Over the past five years, some remarkable changes have happened in the systems business. IBM‘s Power Systems business has dropped from around $5 billion down to around $3 billion and Cisco Systems has built a converged system business that has gone from zero to $3 billion. Cisco has gotten more than its fair share of the blade server market with green-field applications like private clouds and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and now it is looking both low and high to expand its business further.

The fact that Cisco is trying to move from enterprise-class blade servers to minimalist machines

We are on the verge of an expanded Power8 system line from IBM and rival Intel has launched its next-generation “Haswell” Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. But the performance specs that compare the Power8 iron to X86 and other alternatives in the midrange are only just starting to trickle out of Big Blue. So now is a good time to take a look and then brace ourselves for more comparisons in the coming months.

In past issues of The Four Hundred, I have showed how the scale-out variants of the raw Power8 processors rate in terms of raw Commercial Processing

Simplicity used to be one of the hallmarks of the AS/400. You plug in the wires, fire up the applications, and the thing just runs forever. But in today’s world, virtualization reigns supreme. Along with that virtualization comes a level of complexity that can turn once-simple tasks into difficult projects. Now, there are indications that a growing wariness of virtualization technologies–not just VIOS but “i on i” virtualization, too–is driving us back to a simpler world of direct-attached disks.

You can’t blame IBM for building advanced virtualization technology. Driven by requirements from the world’s biggest companies, IBM has created System

In the Super Bowl, the warning two minutes before the end of the first half tells the halftime entertainers to prepare for a big cash outlay. The second reminds players they can soon resume personal pursuits, such as domestic violence. IBM’s financial year has warnings, too. In the first quarter IBM warned it was relinquishing its chip factories. By the second it seemed the taker would be Global Foundries. During the third it emerged GloFo wanted IBM to pay a big disposal fee. The fourth will be a nail-biter; vexatious but better than a wife-beater.

Katy Perry:

The IBM i 6.1.1 release of the midrange operating system that this newsletter is dedicated to was, like many prior releases of the OS/400 and its progeny, a stop-gap release to add support for Virtual I/O Server and was pretty thin as releases go. As we reported several weeks ago, IBM is set to withdraw IBM i 6.1 from marketing on December 9 and stop supporting it on September 30, 2015. But there was not perfect clarity on what would happen to its tweaked follow-on, IBM i 6.1.1.

As we previously reported, IBM withdrew IBM i 6.1 and

Sorry for the delay in thanking you, but I have just returned from TEN weeks consulting in Singapore to rescue another AS/400 customer whose chief developer died as they were about to start a Singapore plant (12 time zones away). Plus continuing consulting when I would much rather be relaxing on my deck (the customer licensed RTPA, which is why I went to Singapore and continue consulting).

I worked 12 hours a day at the plant (24 by 7 operation) as the ONLY IT person, plus 2 hours a day traveling in a van from my $10,000 a month luxury

If you are shopping for disk arrays for your IBM i systems, IBM has a deal for you on adjunct software functions for its Storwize V3700 storage. And the company is also making promises about adding some advanced functions to the FlashSystem flash-based arrays as well.

In announcement letter 314-098, IBM is offering software function upgrades for the V3700 at no charge. The deal is applied to the Storwize Turbo performance boost, which cranks up the I/O operations per second on the array by 50 percent and doubles the maximum throughput as measured in gigabytes per second for the

The city of Sterling, Colorado, has depended on IBM midrange systems for many years. Its one-person IT department is a self-proclaimed advocate for the system. New World Systems, an IBM i ISV, provides the software Sterling uses for the city’s financial records and the police department’s records and computer-aided dispatch system. The police have a separate AS/400 server and the city financials run a second AS/400. In a city council meeting last month, the migration to a Windows-based system entered the discussion.

The police department is leaning toward replacing its aging AS/400 server with a Windows-based system. The primary

He’s baaaaack!

Everyone knows the name Frank Soltis. He’s an IBM certified legend and even though he retired in 2008, his footprints have not faded away. For years after his retirement, the one-time chief scientist remained a highly visible world traveler and platform advocate. He was a keynote speaker at IBM i conferences, including the RPG & DB2 Summit in 2011 and the series of iBelieve events sponsored by looksoftware during 2012 and 2013. More recently, his IBM stump speech campaign has slowed.

But it’s good to see him back again. Soltis is IBM i comfort food. Like a good

IBM opened the doors to another cloud resiliency center this week. You’ll find it in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, an area in the midst of Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh. The facility provides cloud-based business continuity capabilities for companies with low tolerance for downtime and without suitable disaster recovery or high availability implementations.

No specifics were given regarding the available platforms at the new cloud center, but similar cloud centers in London and Hong Kong are operating in the SoftLayer cloud, which is chiefly Intel oriented. IBM acquired SoftLayer in 2013 to gain a customer base and revenue stream