As an avid reader of The Four Hundred, you were thinking that IBM was going to start rolling out the Power7+ processors at the high-end of the Power Systems server line, where volumes are lowest and where the company can extract the most money possible out of each chip that comes off the line. And as usual, you were right. And if you are by any chance in the middle of a Power 770 or Power 780 deal, you need to stop and take a hard look at the new Power 770+ and Power 780+ machines that were announced

Last week at the iBelieve NY event hosted by looksoftware, Allison Butterill, the IBM i product offering manager, was hinting about as strongly as she could without getting into the Big Blue doghouse that Technology Refresh updates for the IBM i operating system were going to be on a regular pattern, like the ticking and tocking of a clock, on a April-October bi-annual cadence.

So it was not much of a surprise to all of us that IBM i 7.1 got Technology Refresh 5, or TR5 for short, right on time as part of the October 3 announcements last

As part of last week’s Power Systems announcements, IBM tweaked a bunch of different prices in the Power Systems and Flex Systems lineup.

In announcement letter 312-113, Big Blue cut prices on disk drives in its PowerLinux 7R1 Linux-only machines, which already have artificially low prices compared to plain vanilla Power Systems 730 machines that can run AIX or IBM i in addition to Linux. I described the price differential that the PowerLinux machines enjoy here back in May, and the gap just got larger.

If you are like most business computer users, it’s been a long time since your go-to gadget was a ThinkPad. But outside the declining post-industrial economics, Lenovo‘s client computers are market leaders. This year, with Hewlett-Packard and Dell slipping, Lenovo’s third world first strategy could bring it to first place on a global basis. The company’s next conquests might be in the server business. You don’t think so? Well, EMC does. Soon, your servers might say Lenovo instead of IBM, if not on their outside name tags, very possibly on the inside ones that count.

Unusually, the people

IBM last week unveiled a new Power7-based disk array called the System Storage DS8870 that delivers up to three times the I/O as its previous flagship storage area network (SAN) array. Big Blue’s big fall product launch also brought a new LTO6 tape drive that promises a significant upgrade in backup throughput compared to older LTO5 drives. A new release of the Storwize V7000 midrange SAN management software and a new SmartCloud storage offering round out the storage announcements.

The new DS8870 replaces the DS8800 at the top of IBM’s SAN heap, and while the two arrays look very similar

April was a busy month for IBM with a slew of Power Systems and IBM i announcements, and October is shaping up to be a busy time, too.

IBM has sent out the invitations to an online event that it is hosting on October 9 at 2 p.m. Eastern that will talk about “the new PureSystems Family Member,” to quote Big Blue, that will “accelerate big data and cloud with Expert Integrated Systems.”

A story last week in the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things D column said that IBM was fixing to launch some new iron that was developed

You work in the IBM i community. That gives you a perspective that is worth talking about. Some of that perspective is shared by others who work on the IBM midrange platform and the overall IT professional community. Some of your perspectives are unique to your own career, the company that employs you, and your geographic location. You’re integrated, but you are also a silo of proprietary information.

This is about sharing your information. It’s about becoming more integrated with the IBM i community and with IBM. I’m talking about feedback. I’m talking about your view of the IBM i

The pipeline of students graduating from college ready, willing, and able to step into an IT position at an IBM midrange shop isn’t what it once was, and those who claim the young talent pool has dried up like a west Texas watering hole aren’t far from the truth. But for companies with current and future jobs for recent grads who have IBM i experience, there’s good news.

Worldwide there are 96 schools with classes that include IBM i subject matter, and 44 of those are in the United States. Finding those schools, as companies previously searching for talent found

In the small to midsize business (SMB) arena, the IBM midrange shops have traditionally done well because of the excellent ERP applications available for a wide variety of vertical industries and the scalability that the system provides as businesses grow. However, markets change. Sometimes technologies follow and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes technologies change and cause markets to follow.

A recent report from the ERP observers at AberdeenGroup, based on a survey of 300 SMB companies (with no indication if any are running ERP on IBM i), put new technologies in the spotlight.

In the process of sorting out

We’ve been warning you for years that mobile devices are poised to take over the world, and the rampant proliferation of smartphones and tablets has caused the analysts over at IDC to create a new market category for our little portable addictions.

The name of this new market isn’t exactly catchy or all that clear. “Mobile enterprise management software” sounds like a catch-all for any software that might fall into the mobile category. But then again, it kind of is. IDC explains that back in the old days (which in this case may have been last week), the mobile market