selling off 882 unspecified patents to a company called CPTN Holdings, which