IBM has kicked out the third generation of its XIV clustered disk arrays, high-end machines for delivering lots of bandwidth and high-end software features such as thin provisioning, snapshotting, asynchronous and synchronous mirroring, and hot upgrades of cluster components.

Big Blue bought disk array upstart XIV back in January 2008 so it would have a clustered disk array that was more expandable and more resilient than the monolithic DS8000 series of high-end disk arrays, which are based on Power Systems servers. The XIV machines are based on Intel Xeon processors running Linux, with main memory serving as cache for disks.

Despite all of the legitimate complaining that many of us in the IBM midrange community do, it looks like the IT staff, business partners, and IBMers have their eye on the ball and are focused on satisfying the needs of customers. That is the message from the preliminary results of the 2011 edition of the COMMON Europe Top Concerns survey of the OS/400 and i installed base.

Despite being managed by COMMON Europe, the Top Concerns survey of OS/400 and i shops is a global survey that seeks to take the pulse of IBM midrange customers and ultimately, in conjunction

The comparisons are getting a little bit harder as 2011 rolls along, but the Power Systems business at IBM pulled its weight and then some in the second quarter ended in June. Big Blue’s mainframe business is enjoying the best upgrade cycle it has had in five years, raking in the bucks as companies in emerging markets buy mainframes for the first time and established companies in the financial services and insurance industries do long-overdue upgrades to their big iron.

IBM’s overall revenues in the second quarter were up 12.4 percent, to $26.7 billion, while net income rose by 8.2

You would think that in any IT community, especially one as tight as the IBM i community, there would be few, if any, secrets. But that doesn’t do justice to IBM, where apparently it is believed that loose lips sink ships. A good example is RPG Open Access. Funny how you could have something called Open Access and yet hardly anyone talks about it except the proponents of modern RPG.

Here’s a tool, officially referred to as Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, that had RPG developers overflowing sessions at the COMMON 2010 Conference. It was one of the first

More often than not, ethical behavior seems to be determined by distance–either real or virtual. The Internet provides a daily reminder that the more removed an offender is from the outcomes he creates, the more emboldened he becomes. And the corollary is also true: The more remote the victim, the easier it is to harm her. Stealing an old woman’s money from the safety of Nigeria is easier than mugging her in Des Moines.

Technology offers criminals, the mean-spirited, and what Hannibal Lecter described as “the free-range rude,” a high degree of immunity from discovery and retaliation. It’s as if

Users of Lawson Software‘s M3 suite are getting Infor‘s new SharePoint-based Workspace user interface, and ION, a Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB), the ERP giant announced last week. Conversely, Infor plans to adopt some of Lawson’s products and technology for its existing offerings, including its Smart Office interface, Mashup Designer, and Enterprise Search options.

Infor bolstered its already-dominant position in the IBM i enterprise software space with its $1.83 billion purchase of Lawson, one of the few remaining large ERP software houses that cater to midmarket and enterprise customers. While both of Lawson’s flagship ERP products–the M3 and

The second quarter was not just a good one for IBM‘s Power Systems server sales. It was a good one for the latest-greatest incarnation of the OS/400 operating system and database platform, known as IBM i 7.1.

Back in May, when the editorial team at IT Jungle–Dan Burger, Alex Woodie, and myself–attended the COMMON midrange conference in Minneapolis, we met with the top brass in the Power Systems organization. They told us that in the first quarter of the year, there were a few companies making the jump from i5/OS V5R4 directly to IBM i 7.1, but that

I guess that IBM has a bunch of Gigabit Ethernet switches sitting in the barn and it wants to get rid of them real bad before the end of the year without having to make any sales calls to get the job done.

Last week, in announcement letter 311-101, Big Blue, which is now a network equipment maker thanks to last year’s acquisition of Blade Network Technologies for an estimated $400 million, slashed the price on one of its top-of-rack switches. Specifically, IBM chopped the price on the RackSwitch G8052, a 1U rack-based switch with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports

The database market is expected to perform well in 2011, according to a new report from IDC.

Current IDC projections for relational database management systems, or RDBMSes in the proper lingo for databases, added to data integration and access software that works in conjunction with databases, show that these combined categories will show 6.5 percent growth this year, hitting $33.9 billion. This follows a solid performance in the second half of 2010, when the market achieved year-over-year growth of 6.7 percent on revenues of $15.9 billion.

If you do the math on the data released by IDC, then the

The midrange is a mouthy bunch, and we spend a lot of time telling IBM what it should do and what it should not do. Just for a change of pace, I want to point out something that Big Blue has not done and show you why this is a good thing.

Last week, in announcement letter 611-007, the company talked about its plan to offer the SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery on its SmartCloud compute and storage clouds. As the name suggests, this is a full managed service that allows companies to fail-over their workloads running on Windows or