When the second generation Power7 servers were launched back on October 12, IBM said that it wanted to bring faster peripherals and doubled-up main memory to the Gen 2 machines, but it also wanted to keep the prices for the machines on the entry Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 machines the same as it was for the Gen 1 machines in terms of processor cards, processor core activations, and software. The new Power 770 and Power 780 Gen 2 machines also were supposed to be in the same pricing brackets.

As readers of The Four Hundred know, I like

The drama is over, and Ginni Rometty, who has spent the past three decades at IBM, is going to be the next president and chief executive officer at the company. Rometty, who is 54, beat out her colleagues Mike Daniels, who is 56 and who runs Global Services, and Steve Mills, who is 60 and who runs Systems and Software Group, for the job. Sam Palmisano, who has held the president position since 2000, the CEO job since 2002, and the chairman job since 2003, will remain chairman of the board at the request of Rometty and the board.

It’s unconfirmed, but I have to give IBM credit for correcting its course and making the best use of RPG Open Access anyway. Last week, the company let a few people know (the press was not included) that it was no longer going to charge for Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. It’s expected this will significantly boost the visibility and use of this product and the products of third-party vendors that have incorporated ROA. It’s a smart move.

Just last week in The Four Hundred, I wrote an article that noted how the ISVs using ROA had sequentially contracted

The uncertainty in the European economies and the after effects of some acquisitions in the region pushed down profits for master IT distributor Avnet in the first quarter of its fiscal 2012, which ended in September. That’s the bad news, which is not bad relative to the political and economic uncertainty we’re all facing. The good news is that the IT side of Avnet still showed very impressive year-on-year growth in a quarter that is not generally the strongest one for the company.

In the quarter ended October 1, Avnet posted sales of $6.43 billion, up 3.9 percent from the

You’re a smart and well-read member of the IBM i community. Your Web browser’s homepage is naturally set to www.itjungle.com so you’ll be sure to get the latest IBM i news, product reviews, and tech tips. But you understand that the Web is World-Wide, and there are lots of other good sources of IBM i insight and opinion beyond our humble website. So bust out the bookmarks–here are the top 10 blogs for the IBM i community.

1. You and i

ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/you_and_i/

IBM i chief architect Steve Will shares his inside view of the platform’s development at the IBM lab

IBM i shops might be wishing soon that Big Blue was making its own disk drives in the Rochester, Minnesota, factory like it used to two decades ago soon. The flooding in Thailand, which is causing much tragedy and strife at the moment, is having a secondary effect of limiting supplies of disk drives.

The monsoons in Thailand have been particularly brutal this year, and dozens of companies that make components for disk drives, as well as the disk drives themselves, relocated to Thailand many years ago to take advantage of inexpensive labor. Seagate Technology and Hitachi are presumably the

For those of you who have never seen a barn raising, I direct your attention to Steve Pitcher, a devoted member of the Lotus Notes/Domino on IBM i congregation. As far as I know, Pitcher has never raised a barn. But it seems he’s passed a sort of equivalency test.

Instead of gathering enough friends and family to build a large farm building in the course of a weekend, Pitcher has compiled, at last count, more than 100,000 Lotus license pledges to run Connections, Sametime, and Notes Traveler on IBM i. He did it using social media (and possibly a

IBM has been wheeling and dealing to try to peddle its Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches from its Blade Network RackSwitch lineup for the past several months, and now it has the launched a new 40 Gigabit Ethernet switch if your network backbones are getting a bit skinny for the traffic load.

The RackSwitch G8316 is a 1U top-of-racker that has 16 40GE ports using QSFP+ cabling. The switch has a chip that can handle 1.28 Tb/sec of switching bandwidth, and it can handle 960 million packets per second of message passing. The switch ports have under one microsecond

Manhattan Associates, a supply chain software company with hundreds of IBM i-based companies using its warehouse management software, has completed its third quarter financial reports for 2011 with record-setting accomplishments. And on that news, shares last week reached a new all-time high.

Record revenue for the third quarter reached $85.6 million, an increase of 16 percent compared to one year ago. Year to date that puts the company slightly more than $20 million ahead of this time last year. Services revenue grew 19 percent and licensing revenue grew 12 percent.

Services revenue totaled $63.6 million, with consulting services contributing

Just ahead of naming Ginni Rometty the president and chief executive officer of IBM effective January 1, the board of directors of the company got down to a little traditional business, hiring a new board member and allocating funds for Big Blue to keep trotting down to Wall Street to buy back billions of dollars of its shares.

The new board member is David Farr, who is chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric, a manufacturer of air conditioners and commercial power and cooling systems, among other things, that also happens to be a big player in the data center racket