Q&A With Power Systems Top Brass, Part Two

The editorial team from The Four Hundred had a pow-wow with the top brass in the Power and z Systems division within IBM‘s converged Systems and Software Group at the COMMON midrange user group meeting in Minneapolis. Last week we gave you the first half of the meeting, where all kinds of things were discussed, and this week you get the second half, with more things jawboned and bandied about.

Tom Rosamilia, who was tapped to run both the Power and mainframe lines at IBM last August, had been running the

See a graphic overview of Richard’s Phased Approach to Disaster Recovery Planning here.

Some take it for granted that a disaster will never strike their organization. Rather than developing proactive solutions for such an event, their focus usually falls on other corporate IT deliverables. How about you? Does your company have a comprehensive IBM iSeries disaster recovery plan that would allow your business to function in the event of a disaster?

Disasters Galore

You can’t surf the Web or turn on the evening news without hearing about turbulent weather-related events. The dramatic events FEMA has declared of the past

The leading purveyor of Big Iron last week unveiled a slew of new tape products designed to handle “big data.” Among the enhancements IBM introduced is a new mechanical shuttle system that links up to 16 TS3500 tape libraries, providing almost an exabyte of native storage capacity in a single archive. The vendor also announced the fourth generation of its propriety 3592 series of enterprise tape technology, and made a slew of enhancements to disk-based storage offerings.

“Extreme scalability” is how IBM describes the storage capacity enabled by the new TS3500 Tape Library Connector Model SC1, a mechanical shuttle system

Tycho Brahe, a Danish polymath with royal blood, achieved his most impressive astronomical discoveries at a pivotal time in the history of science, the moment when stargazers began to understand that the geocentric model of the solar system, widely characterized as that of Ptolemy, would give way to the heliocentric model of Copernicus and Galileo. Brahe had a remarkable moustache, which ultimately provided clues to his demise, and a midget stationed under his dinner table, but, sadly, not one who resembled Pippa Middleton. Brahe’s cosmology, or Ptolemy’s, has recently enjoyed resurgence; its fresh embodiment lies in

You may get into some rather heated debates about whether the IBM i platform deserves to be branded as legacy or modern, but what that really comes down to is how it is being used. There’s no question a lot can be learned about the platform, and that can be said for a lot of folks who are its staunchest supporters, where it sometimes can be said that love is blind. Brendan Kay is not blind. He sees a lot of potential and, more importantly, he sees ways to put the IBM i platform to good use.

Kay is the

Server makers, including IBM and thankfully including Power Systems machines supporting the IBM i operating system, saw an uptick in server sales in the first quarter. So it will come as little surprise that master distributor Arrow Electronics, which pulls from the big server makers and pushes down through its vast global reseller channel, is seeing business improve a bit, too.

In its first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended April 2, Arrow posted $5.22 billion in revenues, up 23.3 percent over last year. Sales in its electronic components group were up 23.4 percent, to $3.89 billion, while its Enterprise

Just as the COMMON midrange conference and expo was winding down, the organization’s European counterpart, COMMON Europe started the process of soliciting input from the OS/400 and i community about what their Top Concerns are regarding the platform.

This is the sixth global Top Concerns survey that COMMON Europe has put together on behalf of the entire OS/400 and i community–and participation is not just limited to people who work at midrange shops in Europe. Ranga Deshpande, vice president of and events manager at COMMON Europe and the Top Concerns project lead, tells The Four Hundred that the survey the

We have been reporting on the promising trend in IT jobs since the beginning of the year, but if you’re among the 9 percent of Americans still in the unemployed category, or unemployed anywhere else on the globe for that matter, there may be some opportunities that are right for you in the freelance marketplace.

Freelancer.com is a Website based in Australia that is designed to connect businesses with “independent service providers” and freelancers. The site began in 2004, and claims that since its launch there have been more than 1 million job postings and more than 2 million users,

EMC has entered the fray for server-side flash storage. So if you were hoping for another source for solid state drives (SSDs) for your Power Systems server, you may be able to go to disk array EMC by the end of the year or early next year to get PCI-based flash and put a little technical and economic pressure on IBM.

Last week at its EMC World storage extravaganza in Las Vegas, the venerable storage array maker and owner of server virtualization juggernaut VMware said that it had a little something called “Project Lightning” under development. With Project Lightning,

Companies may not be hiring as much as we would like, but they do appear to be spending more money on keeping track of their employees.

Kronos, a provider of workforce management products that grew through acquisitions early in the last decade and that was taken private through a $1.8 billion acquisition by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners (H&F), in early 2007, doesn’t have to report its financial results. But to keep its name out there–and perhaps to lure potential suitors or to prepare for an initial public offering some day–the company has released some financial