The distance between the IT department and the executive suite in some IBM midrange shops makes a trip to Mars seem like a hop, skip, and a jump. How do you close that gap? How do you explain to the decision makers the difference that IT can make within the organization? You know what could be accomplished with investments in IT, but executive sign off on IT strategy never materializes. You’re spinning your wheels.

You want to get traction? Build a financial foundation for the project. That’s easy to say, but harder to do. You’re going to need help. Going

Nearly one in five high availability users never test their HA setup, while more than 40 percent aren’t sure whether it will work, according to the 2016 State of Resilience report from Vision Solutions. The “set it and forget” mentality has plagued the HA industry for years, but it’s something Vision is now addressing with the new “virtual switch” capability in the latest release of MIMIX Availability.

Vision surveyed more than 2,600 IT professionals in late 2015 regarding the state of their data resilience strategies, and compiled the results into a 60-page report that it released last week (get

While there is no question that the installed base of OS/400, i5/OS and IBM i machinery in the world–probably something on the order of 150,000 machines–is dominated by small machines with one or two processors and only a couple of cores at most activated, there are still some very, very large customers out there. These companies are driving the performance requirements for Power Systems iron, just like big AIX and Linux shops are doing.

While all of the world gets in a tizzy over in-memory processing, the single-level storage architecture of the System/38’s CPF and the AS/400’s OS/400 make this

One of the problems with hardware is that it is a sunk capital cost to acquire it, which is why financing and now cloud computing, where you lease or rent the capacity in a server or storage array rather than buy it, is popular. But the service providers building Power-based clouds are not always happy to do financing. They want IBM to offer flexible pricing without them having to take the risk.

And so, several times over the past couple of years, Big Blue has offered special pricing for systems software and hardware to managed service providers. In announcement letter

PHP is the open source success story for IBM i. Its support by IBM and particularly Zend Technologies has given it quite a boost. And it’s proved to be capable of leveraging the IBM i operating system, DB2 for i, and RPG code. Beyond that, it is compatible with almost every operating system and hardware platform you can name, which provides the cross-platform capabilities that demolishes siloed information.

Several IBM i independent software vendors offer PHP development tools. Two of them, BCD Software and Zend Technologies, released an e-book last week titled Top Ten Reasons to Choose PHP for IBM