• Ask TPM: Two System i Questions, and Two Responses

  October 29, 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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• As I See It: Survey Says . . .

  October 29, 2007 Victor Rozek

  One of the manifestations of human curiosity is our endless need to survey public opinion on every conceivable subject from voter preference to Viagra usage. Periodically, people are asked to identify which professions are most stressful, and I’m always surprised when bomb squad doesn’t top every list. Apparently, whether you’re a member of an exceptionally stressful profession depends entirely on who is asking and answering the questions. Yahoo recently featured links to several survey results listing the most stressful and depressing jobs. According to one survey, the top five stressors in ascending order were: medical intern, air traffic controller, miner,

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• Gartner Says CIOs Will Be Measured on IT and Business Agility

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Can you run, jump, and shoot? Can you do a four-minute mile, then swim like a dolphin, and then go five rounds in the ring with someone meaner than you? If you are a CIO, you might know as little about sports as I do and still have to exercise the agility of an athlete, but in the data center and in the board room instead of on the court or field. You will need to be agile, and be able to build an agile IT organization, to keep your job and those of the IT staff you hire and

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• GST Offers Blow-Out Pricing on System i Features

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Irvine, California, storage specialist GST last week announced it is having a blow-out sale on its inventory of selected features for AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers. If you want to take a look at what GST has on sale, you can see the promotions at this link. The company is selling 35 GB, 10K RPM disk drives that fit into EXP24 disk enclosures for $95, or 16 percent of the $599 IBM list price for new gear, and 15K RPM disks for the EXP24s for $125, or 21 percent of IBM’s $599 list price. Disks that plug into

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• CCSS Inks Distribution Deal in Nordic Region

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  CCSS, the British maker of systems management and monitoring tools for the i5/OS and OS/400 machines, has announced that it has inked a partnership with Pulsen Systems Solution, a distributor of IBM systems and software as its sales and support agent for the Nordic region. CCSS is trying to expand into growth markets in Asia and Europe, where the System i platform is doing better than in other geographic regions. In January, CCSS opened up an office in the Philippines to sell its wares into Southeast Asia, where multinationals from the United States and Europe are expanding their

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• SPEC Launches Java Messaging Benchmark

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Getting a sense of the performance of applications on various server platforms has been made more problematic since the advent of distributed computing a decade ago. But real distributed computing–the kind driving Web-based applications today–is not just about separating application serving and database serving, which was complex enough. It is about having many different applications and pieces of middleware mashed up into a new kind of application that is inherently more complex than a simple two-tier or three-tier architecture. To help company’s better assess how iron performs in this more complicated hardware and software environment, the techies and vendors who

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• SAP Boosts Sales and Profits in the Third Quarter

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Enterprise application software giant SAP reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2007 last week, and revenues, earnings, and earnings per share grew in the double digits for the company. SAP’s recent decision to offer software as a service through its Business ByDesign product, which is not going to be ready for primetime for a while, did not put a damper on perpetual software license sales. In the third quarter, SAP booked total sales of 2.42 billion euros, up 9 percent as reported and up 13 percent at constant currency. Software license sales in the quarter grew by

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• Symantec Survey Says DR Planning and Testing Are Inadequate

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s a story you hear over and over again in the data center. Disaster recovery plans are only as good as the changes you make after you test the plan and see that it fails. According to a study performed by Symantec, which sells the Veritas stack of file systems and related tools used in clustered Unix, Windows, and Linux environments, IT departments have some work to do on their disaster recovery plans. The Symantec study indicates that 91 percent of the IT organizations polled that have disaster recovery plans carry out full scenario testing of those plans, but

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• IBM’s Math on User-Priced System i Versus Vintage Machines

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the phenomenal things about the AS/400, iSeries, and System i machines, and their predecessors, the System/36 and the System 38, is their electronic longevity. These boxes continue to do useful work long after the economic life of the systems is long since expended. OS/400 and i5/OS shops may be willing to pay a premium for such rugged machines, but they sure don’t like to do it as often as IBM would like. And so, Big Blue has to make the case for customers using vintage machines to move to new iron. It is no different for Hewlett-Packard,

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• Midrange Shops Get Disaster Recovery Services from IBM

  October 29, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s Global Services group has been trying to find a way to get a larger slice of the budget at small and medium businesses in its own customer base for many years. And with a new offering with the unwieldy name of Disaster Recovery Services for Data Center Recovery–Recovery Express, IBM thinks it has just the right thing to not only help it keep its services business growing, but to help customers who cannot afford a full-blown high availability cluster to use IBM’s own machines in its own data centers as hot backups. Of course, IBM has offered hot

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