The systems that IBM uses to make its product announcements like to play a bit of cat and mouse with all of us, and those of you who know me know that I check the system religiously to see if anything interesting has come out. Before the Thanksgiving Day holiday, Big Blue did make a bunch of IBM i-related announcements, but they did not show up on my account until after we had already put the December 1 edition of The Four Hundred to bed.

The important thing is that IBM has finally gotten around to providing Express Edition pricing

My, what a year it has been. Seems like only yesterday we were chatting up what 2014 would bring, and now before we know it, it’s already passed by. From IBM‘s new chips and its old chip business to security hacks and vendor consolidation, it was a fairly eventful year. Here’s a look at the IBM i news highlights from 2014.

Arguably, the highlight of the year from an IBM i news perspective was IBM’s launch of the Power8 processor. It’s always exciting seeing what IBM’s chip experts do with the next generation of the Power architecture, and they

IBM i shops are better equipped to performance tune their infrastructure than they are to performance tune their IT workforce. On first glance, that may not raise many eyebrows. But the fact is that relatively few IBM i shops performance tune their infrastructure. What’s that tell you about their investments in training and education? There’s something stopping companies from making investments in skilled workers.

Last week I had a conversation with Jon Paris and Susan Gantner. They spend more than 300 days a year training IBM i programmers. That connects them with the minority of IBM i shops that are

IBM and Apple are best friends these days. They are working together to get businesses to provide their employees with iPads and iPhones along with IBM tablet applications and cloud services. IBM is going to do the marketing, including the sale or leasing of mobile devices to its end users. Support will be more complicated. Apple will serve as the primary outside support provider through its remote-only AppleCare service; IBM will be the onsite support provider. It isn’t clear what role will be played by the teams that currently support users’ computers, which usually run Windows.

There is little

The world irrevocably changed on May 11, 1997, although at the time the event was reported more as a novelty than the opening salvo of a revolution. It was the day Grandmaster and World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by IBM‘s Deep Blue. The day when the master/slave relationship between humans and computers flipped.

To be sure, there were moments of consternation as people briefly wondered how the implications of machine supremacy might translate in their own lives. But like the advent of the printing press, the full impact of the event would not be felt for many

It is that time of year again, when I am surrounded by fruitcakes that are slurping up kirschwasser like hungry babies, turning them into full-blown, holy day, celebratory, and damned near incendiary, bricks to commemorate the ending of one year and, if need be, to be used as food or fuel in an uncertain New Year.

I mean, that is what fruitcake is all about. Living through an uncertain and possibly dark time to make it through to the spring and the renewed Earth. And when you think about all of that wonderful dried fruit, the four different kinds of

We are closing out one year, and looking forward to another one. It is hard to believe that The Four Hundred has been around since the summer of 1989, and that writing this newsletter was my first real job out of college. We have changed a lot over the years, and we must still be learning because we are still changing.

You will notice a few changes as 2015 comes around on the guitar. First, we are moving to a wider column format for stories that is reflective of the higher resolution screens that most PCs and mobile devices have

Business resiliency and business continuity are terms that are mistakenly used as synonyms with disaster recovery. A disaster is the worst type of disruption to business continuity. It is also the most infrequent. Like death from a thousand paper cuts, a variety of little things can play havoc with business resiliency. How much havoc is related to the value a company attaches to any aspect of the business that does not run at peak performance.

Downtime is the enemy of business continuity. Every year the tolerance for downtime edges closer to zero. For some shops zero tolerance has been in

IT salaries are nudging their way upward and the outlook for hiring IT workers is somewhat improved as we get ready to turn the page on another calendar year. The Computer Economics 2015 IT Salary Report anticipates wages for Joe and Jane IT Worker will rise above the rate of inflation to the tune of 3 percent in the coming year, a modest increase that signals wage growth in these low-inflation times.

It may not look like much, but this indicates organizations are increasing pay rates as the jobs market improves.

The study shows that even at the 25th percentile,

Peripherals change with blazing speed in the IT market, and the Power Systems line, as a collection of various components, is no different from other systems out there. IBM can’t keep all components in supply forever, and it has to move to newer components to stay competitive. And thus a bunch of devices for the Power Systems line are being sunsetted in favor of newer kit.

In announcement letter 914-229, IBM is replacing its first generation of 1.8-inch, 387 GB SSDs with the second generation. Both are based on so-called enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) flash technology, and IBM has