In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I made a logical leap about the problem with supporting independent auxiliary storage pools, or iASPs, that has caused the AS/400 Large User Group to issue a call to arms to compel independent software vendors to support this decades-old feature of the OS/400 and IBM i operating system. While the logical leap I made concerning the root cause of the issue was incorrect, I stand by my assertion that IBM should have made iASP technology transparent to ISV applications and therefore inherently supported.

The AS/400 LUG, in case you don’t know,

Does IBM want to sell you a shiny new Power7 to replace your old Power5 or Power5+ server and get you to move up to IBM i 7.1, or does it want to sell you a Power6 or Power6+ box instead because these machines support i5/OS V5R4? The answer, as it turns out, is exactly what you would expect from Big Blue or any other IT supplier. IBM wants to sell you whatever you will pay to buy for whatever reason you think you have.

As The Four Hundred has been reporting for the past several weeks, IBM is offering

The relationship between IBM and its employees returned to below freezing temperatures last week as Big Blue handed out pink slips to more than 600 workers, according to the Alliance@IBM, a union group that represents many IBM employees but is not recognized by IBM when it comes to negotiations.

This latest round of terminations are spread among IBM facilities in Rochester, Minnesota; Research Triangle Park and Raleigh, North Carolina; Poughkeepsie and East Fishkill, New York; Lexington, Kentucky; and San Ramon, California. IBM does not provide information that ties the number of employees terminated with specific locations.

Company policy at

In retrospect, the cultural fascination with lying probably started with House. The popular FOX series features Hugh Laurie as the redoubtable Dr. House, a scruffy, pill-popping diagnostician with a mind like Aristotle, and a personality like sandpaper. House predicates his practice–as well as the conduct of his relationships–on the assumption that “everyone lies.” No sooner does a patient assure him that he isn’t on drugs, than House dispatches his minions to search the patient’s home for contraband. Don’t trust, do verify, and mess with people in the process. It’s healthcare at its finest: most everyone is cured and no

If you want to get a three-dimensional view of the server racket each quarter, you need to look at the publicly available information from both Gartner and IDC. Actually, to get the correct 3D image of the market you need all of the internal information, too, plus whatever data the vendors themselves have and anything else you can nick from Forrester Research and others that count boxes and labels.

But you can’t have that unless you shell out some big bucks, and this newsletter is free as is the analysis and the advice. You’ll have to make do with

A snowy January put hiring in the United States on ice, but it looks like things thawed out a bit in February.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the arm of the U.S. Department of Labor that counts the employed, the unemployed, and that little known third category of people who are neither, said last Friday that the U.S. economy added a net new 192,000 jobs in the non-farm sector during February. In the past 13 months, the economy has added 1.3 million net new jobs, the BLS says in its latest jobs report, which you can read here.

The

If you were hoping to use some of the long-running and often-modified Power Systems trade-in deals to make your acquisition of a new Power7 server a little more palatable to the bean counters, forget it.

In late February, IBM ceased three different trade-in programs aimed at Power Systems shoppers.

The first one, last modified in announcement letter 310-290 and nuked on February 22 in announcement letter 311-022, gave customers buying specific Power6, Power6+, or Power7 systems trade-in credits on IBM and non-IBM gear if they turned over that gear to Big Blue. The credits were never that great–ranging from

As The Four Hundred previously reported, IBM has scheduled to withdraw the remaining Power6 and Power6+ machines that it had been selling from its catalog throughout the remainder of this year, with machines getting the axe in late April, May, or July, depending on the box. Now, some important features for these machines are also getting the chop.

The machines that IBM killed off in late January were the Power 520, Power 550, and Power 595, which should come as no surprise to anyone. The BladeCenter JS23 and JS43 blades servers also got taken out behind the woodshed. You

How bad is Oracle for open source software? According to the results of a survey released by EnterpriseDB last week, Java developers would rather see Larry Ellison in a dunk tank than Bill Gates, the former Microsoft CEO who crusaded against Linux. The company behind the open source PostgreSQL database also detected some bad karma emanating from Oracle’s handling of MySQL, which is something that IBM i professionals can relate to.

The enticing specter of billionaire tech CEOs sitting in a dunk tank is the product of a non-scientific survey conducted by EnterpriseDB at the JavaOne conference held in September

If you haven’t thought about adding flash storage to your Power Systems-IBM i box, perhaps now is a good time to start thinking about it, despite the high cost of this very fast storage that sits somewhere in speed between disk drives and main memory. Your peers sure are buying this stuff.

SandForce, which makes controllers for the NAND-based solid state drives (SSDs) that IBM has been selling with its Power7-based servers since last year, said last month that it has shipped over one million SSD processors, the company’s name for its flash drive controllers, since they debuted earlier