• Starsoft Taps Veryant to Port IBM i COBOL to Open Systems

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Starsoft, an Israel-based developer of software for the insurance and financial services industries, is using Veryant technology to help it migrate its COBOL applications to Java and open systems, and to modernize the interfaces, Veryant announced last week. The move will help Starsoft offer solutions that run on server platforms other than IBM i, and bring other benefits, the company says. For more than 20 years, Starsoft has used COBOL and IBM i technologies to develop applications that automate key business processes for companies in the insurance and financial services industries, including policy production, underwriting, claims, collections, commissions, and

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• Feeling Like A Heel

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Correlation is not causation. That’s one of the first things you learn as an engineer or scientist. But as human beings that are genetically predisposed to find connections between disparate phenomenon, we just can’t help ourselves. We are, in the final analysis, pattern recognition machines that are wired for small tribes and that have a tendency toward gluttony with fatty, sweet, or salty foods. (Which is why Chubby Hubby ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s should be outlawed, right after I finish this here pint.) We may be designed to live in small tribes and do hunting and gathering, knowing

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• More On That Dreamy And Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Once again, many thanks to the intrepid and helpful reader of The Four Hundred who gave us some insight into the equipment purchasing alternatives facing anyone who buys Power 720-class servers from IBM and the forward-looking direction the company cutting the check for the new system took. (Notice the lack of his or her in that sentence? I had to bend it pretty far to do that.) To make the situation a little clearer, that helpful reader gave us some more insight. To recap: The Dreamy and Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine is one with no disks and no expansion

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• Business Strategy Bumps Into Database Deficiency

  November 28, 2011 Dan Burger

  Most IBM i-based companies do not have a well documented database. It’s likely to go unnoticed until new business requirements uncover the rat’s nest as plans to extract more information from data through business intelligence or advanced queries run smack into database policies that are haphazard or relics of the past. The IBM i operating system includes a modern database management system, but it is limited by data that is poorly defined. To one degree or another, everyone is having this problem. The solution lies between two extremes. On one end is not understanding how to solve the problem and

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• As I See It: Privacy Pirates

  November 28, 2011 Victor Rozek

  November is when my property taxes are due. And living in a state without sales tax, they tend to be high. But the amount is not what rankles me. It’s the fact that in a nation built on the sanctity of property rights, I will never truly own my home, even after the final mortgage payment is made. The reality is that as soon as I’m unable to pay my taxes, the state is empowered to take it away from me. Although property rights are at best tenuous, they are so deeply embedded in our mythology that it seems heretical

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• Where Are Those eXFlash SSDs For Power Systems-IBM i?

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You only see what you are looking at, and like the rest of you in IBM i Land, I have paid close attention to the flash-based solid state drives in 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors that Big Blue has offered specifically for the Power Systems lineup. But IBM’s System x and BladeCenter blade servers have even smaller and less costly SSDs that, at least according to the IBM literature, are perfectly fine for I/O intensive database workloads and that are not available on the Power Systems machines. A recent deal for System x customers brought these smaller SATA drives to

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• Warren Buffett Amasses a $10.7 Billion Stake in Big Blue

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you didn’t think that IBM was really a financial services company as much as an IT provider, now that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company has purchased a whopping $10.7 billion stake in the company, you might just change your mind. During a wide-ranging interview on CNBC on November 14 after The Four Hundred went on Thanksgiving hiatus, Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said he had been accumulating shares in IBM since March and kept right on buying into the fourth quarter. He has stopped buying shares, which is why the Oracle of Omaha is

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• Tape Areal Density Growth To Outpace Disks and Flash?

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A lot of people want tapes and disks to die and flash to take over, but it looks like tape technology is not about to go gently into that night. And it is not just a matter of cost per gigabyte, but the density of the three different types of storage devices. Roger Luethy, a storage specialist at IBM Switzerland, posted a paper that storage techies Robert Fontana, Steven Hetzler, and Gary Decad of the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, published some time earlier this year that shows that maybe the 40 percent annual growth rate in areal

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• Help/Systems Leads New Entries Into IBM i Solution Edition Program

  November 28, 2011 Alex Woodie

  A handful of new IBM i Solution Editions have been added to the program recently, bringing the total size of the North American program to 30. Among the vendors joining the regional program recently are Help/Systems, Agilysys, New Generation Software, and UNIT4 Coda. Also, the platform’s three major high availability software vendors–Vision Solutions, Maxava, and Trader’s–can now sell Solution Edition packages to customers all around the world. The IBM i Solution Edition program allows customers to save close to 50 percent off the combination of the list price of Power Systems servers

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• Mainline Buys KgW For IBM, VMware Expertise

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM system reseller Mainline Information Systems is expanding its reach in the United States with the acquisition of KgW & Company. Mainline, based in Tallahassee, Florida, is one of the largest resellers of IBM mainframes, Power Systems, and System x machines in the United States, and it also has a tidy business peddling Hewlett-Packard‘s X86-based ProLiant and Itanium-based Integrity and Superdome systems. Mainline was founded in 1989 by Rick Kearney in the wake of the AS/400 launch and was initially focused on IBM’s proprietary midrange platform. In the 1990s, Mainline became one of the largest resellers of IBM

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