When IBM flexes its brain muscles, heads turn. The competition that was posing for the crowd while working out with the light weights quietly leaves the gym. Friday was one of those days. A few select Power8-based servers, the first of larger lineup of what IBM is calling the “scale-out” machines, are ready to rip. And for the IBM i advocacy, the latest release of the operating system–available May 2–is showing off for the first time.

COMMON hosted a webinar on April 28 that officially introduced the news, which was a great opportunity for COMMON to increase its visibility. IBM

As part of the IBM i 7.2 announcements last week, IBM introduced PowerHA Express Edition, a new variant of its hardware-based high availability (HA) clustering software. The new Express Edition implements a mainframe-based technology called HyperSwap, which will allow users to move and restart an LPAR on a different IBM SAN array almost instantaneously, IBM says.

PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i is a (rather complex) collection of products and services that enable organizations of various sizes to implement a variety of hardware-based protection schemes, as opposed to software-based logical replication schemes, such as those sold by Vision Solutions, Maxava

People have been buying commercial applications for so long that it is sometimes hard to remember that the System/3X and AS/400 minicomputer businesses were dominated by customers who, by and large, wrote their own software rather than buying it off-the-shelf from a third-party company. Even at the dawning of the commercial Internet era in the early 1990s, the AS/400 community exhibited the kind of self-reliance that we see mostly from hyperscale Web applications these days.

Just for fun, we thought we would take a trip down memory lane and show you what the OS/400 application software market looked like just

The Weimar Republic had a big problem and its name was inflation. But it also had a solution, and its name was print-more-money. Which it did with reckless abandon. So much so that its currency, which was valued at 4.2 Marks per U.S. dollar at the outbreak of World War I, hyper-inflated to over 1 million Marks per dollar by 1923.

Which is why a man who wanted to buy a loaf of bread could be seen pushing a wheelbarrow full of money to a bakery early one morning. When he got there the bakery was not yet open, so

Now that Power8 has broken out of the gate, the eyes of the Unix world will turned to see if IBM can rein in the challenge Intel has created in this enterprise computing horse race. The quarter-by-quarter decline in Power Systems revenue has not been a pleasant ride for IBM’s AIX side of Big Blue. We’ve often heard, “What’s good for Power Systems is good for IBM i.” That’s why we’re wishing Power8 the best.

IBM, as it introduced the first five Power8 boxes at the Impact2014 conference, also plugged into a social media audience with a promotional video that

If nothing else comes of this, IBM has been able to brilliantly leverage the inherent newsiness of search engine juggernaut Google to its advantage in creating some interest in–and dare we say excitement for–the Power8 processor.

At last week’s Impact2014 conference, which we report on elsewhere in this issue, Gordon MacKean, who is engineering director for the platforms group at Google and also the first elected chairman of the OpenPower Foundation, which is tasked with opening up the firmware and hardware for IBM’s Power8 processors, unveiled Google’s own two-socket motherboard for the shiny new IBM chip. If you were not

As part of the April 28 announcements, IBM is trimming prices on various removable storage for its Power Systems line.

The price cuts, which took effect immediately, are for removable disk drives, USB-attached disk drives, RDX units (a different kind of removable disk encased in cyberfuturistic metal casings), a few SAS-attached LTO tape drives, and a bunch of controllers. Here is the full rundown of the features and their price changes, which were outlined in announcement letter 314-048:

Continuing education and training programs for IT personnel seems like a no-brainer. The benefits seem obvious. And even more obvious are the disadvantages of an IT staff that has fallen behind the technical advancements that start-up companies have in place. That’s a competitive advantage that creates risk for businesses that allow IT skills to stagnate.

We hear a lot about the importance of aligning IT with business goals. Business goals are a moving target and IT skills are, too.

There are significant number of IBM midrange shops in the Midwest, and more than 100 or so should be sending people

Look out system administrators, there is a new Hardware Management Console in town. Or, if you are not fond of the HMC, perhaps you call it the Hardware Mangling Controller. No matter what you call it, there is a new one of them, and this one is better than its predecessors.

The 7042-CR8 rack-mounted HMC was tucked into the April 28 announcements, which included the new Power8 entry machines as well as IBM i 7.2, as we reported on elsewhere in the issues last week and this week. In announcement letter 114-060, you can’t really see much about this

Go figure. Gross domestic product figures were lower than expected in the first quarter, but businesses didn’t know that until earlier this week, and so hiring among employers in the United States was up perhaps more strongly than expected. It is hard to argue cause and effect in an economy, so I won’t do that.

What I can say is that according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 288,000 non-farm jobs in April, matching spikes in February and November last year. The unemployment rate took a four-tenths of a percent