Ladies and gentlemen, start your checkbooks. We’ve been telling you all about the impending Power7+ processors and speculating on the related servers for so long you probably think they are already here and can’t figure out why they aren’t available from IBM‘s business partner channel. It looks like we won’t have to wait much longer to see what Big Blue is going to do to ratchet up its assault on Oracle and Hewlett-Packard in the RISC/Unix racket while preserving its IBM i platform and keeping the X86 legions at bay.

It’s a delicate bit of maneuvering that IBM has

Why might you want to run Python on the IBM i platform? According to the folks at iSeries Python who manage the port of the open source language to IBM i, Python is so readable and easy to learn that it gives programmers a big boost in productivity when they use it, particularly for reporting purposes. And with the recent completion of the port of the Django framework to IBM i, there is one more reason to consider adding Python to your quiver.

The iSeries Python project, which is the brainchild of Per Gummedal, began around 2004. Since then, Gummedal

By the time the cow is out of the barn, it’s too late to close the door. For many companies, including those in the IBM midrange community, applications that have served well for many years with patches and fixes are needing attention just like that barn door. The choice between proactive and reactive problem solving is one way of looking at the situation. The choice between application-centric development and data-centric development also awaits.

Just about every IBM i shop is engaged in application-centric development, which is both good and bad. Application development is the engine that drives business and can

It was shaping up to be a near-perfect day, except for that not-so-small matter of the dead horse. It began as the big finish to a busy summer; a trip to the Wallowas (Oregon’s mini-version of the Swiss Alps) to visit a friend and, ostensibly, to spend a little time in the mountains. Personally, I love mountains with a yearning that borders on the irrational, and I hadn’t had my fill of the high country this year, so I was eager and impatient to hit the trail. The morning after we arrived, I stood outside in the crisp early-autumn air,

Corrected:

With the prices of gas, food, and energy all on the rise, an annual salary with six zeros in it could take a lot of pressure off the average American. It sounds outrageous, but that’s the range for the top chief information officers at some big corporations. The top salaries from 2011, the last year for which data is available, were recently revealed by Janco, a management consulting firm that monitors the IT job market.

While the annual salaries on the list of the top CIO earners would be like winning the lottery for those of us toiling

Hi, Tim:

Looking at the iSeries 515 option you mentioned in Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1, And Do It Well? Don’t forget that unless it has V7R1 with it, you have an after-license fee and a year’s Software Maintenance to buy to get it to V7R1. The existing system can be used as a donor to transfer across licensed programs, but if it has Software Maintenance then it can get to V7R1 for just the hardware cost. If the maintenance is about to expire then order the upgrade before it does!

–Richard

P.S. 515s are good boxes;

Trying to figure out the pros and cons of moving to a new server, on both the technical and economic fronts, is difficult enough. Trying to assess the cost and benefits of moving to a new system architecture is even more complex. But that is what IBM wants customers to do in making the leap from Power Systems and System x boxes to “Project Troy” Pure Systems modular machines.

That’s why IBM has gone back to partner Alinean to gin up a return-on-investment and first-pass capacity planning tool to help you figure out how to convert your Power and X86

Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t know the meaning of the word regret, and despite the shrinking systems business in the wake of the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.6 billion in January 2010, Ellison and Company are determined to make a real systems business out of this. And to their credit, they are doing a better job than Sun was doing by itself.

In Oracle’s first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in August, the company posted revenues of $8.18 billion, down 2 percent and shy of Wall Street expectations. But thanks to cost controls, Oracle brought just

The public cloud is huffing and puffing itself up and is trying to blow the IT distribution business down. According to a new projection from Gartner, the myriad kinds of public cloudy services available on the market today will account for $109 billion worldwide. That is up 19.6 percent from 2011’s global public cloud revenues, and higher than the 12 percent growth Gartner was forecasting in prior prognostications.

“The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” explained Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “The key to taking advantage of this growth will be

Big Blue really, really, really wants you to try out its SmartCloud public cloud, and to try to get you hooked on the idea of IBM managing your infrastructure for you, the company is giving away freebie slices on the SmartCloud in various geographies.

The promotion is running on IBM’s website, and has been spotted in recent weeks in various announcement letters in smaller geographies. And it is the SmartCloud Enterprise variant with 64-bit and 32-bit X86 processors, which have been virtualized and can be set up to run Microsoft‘s Windows Server 2003 or 2008, Red Hat Enterprise