• RJS Strikes Again

  September 18, 2012 Alex Woodie

  For the second time in two months, IBM i document management software provider RJS Software Systems has acquired a software development firm in the Twin Cities area. Last week, RJS announced it bought EpicScience, a St. Paul-based managed services company specializing in IT support, network administration, and custom program development. The 20-year-old company provided hosting services for a range of servers and networking gear. It also provided custom development and integration services. “We look forward to adding our IT experience to the RJS team and are excited to offer our skills and services to RJS Software’s broad customer base,” EpicScience

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• Attunity: Moving Big Data for Dollars

  September 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  A year after acquiring fellow data replication software vendor RepliWeb, Attunity is remaking itself as a provider of Big Data pumps. The company, which recently moved up from the pink sheets to trade on the NASDAQ Capital Market, excels at moving large amounts of data in a quick fashion. Thanks to its new partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a whole lot of data is going to go through the Attunity pump. IBM i shops may have heard of Attunity for its change data capture (CDC) software, called Attunity Stream. That product excelled at continuously pulling updates from source databases,

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• Sirius Fluffs Up A Cloud For IBM i SMBs

  September 17, 2012 Dan Burger

  What Sirius Computer Solutions has learned in the managed services business, it hopes to apply to a new cloud services business the company has drawn up specifically for small to midsize IBM i shops. The targets in the sights of the shooters at Sirius are companies that find even the smallest Power 720 running IBM i much more than they need. Although the Power 720 is the volume leader among IBM i boxes, its performance and cost exceeds what many SMB customers can put to use, or what they want to pay. Sirius believes the cloud is the only way

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• Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1, And Do It Well?

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We get a lot of questions here at IT Jungle, and we do our best to try to get you answers. With new Power7+ servers coming soon, IBM is getting ready to mothball Power6+ processor cards early next year (as we report on elsewhere in this issue), and i5/OS V5R4 support being ceased on September 30 next year, customers with older Power5 through Power6+ machinery have a lot to think about. One customer who contacted us recently is willing to ponder the jump from i5/OS V5R4 to IBM i 7.1, but none of the documentation that either he

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• PowerVM Outshines Other VMs In IBM-Backed Report

  September 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  There are many things that set PowerVM apart from other hypervisors on the market. For starters, the server virtualization products from VMware and Microsoft have a much, much bigger installed base than IBM‘s Power Systems hypervisor. But does that make them better? Not according to a recent report commissioned by IBM, which found that PowerVM is quicker to deploy, more stable at scale, requires fewer people to manage, costs less, consumes fewer resources, and delivers higher availability than the other leading brands. IBM hired Solitaire Interglobal Ltd. (SIL) to gather operational data from companies in various industries with the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Malady Of All Empires

  September 17, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  Here we are, more than five years after the debut of the iPhone, welcoming the fifth generation of this iconic product. Actually it’s more than iconic. Late last winter, Forbes pointed out that Apple’s iPhone business had become bigger than all of Microsoft. People like their iPhones a lot, and their Androids, too. They enjoy iPads and Kindles, and soon, perhaps, other tablets. Love for PCs? Not so much. In fact, it’s a tragedy. If the vendors and their suppliers want to survive, they ought to reflect on mythical Greeks, such as Narcissus and Echo and Nemesis. Just in case

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• IBM To Stop Peddling Power6+ Processors Soon

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power7+ processors and their related Power Systems machinery looming on the horizon sometime before the end of the year, according to IBM‘s top brass, it is no surprise that Big Blue is beginning the process of winding down sales of new Power6+ system boards and related peripherals. These machines are two generations back, and no vendor likes to sell more than one generation back even if they do support any old iron for many, many years in terms of running software and providing tech support. In announcement letter 912-815, IBM is telling customers to get out

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• Storage Arrays Keep Selling Despite Server Slowdown In Q2

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The need for more storage capacity in the data center is continuing to outpace the need for capacity, at least in terms of growth, according to the latest data from IDC. As The Four Hundred previously reported, the company reckons that the world consumed 2 million servers in the second quarter (down 3.6 percent) and drove $12.6 billion in revenues (down 4.8 percent). Disk arrays, by contrast, drive $8.1 billion in sales over the same three months, up 8 percent from the year-ago period, and total disk capacity shipped in those disk arrays hit an aggregate of 6,667

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• IBM Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is On Storwize Data Compression

  September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Storwize V7000 disk arrays are at the heart of the new Flex System modular systems announced by IBM back in April, featuring converged Power and X86 server nodes, integrated versions of the V7000 arrays, and integrated switching. The arrays can also be attached to plain vanilla Power Systems boxes running IBM i, AIX, or Linux and are the important midrange of IBM’s storage lineup. So when IBM says Storwize arrays can compress files like crazy and thereby save IT shops money, customers want to believe it. To demonstrate its commitment to its compression algorithms (or rather, the ones it

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• Big Data Is The Big Winner At The U.S. Open

  September 17, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Andy Murray and Serena Williams may have dominated the courts at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York, during the recent 2012 U.S. Open, but behind the scenes, the real action was being served up by IBM. Sure, it’s easy for the average fan to get distracted by the tennis action, but to Big Blue, each serve, volley, and point is more than just an exciting play between athletes. To IBM, that action is big data. “Big data is impacting so many aspects of sporting events, that it’s no longer a stretch to say

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