If you are looking to buy a Power 720 or 750 server based on the current Power7 processors and your company happens to be located in either Australia or New Zealand, then IBM has a deal that you are probably going to want to take a look at and maybe not even refuse. Maybe IBM will start wheeling and dealing up here in the Northern Hemisphere soon, too, ahead of the Power7+ launch.

As you all know, the vast majority of customers who run IBM i on modern Power Systems machines find that a single-socket Power 720 is sufficient for

You have to hand it to IBM. The major economies that used to lead the global economic engine are having a bit of trouble with the growth markets coming on, and being that International is in fact the company’s first name and Business is its middle name, you would expect for Big Blue to not worry about where it makes its sales or even if sales grow so long as profits do. And that is exactly what the company has focused on and accomplished in the second quarter.

In the quarter ended in June, IBM’s revenues took a $1

Beauty and ease of multi-platform integration are in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes it’s the same vision. For instance, if you are a Microsoft .NET application developer and you are able to grab data residing on the DB2 for i database with the greatest of ease, it’s a beautiful thing. But it’s certainly no guarantee. Subject matter experts like Craig Pelkie and Derek Maciak find people lost in this integration wilderness on a pretty regular basis.

Not everyone is happy with the .NET and IBM i matchup. I wrote an article on this topic about six weeks ago, and

She arrived at the dining room as she always did, carrying a baby doll. The woman, like the doll she clutched, was damaged; her appearance shabby, her demeanor distant. She waited her turn in line, acknowledged a greeting from the doorman with a slight nod of her head, and shuffled in looking about for a place to sit. . . .

Stephen Covey, he of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, died last week of complications from a bicycle accident. At age 79, he lost control of his bike on a steep hill. Happily, one of his habits

Maybe IBM should have bought Mellanox Technologies as well as Blade Network Technologies back in the fall of 2010. Or perhaps just after Mellanox ate rival-partner Voltaire that November and positioned itself to be a player in both Ethernet and InfiniBand switches and adapter cards.

Intel is certainly hot to trot to own chip designers who make network switch and router chips as well as silicon and full adapters for servers that allow them to link to switches, and IBM would do well to get more serious about networking than just buying up Ethernet switch maker Blade Network, itself a

Starting next month, the techies from the various divisions of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group are going to be peddling yet another bunch of services to help customers integrate their existing systems with new PureSystems modular gear.

In announcement letter 612-027, you’ll find the IBM Systems Lab Services is offering what it calls ServiceUnits for premium, remote, and local services, all of which are designed to help customers adopt new technologies and integrate them with their existing systems. In this case, IBM is offering QuickStart services for PureFlex Standard, Express, and Enterprise Editions (those are varying degrees of

Here’s a puzzler that we haven’t been able to sort out. There are two new hardware group PTFs that IBM put out last week that are not part of its Technology Refresh cycle and that don’t seem to be tied to cumulative releases of the IBM i 6.1 or 7.1 operating systems, either.

The PTF group is SF99705 for IBM i 7.1 (PDF) and SF99605 for IBM i 6.1 (PDF), and as best as we can tell here at IT Jungle, the PTF patches include firmware and Microsoft patches for drivers and licensed internal code that lives at the

Prominent high availability vendor Vision Solutions has teamed with SkyView Partners, an influential player in the IBM midrange security arena, to tighten the screws on Vision’s portal offering and place more control and manageability within the view of one console.

The integration takes place on Vision Solutions Portal (VSP), a single, browser-based, point of control for monitoring and managing alerts and notifications on Power Systems servers running IBM i as well as AIX through Vision’s MIMIX Global, which manages MIMIX clusters and hybrid IBM i disk-based clustering environments. It is also integrated into Vision’s iOptimize system utilization console on

Location, location, location. We’ve all heard the line that location, which could also be interpreted as being in the right spot at the right time, is the key to success for many business. In the 21st century, businesses don’t have to let their physical location limit their success, but you still need partners, you still need feet on the street sometimes–particularly when there are language barriers.

Take Nebraska-based Linoma Software, for instance. Linoma’s headquarters is located in Ashland, a city with a population of less than 5,000, but with the IBM i platform being popular in Japan and other

It is plain to see when you walk into any IT department when there is a learning environment in place. People are much more motivated to take on the challenges that constantly come their way. Compare this to organizations that make little or no effort to keep a sharp edge on IT. The wasted resources in those instances should be enough to choke a horse, or a CEO, depending on who was the first to pay attention to it.

In many cases, IT training and education doesn’t come cheap. Travel expenses plus food and lodging can be equal to or