We have spent several weeks walking you through the salient technical and economic characteristics of the new entry Power Systems machines using the new Power7+ processors from IBM. This week, it is time to take a run at those midrange Power 750+ and Power 760+ boxes that are based on the double-stuffed dual-chip modules, or DCMs, that are used to put more cores and threads in these boxes than Big Blue might otherwise not be able to deliver using regular single-chip module, or SCM, units that are used on the entry machines.

If you want to review the feeds

Tom Bruno understands cloud ERP better than you. After all, as the president and CEO of Velocity Technology Solutions, a managed service provider (MSP) based in New York City, it is his job to make sure his customers’ JD Edwards, Lawson, Kronos, and Hyperion applications run safely and securely in his private cloud. Bruno recently got on the telephone with IT Jungle to share his view of the future of private clouds and enterprise software’s place in them.

Velocity runs ERP and other critical systems for more than 250 midsize to large companies out of five data centers

It’s good to know when business is good. But you usually hear about it quicker (and louder and more often) when it’s not. Fortunately, when I want to know a little something about the IBM i business, there’s a guy in Texas I call. He always starts off by saying “my view of the world is pretty narrow.” And that’s a fact. But I always say something to the effect of “if the crumbs are good, chances are the cake is, too.”

A lot of you folks know the Texan I’m talking about. His name is Doug Fulmer and he

Many years ago, 60 Minutes did a segment on the Israeli Air Force. At the time, the United States had just sold the Israelis a handful of our latest jet fighters and 60 Minutes wanted to see how Israeli pilots were using their new toys. Turns out they had made a number of low-tech modifications (some classified), which the Israelis believed would make the planes more user friendly. For one thing, they installed an inexpensive rear-view mirror so that the pilot could track enemy aircraft without turning his head. The reporter also asked about the vast array of gauges, flashing

Who’s to say that small to midsize companies are ready to move their IT infrastructure off premise to the cloud where it will be managed by people on someone else’s payroll? I can name one person who would. His name is Jay Johnson and he’s vice president of managed services for Sirius Computer Solutions, IBM‘s largest business partner. His managed services program is built around Power Systems and is primarily focused on the IBM i user base.

Last fall, Sirius rolled out a cloud computing program (part of, but separate from, managed services) because it thought the time

The concept of “big data” came into vogue a few years back as organizations began adopting new ways to deal with the increase in data volume, variability, and velocity. But according to a new survey conducted by toolmaker Lavastorm Analytics, the biggest analytics investments organizations are planning to make in the coming years are aimed at educating and training people, as a shortage in analytic skills looms.

The term big data is fairly new, but the concept is not. By most accounts, the amount of data generated in world has been increasing at an exponential rate for quite a

With the entry Power7+ systems shipping and the PS7XX series of blades using Power7 chips being the last of their line, it comes as no surprise that IBM has tweaked an on-again, off-again Power7 rebate deal.

The rebate deal aims to get customers using earlier generations of Power Systems iron with any of the releases in OS/400, i5/OS, IBM i V5 to move up to new Power7 iron and either IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. The last time this deal was updated was back in June 2012, when IBM put out a rule saying that with this rebate

Despite the best efforts of storage array makers to make their gear less wasteful in terms of capacity, companies keep buying storage both inside their server skins and outside in external arrays like there is no tomorrow. And the amount of capacity that companies are consuming is growing at near historical levels before various kinds of technologies, such as thin provisioning, de-duplication, data compression, and other features were added to arrays to try to curb the appetite for gigabytes.

In the final quarter of the year, according to market research from IDC, worldwide disk capacity shipped in the quarter

Successful IBM i tech conferences depend on a couple of key performance indicators. First of all, there has to be attention to the right topics and speakers and secondly there must be a core group of volunteers who are dedicated to getting the conference done right. The Toronto User Group (TUG) consistently scores high with its annual Technical Education Conference (TEC), which this year is scheduled for April 25 and 26 in Toronto.

There are good reasons for this. The user group has education professionals that are prominent and they put an emphasis on education that is evident with the

It was just last year when Bill Hansen, president of Manta Technologies achieved his long-time goal of introducing a COBOL training series for programming students. COBOL was the one training course Hansen said customers consistently asked for over the years, so he was pleased to add it to Manta’s curriculum.

Now comes the addition of two more courses to the COBOL series: Performing Arithmetic in COBOL and COBOL Table Processing. The curriculum already includes Developing a COBOL Program, COBOL Output Programming, and COBOL Input Programming, which we told you about last year. The two new