• IBM Rochester Shows Off Its Agility

  February 18, 2013 Alex Woodie

  When IBM i 7.1 shipped three years ago, it marked a significant moment in the history of the IBM i product. However, few people outside of IBM‘s lab in Rochester, Minnesota, fully understood the future ramifications of the changes IBM was making, and IBMers like chief architect Steve Will didn’t really try to explain it at the time. But with the sixth Technology Refresh (TR6) on its way, the proof is in the pudding: IBM Rochester has adopted agile in a big way. Will says Rochester’s agile development strategy arose as a result of the work it was doing

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• Storage And I/O Enhancements Come To Power Boxes

  February 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever IBM makes major processor announcements in the Power Systems line, it likes to roll out companion enhancements to the storage it attaches to or embeds within the boxes as well as updating network adapter and other I/O features for the systems. And, as you might expect, using these features on existing systems as well as new ones requires patches to the operating system. And so it is with the February 5 announcements. In announcement letter 113-006, IBM revealed all of the storage and I/O enhancements that came out in conjunction with the new entry and midrange Power7+ servers,

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Post Office And Dell, Delivering Less, Hoping For More

  February 18, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Blame spreadsheets and those who worship them. That’s how to explain the Postal Service dropping Saturday mail delivery and Dell going private. In the case of the USPS, the destructive effect of confusing MBAs with education is obvious to everyone except the technocrats in charge. In the case of Dell, the danger of damage is just as apparent, but the hubristic bean-counters leading the retreat from exposure imagine they will reap huge rewards even as others suffer. In both cases, irritated customers will strike back. The instigators of these tragic follies will learn what Pyrrhus learned. The USPS and Dell

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• SQL Server Not Best Ingredient In IBM i BI Pie

  February 18, 2013 Dan Burger

  What does business intelligence and analytics mean to you? There are many answers to that single question, but information delivery is often the common denominator. Most people who think of BI think of dashboards. The capability to produce Web-based reports is likely to be the guiding light for most BI projects in the majority of IBM midrange shops where the dissemination of useful data, primarily residing in the DB2 for i database, is both inefficient and inconvenient. How do you fix that? It is not with a green-screen query tool designed for last century’s business objectives, that is for sure.

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• PowerHA Brings New Data Protection Options For Midsize Shops

  February 18, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The upcoming IBM i 7.1 TR6 version of PowerHA SystemMirror introduces a new technology that will allow midsize organizations to protect their systems in an entirely new way. The enablement of LUN-level switching in smaller IBM storage servers will allow midsize IBM i shops to take advantage of an HA topology that has been widely used in the Unix and Windows world but until now has only been available to IBM i shops running the largest storage servers. The TR6 release of PowerHA SystemMirror introduces support for LUN-level switching in three IBM storage area networks (SANs), including the Storwize V7000,

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• IBM Canada Cuts Capacity On Demand Prices For Big Power Servers

  February 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well this one is not all that complicated, but we need you to be aware of it just the same. On February 15, in announcement letter 313-015, IBM Canada cut the price of feature 4710 on the Power 780 (product number 9179) and Power 795 (product number 9119), from $1,270 to $999. (That’s in Canadian dollars, not U.S. dollars.) That feature is for 999 gigabyte-days of memory capacity. This feature allows you to buy 999 1GB increments of memory and activate it for peak loads when you need it and turn it off when you don’t. It doesn’t seem

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• Java Wins Programming Beauty Pageant, But C and Objective C Gussy Up

  February 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Java programming language, bolstered by the adoption of Android-based smartphones and tablets in the market, has regained the crown as the top language in the Tiobe Programming Community Index put together by programming tool maker Tiobe Software. The index is based on a number of different factors, including the availability of courses and training, the popularity of searches in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu search engines, and the number of engineers with specific programming skills based on their employment and job searches. The Tiobe Index has been around for more than a decade, and it is

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• More Record-Breaking Results For Magic Software

  February 18, 2013 Dan Burger

  The year 2012 was a good one. Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking skydive from 24 miles above the planet in 2012 got more attention, but Magic Software Enterprises broke records, too, admittedly with less fanfare. Perhaps CEO Guy Bernstein should take up skydiving. Then again, he is not doing a bad job increasing revenue at the company that specializes in application development and business integration tools for the IBM midrange as well as several other important markets. Revenue gains, like the 12 percent increase that Magic scored last year, would be cause for celebration in most companies. Converted to cash money, that’s

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• Have You Got An Enterprise App For That?

  February 18, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Having an app already sounds like a cliché. In the Apple App Store, for instance, there are approximately 775,000 apps available, as compared to the mere 800 apps it offered when it opened its doors in July 2008. Best guesstimates put the Google Play store at a close second in the neighborhood of 600,000 apps and growing. It begs the question: How many more apps can we possible need? It looks like the sky may be the limit as enterprises start to get in on the app mania. The analysts at Gartner believe there is a new app wave

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• Invader II: New Power7+ Machines Take On Entry X86 Iron

  February 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long, long time since IBM both understood and did something dramatic about the competitive pressure that X86-based servers have put on its RISC-based systems. The last time I can remember Big Blue really going after X86 boxes was back when the AS/400 Model 170 “Invader” servers came out in February 1998. Although, to be fair, the Power 520 M15 and M25 models that came out a decade later were no slouches, either. This time around, we don’t have to wait a decade for IBM to get serious. With the entry Power7+ machines announced last Tuesday, it

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