For many years, IBM didn’t have its own network and storage switching business, and it OEMed or resold products from others, including gear from Cisco Systems, Brocade Communications, Voltaire (which was eaten by Mellanox Technologies two years ago), Juniper, and Blade Network Technologies. Since that time, Cisco has jumped into the server biz, IBM bought BNT, and Intel bought the InfiniBand biz from QLogic (among many other deals that did not directly affect Big Blue).

Now, IBM is paring back on its catalog a bit, and it looks like QLogic is being shown the door on Power

Sometimes, it takes a while for something to sink into my thick skull. I have known for a while that IBM has a security software layer called PowerSC, short for security and compliance, and I figured that given all the built-in security in the IBM i platform as well as the several add-ons from third-party vendors, this was not something we need to worry about. But, of course, the PowerVM hypervisor and AIX partitions running on Power Systems machines at your site need to be locked down. And that is what PowerSC is all about.

PowerSC was launched back in

It hasn’t been an easy couple of years for IBM in the RISC/Unix midrange and enterprise server market. And it has just gotten a bit harder and stands to get even more difficult in the next year. Not only did Intel finally get its “Poulson” Itanium 9500 processors into the field, which will be picked up by Hewlett-Packard for its HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop systems, but it made a broader commitment to converge the high-end of the Xeon processor line with the Itanium line with the next generation “Kittson” processors.

And Oracle is working on its next-generation Sparc T5 processors

IBM last week announced a variety of new LTO6 products, including a full-height SAS tape drive, a half-height SAS drive, a new LTO6 autoloader, and support for LTO6 drives in three tape libraries. The company also announced the versatile new Storwize V3700 storage array, which offers midrange shops various SAS drive and connectivity options.

The new TS2260 Tape Drive Model H6S is a half-height, SAS-connected LTO6 drive that can be installed in a rack or stand by itself. The TS2260 has a 512GB internal memory buffer, includes 16 KB cartridge memory, uses the Linear Tape File System (LTFS), and supports

Web Query may be the most underused business intelligence software available. Although it is thought to be owned–complete with licenses and maintenance contracts–by tens of thousands of IBM i customers, it sits on the shelf, like good whiskey waiting for the right occasion. For those who don’t know a good thing when they don’t see it, Web Query was introduced by IBM in 2007 as a Web-based query and report product to replace the aged but beloved Query/400.

In its version 1 release, it was highly promoted by IBM as one of the many modern features being added to what

One of the challenges of writing a bi-monthly column is continually coming up with interesting ideas. In the Internet age, it is humbling to discover that hundreds of writers have already explored a particular topic I believed was original. For that matter, just finding a fresh take on a subject like computing–which returns 375 million Google hits–is about as tricky as electing a third-party candidate. Which is why, I suppose, there is a truism among writers: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.”

Software development is a lot like writing, only it often requires mastery of multiple languages. And given the

Those of us who live and work in the United States can sometimes forget that other parts of the world are affected by what we do and we are affected by what they do. And so it is that we ponder IT spending in Europe, which is not doing great here in 2012, and for the world at large. Hope springs eternal, and according to the prognosticators at Gartner, IT spending will be on the upswing in 2013 in EMEA and the world over and carry on growing modestly through 2016.

“This year is a pessimistic year for IT

Managed file transfer (MFT) products are designed to manage, secure, centralize, and automate the transfer of files inside and outside of an organization. In IBM midrange shops running the modern operating system known as IBM i, or its earlier versions known as i5OS or OS/400, there is almost always a reason to share data with other platforms running Windows, Linux, Unix, or Mac OS. System integration and data sharing capabilities are expanding with each tick of the clock. Coincidentally, data security issues are expanding at the same time.

With increased risk comes increased regulatory compliance for a lot of companies.

We all make mistakes. And for those who don’t, I make up for your perfection. There’s value in mistakes. Learning about mistakes is a good way to avoid mistakes. It’s as true with PHP as it is with skydiving. Because a lot of people in the IBM midrange community use PHP, and presumably many more will be learning about it soon, I hope this helps them.

This is not to say people using PHP for Web application development are more likely to make mistakes or that it is easier to make mistakes in this environment. Please don’t jump to that

It will come as no shock to IT Jungle readers that cloud computing is no longer a distant trend on the horizon. We have been forecasting the push toward cloud computing for years, and more recently we have been reporting on the growing number of IBM i solution providers that are introducing cloud services.

For a platform that is often wrongly accused of being behind the times, the IBM i platform looks to be staying in pace with other similar platforms when it comes to the move to the cloud. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be informed as to where