• Blade Servers Barely Nick IBM i Market

  December 6, 2011 Dan Burger

  After nearly four years of sales, IBM finds itself with a blade server for the IBM i-based Power Systems midmarket that is unwanted and as yet unable to build a following. Adjustments have been made, incentives have been provided, but this product still seems destined to be ignored by a large majority of users. Why? The answer is complex. This product is too complex compared to the servers the community is familiar with and has come to count on. I don’t believe this is simply a case of not enough IBM i shops with a forward-thinking approach to IT. There

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• TSM and IBM i: Not What It Could Be

  December 5, 2011 Alex Woodie

  It is not unusual in the IBM i world to discover that IBM as a whole pays more attention and spends more time developing solutions and utilities that run on and support third-party operating systems rather than its own IBM i OS. Call it the nature of i beast. But when it comes to IBM’s strategic backup and recovery product, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), at least one IBM business partner wonders whether it’s time that IBM i becomes a fully supported TSM client. For years, STORServer has been in the business of packaging, selling, and supporting backup appliances based on

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• Small Biz To Boost IT Spending In 2012, Says Computer Economics

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Small businesses are like birch trees: they are the first to wander out into a new field and turn it into a forest. And as such, small business spending can be thought of as a leading indicator for economic recovery, and perhaps more importantly, create new jobs and, even more importantly for IT vendors, they also tend to invest in computers, software, and other gadgets at a faster pace than larger organizations during economic downturns. The prognosticators and pulse takers at Computer Economics just completed a survey of 157 organizations, most of them in the United States and Canada, to

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• As I See It: The Artist And The Pragmatist

  December 5, 2011 Victor Rozek

  Gather around, boys and girls, Uncle Victor is going to tell you a story. And what a story it is, full of greed and generosity, cooperation and betrayal, respect and disdain, and even death. Scheherazade would be envious. OK, maybe not, but the stakes were higher for her. In any event, once upon a time, there were two little boys, and for a long time that’s about all they had in common. One was abandoned at birth and became a college dropout who collected Coke bottles for food money. The other was very much wanted, went to exclusive schools (which,

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• Cooling Server Sales Reach Pre-Recession Levels

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like the data centers and data closets of the world, which have been eating servers like crazy in the second half of 2010 through now, are starting to get full. The appetite for system buying was starting to slow in the third quarter, according to statistics from Gartner, but was still pretty healthy nonetheless. The question now is whether the market can have a bumper fourth quarter and beat last year’s high, and while this is possible, it seems unlikely. Gartner reckons that server makers sold $12.97 billion worth of machines in the third quarter ended in

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• IBM Tweaks Power Systems-IBM i Licensing Deal

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were hoping to get a cheaper IBM i license for old Power6+ blade servers you have in your shop, you just missed the boat. On November 22, while The Four Hundred was on hiatus for the Thanksgiving holiday, in announcement letter 311-171 IBM cut out the old JS23 and JS43 blade servers from the IBM i Licensing by User promotion. This deal has been running since August 2010. It gives customers that have user-based pricing for the IBM i operating system–meaning Power 520-class systems, Power-based blade servers (old and new), and the new Power 710 and 720 machines–a

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• Big Blue Sneaks Out Power Systems Price Changes

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we keep pretty religious track of IBM‘s weekly announcements, which historically have come out on Tuesday mornings around 9 a.m. Eastern. But over the years, Big Blue has been wandering from its traditional announcement days, launching things any old day and often not in conjunction with the actual announcement to the press for a new product. And, this year, IBM has put a new front end on its customer resource system that seems to have a mind of its own. That’s the excuse we are using for why we didn’t see some Power

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• PCI-Express 4.0 Spec To Double Up Peripheral Bandwidth

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Systems using PCI-Express 3.0 peripherals are not yet on the market–unless you count Xeon E5-based machines shipping ahead of next year’s launch–and the basic feeds and speeds of the PCI-Express 4.0 spec have been hammered out by the PCI-Special Interest Group that controls the spec. After about nine months of running simulations, PCI-SIG said that it would be able to push the bandwidth on the PCI-Express bus to 16 GT/sec (that’s gigatransfers per second), double the 8 GT/sec of the shiny new PCI-Express 3.0, and still remain on copper interconnects between adapter cards and peripheral slots on systems. This will

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• Disk Drive Shipments To Dive 30 Percent in Q4

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Fears that the catastrophic flooding in Thailand that has killed hundreds of people and dislocated millions more would have a dramatic impact on the hard disk drive business are apparently going to be realized. The looming disk drive shortage is already driving up raw disk and PC prices and it won’t be long before server prices start rising, too. This tragic situation, like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan back in March, demonstrates the need to diversify the IT supply chain and second- or third-source parts despite our tendency to want to ramp up volumes at a limited number of

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• JDA Settles Lawsuit With Dillard’s Over i2 Software

  December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The acquisition of supply chain specialist i2 Technologies may have helped drive the revenues and profits of JDA Software in the past year, but the acquisition cost JDA perhaps more than it expected. JDA tried to buy i2 back in August 2008, the belly of the Great Recession, for $346 million, but four months later, when it was unable to line up the financing, it called the deal off. Then in November 2009, when the economy had improved a bit, JDA took another run at i2, shelling out $396 million to acquire the company, adding it to its already-acquired set

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