The Four Hundred has spent the past several weeks going over what the top brass and head techies at Big Blue say about how the IBM i platform running atop Power Systems iron is doing both economically and technically. This week, we close out this series of articles with a discussion with Steve Will, the IBM i chief architect, concerning the near-term future of the platform, by which IBM means the time between now and the end of 2013.

Will went over a lot of this material at his IBM i: Today, Tomorrow & Beyond presentation at the COMMON tradeshow

Help/Systems has acquired the DataThread database monitoring tool from Innovatum, the companies announced last week. The deal puts Help/Systems and its security subsidiary, PowerTech, firmly in control of a product they have been reselling since last year.

DataThread is a powerful database monitoring tool that automatically detects and records IBM i user and application activity, down to the field level. The software complements native IBM i capabilities and third-party security tools by providing filtering and workflow mechanisms to sift through millions of journal and database entries, and alert administrators of signs of potential security breaches, such as changes

Certain companies thrive during a recession. Those that can tighten budgets, run leaner without killing productivity, actually put themselves in an advantageous position. Some try to do it with smoke and mirrors with short-term relief causing long-term pain. Sort of like deciding to save money by not paying the electric bill. That’s not a good long-term plan. But as you shine a light on the IT department, what about an option to reduce hardware maintenance charges? What can you do and how dangerous is it?

If your company fits in with the majority of IBM i shops–a small to midsize

On a recent training engagement, I visited a very popular American company. This company fit the profile of ones that I have visited before. In this case, the customer had a Power System 570; i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1; and had CPU running redline at 100 percent of utilization, using shared resources between LPARs. Support consisted of a help desk (Level 1 support) and a systems analyst (Level 2 or 3), and the entire IT support staff for the IBM i environment was four system admins.

During the week-long class, we talk about best practice performance guidelines and teach

In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I went over what the box counters at IDC reckoned happened in the server market in the first quarter. IDC looks at the market at the vendor factory level and gives a certain dicing and slicing. The box counters over at Gartner look at sales by vendor type including the reseller channel and direct sales from the vendors with a slightly different angle.

By Gartner’s count, customers shelled out $12.67 billion for servers in the first quarter, an increase of 17.3 percent compared to the year-ago period. The number of boxes

Hi, Tim:

Could IBM not offer this as a cloud solution? I’m thinking that they have some huge server farms, stick a few System i boxes online, have some sort of registration process, and then allow programmers to play with RPG and etcetera online? Doesn’t take a lot and there is the cheap development environment carried over the Internet???

–Pete

Hi, Pete:

I did suggest that a cloudy option might be a possibility for a cheap development workstation at the end of my story. It is a question of economics.

The problem is that a Power6 or Power7 chip is

“Go Big or Go Home” is fast-becoming the new battle cry heard from midmarket IT departments around the globe. The demand by companies for better analytics, i.e., the ability to extract actionable insights from “Big Data,” was cited as the number one priority in a recent survey of midmarket chief information officers (CIOs) by IBM.

Midsize businesses, together with small enterprises, are responsible for nearly 65 percent of the global GDP, representing more than 90 percent of all businesses and employing over 90 percent of the world’s workforce, so their desire for better analytics isn’t all that surprising. Like

Back in February, IBM yanked a whole bunch of different trade-in deals it had in place for its Power Systems server lineup. But a long-running trade-in deal is aimed at getting old iSeries, System i, pSeries, and System p servers unplugged–as well as machines from its Unix and proprietary systems competitors–and replaced with modern Power gear.

The last time this particular Power Systems trade-in deal was resurrected was in announcement letter 311-078 on March 22. IBM gave trade-in credit ranging from $250 to $8,000 on vintage and more recent entry iSeries and System i machines. Multiple machines could be consolidated

Our motto at IT Jungle is to “survive, adapt, and thrive,” and that is a fitting mantra for many businesses trying to make it in today’s economy. To survive, companies must adapt to changing technology, and nothing is changing faster than the opportunities brought on by mobile and social computing.

IBM is looking to help business partners (BPs) adjust to shifting buying patterns brought on by mobile and social computing by expanding its Smarter Commerce initiative, which delivers software and services to help companies get their brand wherever a customer might be shopping, be it on partner Web sites, social

It is hard to believe that people still care about modems in this broadband world, but fax/modems still matter to a lot of IT operations. When IBM was busy swinging its axe to chop things out of the Power Systems catalog back in January, it looks like it got tangled up in some modem cables and cut itself.

The chop came down in announcement letter 911-010, when IBM killed off the last remaining Power6 and Power6+ systems from the catalog, warning customers that the BladeCenter JS23 and JS43 blade servers would not be available after April 29, that the