I can sum up IBM‘s entry Power Systems announcements on October 12, which are not being formally announced until sometime this week, in a way that will flash you back to either your own or your parents’ childhood. This is the refrain of the theme song from The Power Systems Show: “They’re servers, nearly identical servers: They look alike, they cost alike, at times they even compute alike–you can lose your mind when computers are two of a kind.”

Aren’t you glad I didn’t sing that? Be grateful that I think a newsletter should be printed and not

As part of the October 12 Power Systems announcements, the IBM i 7.1 operating system-database combo was tweaked with Technology Refresh 3, the second update this year and the third such refresh since IBM moved toward a regular update cycle that was more akin to (but still distinct from) the way AIX gets updated. The Technology Refresh focuses on new functions and I/O support that is meant to be installed with the current operating system release and be less disruptive.

Steve Will, the chief IBM i architect at IBM, explained this Technology Refresh approach to readers of The Four Hundred

Like you, I only jump to the wrong conclusion when I come to a cliff and generally only if I believe I am going to make it to the other side. There was a lot of circumstantial and graphical evidence that IBM was going to launch a Power7+ kicker to the current Power7 processor, and as we all found out last week, that didn’t happen. As we report elsewhere in this issue, IBM put out new systems with denser memory and new PCI-Express I/O peripheral slots, but with the same or essentially the same Power7 processor features.

I hear a

IBM has almost always been a darling of Wall Street. It is Big Blue, the bluest of the blue chips. This year IBM shares have risen more than any of the other 29 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average; they currently sell for about 13 times earnings. Hewlett-Packard is also a DJII component. It has significantly higher revenue than IBM. For the past five years it has grown faster, too. It sells a larger number of servers than Big Blue. But its name is mud on Wall Street. HP’s price/earnings ratio is half that of IBM. How come?

Looking

UNICOM Systems made two separate acquisition deals last month, including the purchase of iET Solutions, a developer of IT service management software (ITSM) aimed at helping companies achieve ITIL compliance, and illustro Systems International, a developer of mainframe utilities for z/OS and z/VSE shops.

In early September, Mission Hills, California-based UNICOM bought illustro, a Dallas, Texas-based company that develops a range of software primarily aimed at IBM System z mainframe community, including z/OS and z/VSE shops. The company’s flagship product is a Web-enablement suite called z/Ware that transforms the 3270 datastream into XML and HTML. The company also

No matter if you call them hosted services, managed services, or cloud services, the common denominator is services. Can a hosted services company provide service at a level that meets extremely high expectations? Inquiring minds want to know. A simple “trust me” doesn’t close the deal.

So to make sure customers are satisfied, a hosted survey provider checks in frequently with its customers. A customer satisfaction survey comes in handy in determining what’s right and what’s wrong.

Apparently, Connectria is keeping its eye on its customers like a cat watching a mouse hole. Last week, the company sent out

IBM wants to sell the Capacity BackUp Editions on its earlier generation Power7-based servers–the ones not announced last week–and it is willing to give some instance cash rebates to customers to help grease the palms a little.

In announcement letter 311-148, the IBM i Capacity BackUp with PowerHA offering is giving customers who buy a Power 720, 740, 750, 770, 780, or 795 CBU Edition machine and a license for IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i Standard Edition rebates. Those buying the Power 720, 740, and 750 get $1,500 back, those buying the Power 770 and 780 get $2,000, and

Once again, in contrast to the current economy in the U.S. at least, the analysts at Gartner are predicting an increase in worldwide data center hardware spending, projecting a total of $98.9 billion in 2011, which is up 12.7 percent from 2010 spending of $87.8 billion. The Gartner gurus go on to forecast that data center hardware spending will reach $106.4 billion in 2012, and surpass $126.2 billion in 2015.

Even though Gartner’s finest are saying growth will continue in the world’s data centers through 2015, it looks like it will see a slowdown after the spike in 2011. A

Hierarchical storage management is not a new concept, but it sure does keep getting new names as the years roll by. IBM‘s high-end DS8800 disk arrays, announced a year ago, sport a hierarchical storage management feature called Easy Tier, which was used to move frequently used data from slower disks to faster ones in the array automatically to boost overall system throughput.

The DS8800, and other IBM systems and disk arrays as well, now sport solid state drives (SSDs) as well as disk drives, and IBM wants customers to take SSDs for a spin (er, well, not really I

German application software giant SAP is rolling in it again, just like rival Oracle has been since the Great Recession ended.

The “it” I am referring to is not legal issues, but rather money. And SAP has so much of it now it decided to release preliminary results for the third quarter ended in September.

In the quarter, SAP posted at 28 percent increase in software sales, to €841 million, and software and software-related services sales (is that a German language construct or what?) posted a 16 percent increase to €2.69 billion. Total revenues rose by 14 percent to €3.41