When you are a computer system of a certain age, you have to count your blessings as well as your aches and pains. As I sit here on June 21, 2012, I just took a walk in Manhattan down on Broadway to intentionally experience the 97-degree heat that is still building toward 100 this afternoon. I didn’t take a walk because this heat wave would clear my head and somehow focus my mind, but rather because for once I would be forced to walk at a lazy pace and let my mind wander through all the many years we have

If you don’t know something is broke, is that any reason not to fix it? That’s not a trick question. It’s another way of saying ignorance is bliss, which doesn’t carry a lot of weight in traffic court or database management. You might think you have a get out of jail free card because the IBM i operating system, with its built-in database management system, doesn’t need a database administrator, but that little marketing half-truth is exactly what “ignorance is bliss” is all about.

It’s true the IBM midrange computer doesn’t need a database administrator in the same way that

It looks like customers doing some tire kicking on IBM‘s new PureSystems modular systems have been complaining a little about some of the pricing on the boxes and are looking for a little help to get the new iron and its systems and cloud management software up and running. Big Blue last week tweaked some pricing on the Flex System iron underneath the PureSystems configurations, and tweaked some pricing on BladeCenter and Power Systems machines while also rolling out implementation services for Flex System machinery.

First, let’s go over the price changes. In announcement letter 312-070, you will

People who lived during the Great Depression often greeted each other with a question: “Are you working?” For millions, finding work was the daily imperative and it dominated every waking hour. Notably, no one asked the quintessential question of our time: “What do you do?” That is a question born of having choices, which themselves are the products of affluence. Back then it hardly mattered. There was dignity in simply having a job, and sanctity in labor that could provide food, shelter, and the most elusive commodity of all during hard economic times, hope.

The importance of securing a job–any

EMC says the implementation of its Data Domain virtual tape library (VTL) has simplified backup and recoveries at Mid-Continent Group, an insurance company based in Oklahoma. EMC says the move from a tape-based backup strategy to a disk-based one built on Data Domain’s data de-duplication technology will give the IBM i shop speedier recoveries, save money, and free up room in its data center.

Mid-Continent Group is a collection of three insurance companies–Mid-Continent Casualty, Mid-Continent Assurance, and Oklahoma Surety–that are licensed to sell insurance in 33 states. The group, which itself is owned by the $1.1 billion American Financial Group,

If all goes well, I will be flying out west in late August to visit Stanford University and the Hot Chips 24 symposium on processors and other types of chips used in the gadgetry around us in the data center and in our offices and homes. It’s a total geek fest, with presentations that are about 75 percent over my head, and the kind of thing I love to do because being a dummy and admitting it is the only way to learn anything.

A whole bunch of server chips are going to be revealed at the Hot Chips event,

Sometimes, you don’t know something is going on until someone in authority tells you that you have to stop doing it.

Last week, on the 24th birthday of the AS/400, IBM tweaked a bunch of already-running announcements with an interesting provision, which reads:

“[T]he ability to request that the IBM Redemption Center (IRC) make rebate checks/cheques payable to someone else has been removed. The IRC will disregard this information, if included, on any Rebate request forms it receives, and will send the rebate to the customer that acquired the eligible products.”

You would have assumed that this would have been

Regardless of the economic maladies that have Europe tied in knots, the IT market is managing to keep its head above water, even if gains are likely to be fractional at best. It’s times like these when some companies move forward, looking to create an advantage that will pay off when the economy returns to something closer to normal. For example, last week the high availability and disaster recovery software vendor Maxava announced the addition of two senior-level executives to its European team.

The company has operated in the European region for 12 years from its office in the United

Trying to tell the future is a tricky business. When you’re right, you’re a hero, and when you’re wrong, well, you just try, try again.

The analysts at Gartner have a reputation for having a pretty clear eye for the future of IT. But they may have been a tad overly optimistic about the economy in Europe and therefore spending on enterprise application software, as they have recently released a new report that downgrades their original prediction for by one half of one percent in 2012.

(Coming within a half percent is some impressive prognosticating. But I guess when you’re

The box counters at IDC gave their overview of the server racket in the first quarter on a global basis a few weeks ago, and now the company has done a deep sort on its data and drilled into the data for the EMEA market. And man, it sure doesn’t look good if Europe is any kind of leading indicator for the global economy and server sales are a kind of canary in the coal mine.

As The Four Hundred explained two weeks ago, the overall server market had a 2.4 percent revenue decline in the first quarter, falling