It was not a foregone conclusion that there would be upgrades available from Power6 and Power6+ systems to Power7+ machines, although many of us were guessing that there would be upgrades between the Power7 iron to Power7+ machinery. As it turns out, IBM is being pretty generous with its upgrade policy, or at least as generous as it can be within the confines of the very strict accounting rules that govern upgrades and the preservation of serial numbers on IT gear.

You may not be aware of it, but there are in fact accounting rules that stipulate how much of

While the Power7+ chip, the new Power 770+ and Power 780+ systems, and IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 5 were the dominant parts of the October 3 announcements, IBM made a bunch of changes to its lineup of I/O devices–both storage and networking–that have an effect on the entire Power Systems range and that keep the product line moving forward along with the relentless tide of ever-increasing capacity that sweeps us along in the IT racket.

The I/O enhancements from IBM for the Power Systems machines were all rolled up in announcement letter 112-180. Perhaps the most exciting of

IBM last week unveiled SmartCloud Entry for Power version 2.4, a new release of its software for helping organizations deploy and run a private cloud environment on Power Systems servers. With version 2.4, the company has followed through on its pledge to support the management of IBM i workloads with the software, which continues to require AIX.

SmartCloud Entry for Power builds upon the capabilities in PowerVM and Systems Director VMControl to deliver a Web portal interface where administrators can create, modify, and delete virtualized slices of their server. The software delivers self-service provisioning for end users; provides security, auditing,

What if there was a simple experiment that could predict the trajectory of a 4-year-old’s life. Seems improbable. After all, toddlers are no more fully formed than Greek economic policy. But such an instrument exists and it involves marshmallows.

The experiment was the brainchild of psychologist Walter Mischel and it dates back to the 1960s when experimentation of any sort usually involved drugs. It was conducted at a preschool on the Stanford University campus with the children of faculty members and graduate students, which suggests that the little dauphins were strangers to privation. The test was simplicity itself, and the

IBM is settling into a spring-fall cadence for system announcements, with some wiggling here and there as machines come out early or a little late. We got the first Power7+ machines on October 3, and the new “Project Sparta” PureData appliances for “big data” and “cloud” came out last week on October 9. I get the big data part of the PureData announcements, but after analyzing the announcements and getting briefed by Big Blue, I still don’t get the cloud part. And I don’t get why the names on all of this stuff need to be so complicated.

The Project

Encouraging employees to upgrade skills used to be emphasized a lot more than it is these days. I don’t think there’s any debate about that. It was more widely believed that learning to do more with the on-premise hardware and software was directly related to increases in productivity and a better return on the overall IT investment. There are still companies that believe investing in people is money well spent, but you could probably make a case for them becoming an endangered species.

One place you can glimpse these increasingly rare organizations is at the IBM Power Systems Technical University

So how many data centers, server rooms, and data closets do you think there are in the United States? You guess maybe 20,000? Maybe 100,000? Try 2.94 million, at least according to the box counters at IDC.

This is a much larger number than you might expect, and considering there are tens of millions of small businesses in the U.S., maybe you were guessing the number should be larger. But I was surprised that the number was more than a couple hundred thousand myself, assuming that most businesses did as I did for many years, which is tuck a

There’s some truth in the remark that as we get older we get more set in our ways. And along that same line of thinking is one of my favorite reflections that “wisdom arrives with old age . . . but sometimes old age arrives alone.” Things like this come to mind when I think about the age demographic of the IBM i community.

The other day I got an email from Laura Ubelhor, president of the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group and the assistant director of the COMMON Education Foundation (CEF) board of directors. Laura is full of energy,

Jobs, and the lack of them, are big news in the United States. And by now most of us have probably heard that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had some encouraging news in its September jobs report, revealing the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, marking the first time the jobless rate has been below 8 percent since December 2007. If that wasn’t enough to reinvigorate job seekers, the BLS also revised its July and August job reports, confirming the creation of jobs in those months was actually higher than originally reported.

Great news, on the surface, but the

The 19-inch rack hasn’t changed all that much in decades, and like Ethernet, anything that comes up against it with better technology finds itself smashed and absorbed. Or both. But, that said, even things like racks need to be tweaked to fit new server, storage, and networking designs, and so it is with a line of racks tailored for the PureFlex modular systems that IBM announced in April.

To fit all of the hairy cables coming out of the backend of the Flex System chassis, IBM has tweaked the PureFlex rack to be 10 percent deeper (1.1 meters instead of