In about a year or so, a radically different Power processor family will be embedded as the motors in the Power Systems machines that will drive IBM i applications into the future. The forthcoming Power9 chips, which IBM’s top techies unveiled at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley last week, are as always packed with lots of technical innovation. But that is not the main thing that IBM i shops should be ebullient about.

The real innovation that will drive the Power platform forward is the OpenPower Foundation and the fact that Big Blue has rearchitected its chips and

Everyone has a story. Alison Butterill has quite a few. They’re all about i. She didn’t make them up. You did. Or, at least, some of you did. These are stories only you can tell. Butterill, the widely traveled IBM i product offering manager, just repeats them. Storytelling was part of her session titled IBM i in the Digital World, which I sat in on at the OCEAN Technical Conference last month in Orange County, California.

The reason you are the only ones who can tell them is because they’re about you and your IBM i. Butterill collects them

In 2003, the inestimable Richard Pryor got in a good, last laugh when he starred in the Comedy Central documentary “I Ain’t Dead Yet, #*%$#@!!” In some ways, you could say that magnetic tape is the Richard Pryor of the storage world: Everybody seems to think tape is already dead, but it keeps delivering the goods year after year anyway.

If your midrange shop is like most, there is probably a magnetic tape drive toiling away. That’s because, despite the repeated predictions of its death, tape still plays a critical role in the back-office IT operations of tens of thousands

IBM midrange shops with dedicated system operators that manage backup media and drives are few and far between these days. The common staffing arrangement has programmers or maybe network admins juggling backup duties along with their other responsibilities. Of course, lean staffing invites human error into IT operations. Automating backup procedures can provide welcome relief. Data at risk is a problem that Electronic Storage Corporation is addressing with a new appliance it calls Backup SAVSmart for i.

Electronic Storage Corporation is the maker of LaserVault backup and recovery solutions.

SAVSmart uses the newest version of the LaserVault Backup software, which

Until cloud computing–meaning virtualized compute, storage, and networking that is sold under utility pricing–is absolutely the norm in the data center, we will be talking about what is and is not cloud and how fast it is or is not. The prognosis is that investments in public cloud computing are going to continue to grow fast, much faster than the overall IT sector, which has been coasting along more or less level for years.

That placid surface on overall IT spending masks the churn underneath the surface, so don’t be fooled.

According to researchers at IDC public cloud spending is