• English Clothing Maker Taps looksoftware for System i Modernization

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Alexandra, the English manufacturer of uniforms and other clothes for workers, has successfully service-enabled its back-end RPG application to provide a way to access the application over the Web, looksoftware announced last week. Since Alexandra was founded in 1958, the company has been providing clothing to workers in England’s hospitality and healthcare industries, first via catalog, then through stores, and finally across the Web. In 2002, the company was granted a royal warrant of appointment to the Queen of England, providing another valuable source of business. The company currently relies on the System i server to run critical back office

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• Centerfield, S4i Offer Deal on System i Performance Tools

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  As part of the deal unveiled by partners Centerfield Technology and S4i recently, System i shops can save 40 percent off the cost of the DASD-Plus and disk/HUNTER performance tools when they buy them together. If you work in an iSeries or System i shop that’s struggling to keep disk use from getting out of hand, it may be worth taking a look at DASD-Plus and disk/HUNTER. After all, without a minimum level of open DASD available, application performance can come to a screeching halt, and it could even put your IBM midrange server in danger of crashing. DASD-Plus, from

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• IBS Partners with Global for Excel Software

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Integrated Barcoding Systems (IBS) and Global Software have entered into an OEM agreement that results in IBS reselling Global’s software, which integrates Excel with i5/OS applications, as an add-on to its data collection software, the companies announced last week. IBS is an Adrian, Michigan, software company that specializes in the development of middleware that extends ERP application screens to data collection equipment, mostly wireless barcode scanners, but also some radio frequency identification (RFID) equipment. The company’s flagship product, QuikTrac, has been used to connect popular i5/OS-based ERP systems like XA, BPCS, System 21, J.D. Edwards, and Movex, with a variety

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• Mochasoft Updates TN5250 for Mac OS X

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Got a Mac and need 5250 access? Then you might want to check out the new release of the Mocha MacX TN5250 emulator from Mochasoft, the German developer of emulation software that is so affordable, it is ridiculous. Despite the annual autumnal celebration of Oktoberfest, the good folks at Mochasoft managed to release at least one update during October. Mocha MacX TN5250 version 1.8 brings several new features, including support for the new Apple aluminum keyboard, the addition of options, including “ignore help” and “fieldexit,” and the capability to handle double key input, such as Ž and š. Mochasoft

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• InfoPrint Solutions Expands Globally

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  InfoPrint Solutions Company, the former IBM printing division that is now operated as a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, has grown its presence around the world five months after becoming semi-independent, the company reports. IBM sold its printer unit to Ricoh in January for $725 million. As part of the deal, the two companies entered into a three-year agreement to jointly operate the InfoPrint Solutions Company, with Ricoh owning a 51 percent stake and IBM taking 49 percent. Since then, the company, which is based in Boulder, Colorado, has introduced several new printers, launched a developer

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• IBM Brags About Its Power6 Server Shipments

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server maker IBM has been pretty quiet about its System p and System i server lines in recent months with the exception of talking up its one product–the 570 machine bearing both labels known internally at Big Blue as the 9406-MMA that scales from one to four chasses and from two to 16 of the new Power6 processors. And IBM has been bragging in recent days that it has hit a major milestone in shipments for the 9406-MMA machines bearing the System p label. Specifically, IBM said that it had shipped its 1,000th System p version of the 9406-MMA machine.

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• Neuwing, IBM to Quantify and Monetize IT Energy Savings

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server and storage maker IBM has partnered with New York-based Neuwing Energy Ventures, a specialist in renewable energy and related energy certifications that is owned by a large private equity firm with holdings in real estate and energy companies, to come up with a scheme that will allow companies to document and benefit from increasing the energy efficiency of their data centers. As we all know by now, chief information officers and facilities managers at large companies that have data centers hogging a lot of electricity to process transactions and cool machinery are under increasing pressure from two ends.

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• Ask TPM: Enticing Users to Upgrade Their i5/OS Hardware

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our experts over at Four Hundred Guru get asked a lot of questions and they provide a lot of good answers. But some of your questions are of a strategic or tactical nature, having to do with broader issues in the information technology space or with the i5/OS and OS/400 platform. So if you have a question you want to get my take on–or you want to use me to get a straight answer out of the people in IBM who know what is going on–then send me an email and I will see what I can do. Here’s a

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• Project ECLipz Surfaces, But Not the Way You Think

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tongues are a-wagging out there again in IT Land about IBM‘s ongoing “Project ECLipz” server convergence initiative. In a PDF document that has an internal name “ECLipz-DCT,” one of the key IBMers responsible for the decimal floating point unit inside the current Power6 and future z6 mainframe engines compares and contrasts the two processors. The Power6, of course, is the chip used in the System i and System p server lines, which support i5/OS, AIX, and Linux. The good news for mainframe shops is that System z mainframes are going to get a lot more processing oomph and other

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• IBM to Recycle Silicon Wafers for Solar Cells

  November 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is probably best known for its enterprise-class servers and related systems software, but the company is obviously a pretty big player in the chip industry with its various Power and PowerPC chips. IBM’s techies in Burlington, Vermont, where IBM still makes a lot of chips, have been scratching their heads about what to do with defective silicon wafers, which are the inevitable result of any chip-making process, and have come up with a novel idea: recycle them for use in solar cells. An engineer named Eric White from the Burlington factory, which is located there because the Watson family

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