• IBM i TR8, Database Driven

  April 21, 2014 Dan Burger

  The TR8 updates for IBM i 7.1, announced last week and available June 6, were once again stacked with DB2 for i appropriations. That’s good news for the growing number of SQL advocates in the IBM midrange community. If you are not yet onboard with SQL, for data access and/or data definition, you are falling behind in modern skills, tooling, and programming framework. This kind of stuff is leading the way in IBM’s Technology Refresh program. There are more than a couple of good reasons for this. One is that SQL fits into modern, multi-platform data access. Another is the

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• Power Systems: Look Ahead, Don’t Look Back

  April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is no two ways about it. The declining sales of IBM‘s Power Systems line is a cause for concern at the company and is as troubling in some ways as the drop in the company’s sales of X86-based machinery and various kinds of storage arrays. Many IBM i shops buy all of this gear from Big Blue, and they may be wondering what kind of commitment IBM has for the long term with any of these platforms, given the diminishing revenues. The fact of the matter is that IBM not only needs to stay in the hardware business

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• Java On IBM i 7.1 Brings JVM Migrations

  April 21, 2014 Dan Burger

  As the announcement of IBM i 7.2 dawns, the introduction of IBM i 7.1 has its four-year anniversary. Although IBM guards its estimates of companies that have moved to 7.1, it is an optimistic guess that half of the IBM i installed base has made that move. How many of the 7.1 shops are housing Javaheads is also unspoken. But 7.1 was a milestone for Java developers because the Classic Java Virtual Machine was no longer supported. That was not a big deal then. But time flies and here we are four years down the road. Java shops have moved

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• Mad Dog 21/21: When Oxford Was Obnoxford

  April 21, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  It was December 1208 or 1209. New Year’s Day in England was March 25; the month after December 1208 was January 1208. Somebody bumped off a young woman who lived in Oxford. The villagers blamed university students, and, led by their mayor, hanged two. The remaining academics blew town right away, many moving east from their ford on the River Thames to a bridge over the River Cam. That is how Oxford University gave birth to Cambridge. They were the sole universities in England for 600 years, providing an organizational model for many academic institutions and some commercial companies.

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• IBM Enhances I/O On Power7 And Power7+ Machines

  April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power8 system announcements might be right around the corner, but IBM has not forgotten about customers using its current machines based on Power7 and Power7+ processors. As part of the trickle of announcements on April 15 that saw Technology Refresh 8 for IBM i 7.1 roll out, Big Blue made some enhancements to the enterprise-class machines and put out a bunch of Ethernet and storage controller adapters. As you can see in announcement letter 114-054, IBM is allowing customers to have static processor activations for Power 770, Power 780, and Power 795 machines and convert them to mobile

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• IBM Pulls The Plug On Some More Power Iron

  April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power8 server announcements have been on the horizon since last August, when IBM first started giving out details about the chips that will be at the heart of the new systems. Since that time, as is usual, IBM has been warning customers that it will be withdrawing some older iron from its sales catalog, and it did so again recently. In announcement letter 914-055, selected features will be withdrawn from marketing through the summer and into the fall. On July 11, the BladeCenter PS700, the entry single-socket blade server that was aimed predominantly at IBM i shops back

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• Maxava And Vision Reach Settlement in Lawsuit

  April 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM i high availability software vendors Maxava and Vision Solutions have reached a settlement in their four-and-a-half year legal fight. By giving up on the accusations of violation of state law, Maxava is now free to appeal a judge’s earlier decision to throw out the part of its lawsuit relating to violations of federal law. In late December 2013, Maxava and the three defendants in the case–Vision Solutions, Sirius Computer Solutions, and former Vision employee Eva Succi–submitted settlement papers that Judge George Wu subsequently signed. As part of Judge Wu’s order, Maxava withdrew its claims against the defendants relating

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• SAP Continues To Soar In The First Quarter

  April 21, 2014 Dan Burger

  SAP‘s star continues to shine brightly after the company’s first quarter financial results revealed respectable revenue growth, while extending cloud successes and building opportune partnerships. All things considered, this was another good report for the German software giant and it occurred during what is traditionally the company’s lightest quarter. HANA, the in-memory database that serves as the keystone in SAP’s cloud-heavy future, once again is given heaps of credit. What it has done so far, however, pales in comparison to the expectations. For the present, HANA is being lauded for simplifying and improving the company’s flagship ERP system Business

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• Gartner Says Take A Hard Look At App Dev And Maintenance

  April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Making the application code and tending that code as systems, conditions, and other code around it all change eats a big part of the IT budget at most companies. And the analysts at Gartner say there is a methodical way to rein those costs in and have the funds available to apply to other projects. Perhaps even a decent pay raise. . . . Gartner is hosting an application development summit next month, and as is its tradition, it puts some teaser information out there to whet people’s appetite and get them thinking about what they are doing in their

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• IBM Italy Gives Power-To-Pure Migration Rebate

  April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is the kind of deal that I would have expected to see a lot more of since the PureSystems family was introduced in April 2012. IBM’s Italian subsidiary is giving customers who transition from regular Power Systems blade servers tucked into BladeCenter enclosures rebates to move to PureFlex converged systems. Specifically, in announcement letter ZA14-1132, IBM Italy is giving distributors a €3,000 rebate if their downstream solution provider customers convince customers to make the jump to modern, converged machinery. Customers can either own or lease the Power Systems blade servers, and can work out a deal with the

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