• IBM i Looks For ‘Social Security’ On Silver Anniversary

  April 8, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM is planning a 25th anniversary celebration for IBM i and it begins now. It’s sort of a surprise party (at least the timing is a surprise), because the celebration is beginning almost 11 weeks in advance of the official anniversary date, which is June 21. Colin Parris popped the first cork April 7 during the opening session of the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition in Austin, Texas. However, it was Steve Will who strategically leaked the information last week in his blog. It is fitting that the chief architect for the IBM i should open the door to this

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• IBM Lets MSPs Have Utility-Priced IBM i 6.1 For Clouds

  April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to build a cloud and charge utility style pricing, it is very tough to come up with the capital ahead of time to get the hardware and software to build that cloud and then wait patiently as you find customers to pay monthly fees to use that infrastructure. IBM Global Financing has always offered financing on new machines at fairly attractive prices, but to go after managed service providers and help them build cloudy infrastructure based on IBM i, Big Blue has been giving deep discounts to MSPs for specific hardware and also providing utility pricing on

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• As I See It: Rigging Reputation

  April 8, 2013 Victor Rozek

  In Atlanta, the teachers cheated so the students didn’t have to. It was an imperfect solution to be sure, designed to relieve the pressures of standardized testing, an unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind, otherwise known as “Are our children learning?” Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of educators were involved over the span of a decade. As of 10 days ago, 35 have been indicted, including former superintendent Beverly Hall, charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy, and making false statements. Can you spell “prison time?” As test scores miraculously soared even in the poorest, most challenged districts, it became evident

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• The 21 IBM Fellows Who Helped Build The IBM i Server

  April 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM celebrates two major milestones this spring: the 25th anniversary of the launch of the AS/400, as well as the 50th anniversary of the IBM Fellows program. With help from IBM, we filled in the areas where these two programs overlap, and identified a list of the 21 Fellows who applied their brilliant brains to developing some aspect of the AS/400 or its successors and related technologies. IBM launched its Fellows program in 1963. The idea behind the program, as envisioned by CEO Thomas Watson Jr., was to give accomplished scientists, engineers, programmers, and architects the freedom to explore their

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• Reader Feedback On Oracle Takes On IBM Power With New Sparc T5 Systems

  April 8, 2013 Hey, TPM

  I won’t say “Is this a joke?” although it is very tempting. I enjoy reading your articles, even though I had only a light period with managing any OS/400 (V4R2 days). My focus is AIX and Unix, since 1979 actually. When you test these systems look closely at the specs for transfer between chips and cores. My experience with AIX and Power is that customers do not like doing the planning required to get the most out of the box. NUMA is “boring,” and planning your workloads to work with it is a headache for some; not doing the planning

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• The Spirit Of John Earl Lives On In Scholarship

  April 8, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Earlier this year, the IBM i community lost a valuable member when John Earl, an IBM i security expert, lost his battle with brain cancer. In a fitting tribute to a man who took joy in sharing his knowledge and was passionate in encouraging others to do the same, the COMMON Educational Foundation has teamed with Help/Systems to fund the John Earl Speaker Scholarship Award. Help/Systems’ participation in funding the award is a nod to Earl’s history in the IBM i community. Earl was a co-founder of Lighthouse Security, which was acquired by PowerTech in 1998. Help/Systems acquired PowerTech

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• IBM Extends Power Systems Trade-In Deal In Europe

  April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With new machines out the door for entry and midrange Power Systems customers and the economy not doing so great in parts of Europe, I would have expected to see more wheeling and dealing for the Power7+ machines to get customers buying. Rather than come up with a new deal, Big Blue has instead just extended and slightly tweaked an existing trade-in rebate deal for customers moving from old Power-based systems to new Power7+ machinery. In announcement letter ENUSZA13-1003, which was updated on April 4, IBM dropped the Power7 models that were on the eligible list and now, through

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• Abacus Running On Clouds At COMMON, Gives Free Trial

  April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may have taken some major changes in technology and culture, but the long-awaited promise of cloudy infrastructure for OS/400 and IBM i workloads is becoming a reality. Abacus Solutions, which launched an IBM i cloud at last May’s COMMON Annual Conference and Exposition, is back at this year’s COMMON event in Austin with customer Brooks Running Company to tell potential customers all about the benefits of putting their applications out on the Abacus cloud. Scott Johnson, senior iSeries solutions specialist at Abacus, tells The Four Hundred that the company is teaming up with Brooks to fit prospective customers

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• Maxava Versus Vision Solutions Trial Date Delayed Again

  April 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Instead of prepping for trial next month, participants in Maxava‘s false advertising and trade libel lawsuit against Vision Solutions will be waiting–waiting for the judge in the case to issue summary judgment rulings, which will impact how they prepare for the trial, and maybe even lead to an out-of-court settlement. In a filing made last week, Judge George Wu set a new trial date of August 6, and a new pretrial conference date of July 15. The previous pretrial conference date was May 2, and the previous trial date was May 28. The delay was jointly requested on March

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• Midrange Power7+ Servers: The More Oomph You Want, The More It Costs

  April 1, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you though the pricing for various sized configurations of the new Power 750+ and Power 760+ midrange servers using IBM‘s dual-chip module (DCM) variant of the Power7+ processor. That just looked at the system hardware costs. This week, as I have done in the past, I want to walk you through how the raw computing, operating system, and Software Maintenance costs compare across each processor SKU and how those costs stack up with prior Power 750 machines. As has been the case since there was an AS/400, customers

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