Big Blue was pretty clear that it was not going to roll out any more servers using its Power7+ processors when it launched the Power 770+ and Power 780+ enterprise-class boxes back on October 3, but somewhere along the way, someone either changed their minds inside of IBM or didn’t get the memo that the Flex System p260 server nodes would be upgraded with the Power7+ chips. Because that, in fact, is what happened on November 13, just before we took a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.

And those new p260 machines give IBM i and AIX shops one more

IBM spends billions and billions of dollars on dividends (which is fine) and stock buybacks (which I have a problem with on the scale that Big Blue does it). I spend a lot of time complaining that there are better things that IBM could do with the billions in cash it generates running its business, from investing in new businesses, competing more aggressively on price, or doing acquisitions. Another option, and one that IBM has been doing in the past year, is to help the partner channel and the IT shops it serves get the financing they need to do

You may recall that, several years back, Microsoft ran the Midrange Alliance Program (MAP) and Mainframe Modernization Alliance (MMA), two marketing and awareness campaigns focused on moving applications and workloads off IBM‘s iSeries and mainframe servers. While the MAP and MMA fizzled away, Microsoft has a new group called the Platform Modernization Alliance (PMA) that is gaining attention with IBM partners and customers.

It is not news that the so-called “distributed” Wintel and Lintel server platforms are dominant in the IT industry. They have been for a while now; the war ended years ago. Consider these numbers:

Out of

The printer business is disappearing. But a successor market is forming around a new kind of device, an image and media server that will absorb printers, scanners, copiers, faxes, and more. The process is actually well along already. But, surprisingly, the big names in the printer business are caught up but haven’t caught on. They worry about the fiscal cliff when they should contemplate Jimmy Cliff. They are haunted by the ghost of Jacob Marley when they should be celebrating with the spirit of Bob Marley.

Give me a couple minutes and I will show you.

Like so

Regarding your recent Web Query article: I think one of the big impediments of the QU2 Web Query product is that it was not what a lot of customers were wanting. Most of the customers that I deal with are in small-to-medium shops that do not have a deep bench of IT people and skills. (One of the main selling points of IBM i is the ease of administration, of course). What they were really wanting was basically QU1 Query with a simple web interface to build queries and, more importantly, make basic web (well Intranet) reports and Excel tables.

Every market has its own psychological barrier, and for IBM systems, the magic number seems to be 1,000. As part of the tweaks to the PureSystems upgrade on November 13, Big Blue was bragging that it now has more than 1,000 unique customers worldwide using the new boxes.

IBM did not supply any numbers regarding the volume of server nodes or racks these first kilo-customers that it found for the modular systems, which consist of its Flex System chassis and Flex Power and x86 server nodes. These are stacked up in racks with switches and integrated storage to make the

The November 13 Flex System mini-announcement didn’t just feature some new Power7+ p260 server nodes and configurations of the PureFlex infrastructure stacks sporting all of the various server nodes instead of the x240 Xeon E5 node. IBM made a few other announcements in systems management, switching, and storage related to the platform.

In announcement letter 212-475, you will see that the Flex System Manager, the control freak for the entire server-storage-network mashup that is PureSystems, has been upgraded to V1.2. And in that update, the software not only speaks to the new Power7+ nodes reported on elsewhere in this

The U.S. presidential election might be over, but the polling is not. Application modernization tool maker LANSA doesn’t care a bit about your politics, but it does care very much about the political environment in which the IBM i platform lives inside your company.

To that end, LANSA has opened up its third annual iPulse Survey, which aims to assess the threat level to the IBM i platform in your organization, your future plans for IBM i applications, and what your budget for software development is for the coming 2013 year. In addition, LANSA is polling customers to figure out

In our private lives, social media is unavoidable. Even if you don’t have the uncontrollable urge to post every time you visit a Starbucks, at this point, the vast majority of us have succumbed to peer pressure and joined at least one social network where we can go to see pictures of our friends and find out what they ate for lunch.

In our work lives, personal social media usage is largely frowned upon, but using social technology as a business tool is unavoidable and, for many, a critical component for success. According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity

The hosted high availability (HA) software business is taking off in a big way for Maxava. The company claims to have between 150 and 200 customers utilizing its software through the cloud, and that cloud deals now account for half of its sales pipeline. This led the company to lay claim earlier this month to being the number one provider of cloud-based HA software in the IBM i market.

IT Jungle spoke with Maxava’s senior vice president Simon O’Sullivan last week to give him a chance to back up the big claims Maxava was making about its presence in