Correlation is not causation. That’s one of the first things you learn as an engineer or scientist. But as human beings that are genetically predisposed to find connections between disparate phenomenon, we just can’t help ourselves. We are, in the final analysis, pattern recognition machines that are wired for small tribes and that have a tendency toward gluttony with fatty, sweet, or salty foods. (Which is why Chubby Hubby ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s should be outlawed, right after I finish this here pint.)

We may be designed to live in small tribes and do hunting and gathering, knowing

Once again, many thanks to the intrepid and helpful reader of The Four Hundred who gave us some insight into the equipment purchasing alternatives facing anyone who buys Power 720-class servers from IBM and the forward-looking direction the company cutting the check for the new system took. (Notice the lack of his or her in that sentence? I had to bend it pretty far to do that.) To make the situation a little clearer, that helpful reader gave us some more insight.

To recap: The Dreamy and Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine is one with no disks and no expansion

Most IBM i-based companies do not have a well documented database. It’s likely to go unnoticed until new business requirements uncover the rat’s nest as plans to extract more information from data through business intelligence or advanced queries run smack into database policies that are haphazard or relics of the past. The IBM i operating system includes a modern database management system, but it is limited by data that is poorly defined. To one degree or another, everyone is having this problem.

The solution lies between two extremes. On one end is not understanding how to solve the problem and

November is when my property taxes are due. And living in a state without sales tax, they tend to be high. But the amount is not what rankles me. It’s the fact that in a nation built on the sanctity of property rights, I will never truly own my home, even after the final mortgage payment is made. The reality is that as soon as I’m unable to pay my taxes, the state is empowered to take it away from me.

Although property rights are at best tenuous, they are so deeply embedded in our mythology that it seems heretical

You only see what you are looking at, and like the rest of you in IBM i Land, I have paid close attention to the flash-based solid state drives in 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors that Big Blue has offered specifically for the Power Systems lineup. But IBM’s System x and BladeCenter blade servers have even smaller and less costly SSDs that, at least according to the IBM literature, are perfectly fine for I/O intensive database workloads and that are not available on the Power Systems machines.

A recent deal for System x customers brought these smaller SATA drives to

If you didn’t think that IBM was really a financial services company as much as an IT provider, now that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company has purchased a whopping $10.7 billion stake in the company, you might just change your mind.

During a wide-ranging interview on CNBC on November 14 after The Four Hundred went on Thanksgiving hiatus, Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said he had been accumulating shares in IBM since March and kept right on buying into the fourth quarter. He has stopped buying shares, which is why the Oracle of Omaha is

A lot of people want tapes and disks to die and flash to take over, but it looks like tape technology is not about to go gently into that night. And it is not just a matter of cost per gigabyte, but the density of the three different types of storage devices.

Roger Luethy, a storage specialist at IBM Switzerland, posted a paper that storage techies Robert Fontana, Steven Hetzler, and Gary Decad of the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, published some time earlier this year that shows that maybe the 40 percent annual growth rate in areal

A handful of new IBM i Solution Editions have been added to the program recently, bringing the total size of the North American program to 30. Among the vendors joining the regional program recently are Help/Systems, Agilysys, New Generation Software, and UNIT4 Coda. Also, the platform’s three major high availability software vendors–Vision Solutions, Maxava, and Trader’s–can now sell Solution Edition packages to customers all around the world.

The IBM i Solution Edition program allows customers to save close to 50 percent off the combination of the list price of Power Systems servers

IBM system reseller Mainline Information Systems is expanding its reach in the United States with the acquisition of KgW & Company.

Mainline, based in Tallahassee, Florida, is one of the largest resellers of IBM mainframes, Power Systems, and System x machines in the United States, and it also has a tidy business peddling Hewlett-Packard‘s X86-based ProLiant and Itanium-based Integrity and Superdome systems. Mainline was founded in 1989 by Rick Kearney in the wake of the AS/400 launch and was initially focused on IBM’s proprietary midrange platform. In the 1990s, Mainline became one of the largest resellers of IBM

If you currently use the Performance Management iSeries service, IBM is replacing it with a new set of performance monitoring services that span both IBM i and AIX platforms.

In announcement letter 611-050 from November 15, just after we went on Thanksgiving holiday hiatus at The Four Hundred, IBM replaced the different iSeries and pSeries services with a single, unified Performance Management for Power Systems service. The older Performance Management iSeries service, which was part of IBM’s umbrella Operational Support Services, are withdrawn immediately. IBM will support you with the new combined service until your existing contract term comes