The Four Hundred Archives - Page 565 of 1510

Private Clouds Growing at a 50 Percent Clip, IDC Says

March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie

Worldwide spending on private cloud services will grow at a 50 percent compound annual growth rate through 2016, at which point it will account for $24 billion in spending, according to the latest forecast from the cloud watchers at IDC. The market for IBM i cloud services is growing, too.

IDC splits the hosted private cloud (HPC) services market into two components. There’s the dedicated private cloud, which offers a dedicated, one-to-one physical compute and storage resources, and the virtual private cloud model, which utilizes shared virtualized resources, and which is an adjunct of the public cloud services model.

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Polaris Chooses IntelliChief for Office Automation

March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie

Polaris Industries, the $3.2 billion maker of snowmobiles, has selected IntelliChief‘s eponymous software to help it streamline back-office business processes and eliminate paper. The initial IntelliChief implementation will target accounts payable (AP) processes, and will hook into Polaris’ IBM i-based Infor ERP XA application.

IntelliChief is a Windows-based suite of software designed to help IBM i shops transition to electronic documents, or “paperless process management,” as IntelliChief calls it. In its basic configurations, the software provides a simple repository for storing and accessing e-documents. More advanced implementations involve the roll-out of sophisticated scanning and data capture solutions, direct integration

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OKI Data to Carry Brooks Print Converters

March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie

OKI Data Americas, the North American subsidiary of the Japanese printing and telecommunications giant, has inked a deal with Brooks Internet Software to carry the software company’s line of print protocol converters for IBM i, Unix, and mainframe servers.

The co-marketing deal announced last month will ensure that organizations buying printers and other gear from OKI Data Americas will also have the opportunity to buy Brooks’ products, notably ExcelliPrint and RPM Remote Print Manager, as part of the deal. RPM Remote Print Manager is a Line Printer Daemon (LPD) print server designed to provide more flexibility in the management

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Entry Power7+ Servers: Those 720+ and 740+ Boxes Are Gonna Cost Ya

March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Let me give you a piece of advice. If your IBM i workloads are such that they are compute intensive but not data intensive, and you can cram all of the peripherals you need into a 2U rack server, such as the chassis used with the new Power 710+ and Power 730+ servers, then you most assuredly should do so. Because the expandability inherent in the 4U rack or tower enclosures used with the Power 720+ and Power 740+ servers, including the ability to hang lots of external disk off the box, are going to cost you.

I have come

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Power7 Is The End Of The Line For Power Blades

March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you were hoping to see Power7+ processors in blade servers later this year to build out your existing BladeCenter infrastructure, I have some bad news for you. As I had been suspecting with my newsy-sense (not as good as spidey sense, but it keeps me employed just as that sixth sense keeps Spiderman alive), IBM has no plans to put the shiny Power7+ processors into the existing PS700 through PS704 series of blade servers.

I had been guessing that Big Blue might cut off the BladeCenters with the Power7+ or Power8 generations, especially given the launch of the Flex

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Enthusiasm, Persistence, And The IBM i Payoff

March 4, 2013 Dan Burger

Innovation is an overused word that gets nailed to everything from a pair of socks to cures for baldness. Let me give you a place where it actually applies: the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group (SEMiUG). Membership in local user groups is not what it once was. The IBM midrange community is no different than most in that regard. One reason for the membership decline is a dearth of educational innovation with the result being decreased value.

I’ve written about the SE Michigan user group before. Check out the “Related Stories” at the bottom of this article. In November, the

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Mad Dog 21/21: If You Want Cheap Cloud Backup, Raise Your ARM

March 4, 2013 Hesh Wiener

If you are using a smartphone, tablet or PC, you can back up data to the cloud, 5 gigs or more, for free using Dropbox,Evernote, Google Drive, or Microsoft Skydrive. Want more capacity? It’s cheap. Want to share stuff among your machines or with others? Easy. Security? Pretty good even before you encrypt.

Compare this with IBM’s backup schemes for an IBM i shop. You could write a book about your experience: Fifty Shades of Blue. But do it fast, because disruption may be imminent, and you don’t want to get caught with

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The Server Racket Holds Its Own In The Fourth Quarter

March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The server business is sputtering a bit with the economic uncertainty out there, but it has, at least according to the numbers coming out of Gartner last week, put the Great Recession a few miles back in the rear view mirror and is holding its own despite all of the wrenching changes going on in the data center these days. We may be witnessing another big wave of a virtualization of another kind, where new applications don’t end up in our own data centers, but in someone else’s, and therefore some of the server sales shift from your data center

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Reader Feedback On Big Blue Jacks SWMA For IBM i, Application RISC Machine System/500

March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hi, Timothy:

What I am guessing IBM is referring to in your story, Big Blue Jacks Software Maintenance Prices For IBM i, with the “45 other products” covered by SWMA are the Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that most i clients use. It is rare for a machine running a business app to not use a combination of WebSphere Development Studio, iSeries Access, Query/400, SQL Kit, Performance Tools, BRMS, etc. However IBM does not charge extra maintenance for these products.

Compare that to a Windows or Unix system, where you have to buy all these features as standalone products from

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IBM Server Partners Get Extra Incentives, IBM i Scores Another Supply Chain Win

March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM hosted its PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas last week, and there was lots of talk about cloud, mobile, and big data, as is the case with everything Blue and Big these days. But IBM wanted to give a couple of shouts out to the partners in who peddle products that come out of its Systems and Technology Group, and outlined a number of actions it was taking specifically to help partners push more Power Systems and PureSystems iron.

Specifically, IBM told partners that it would: