• LTO Gen 6 Licenses Now Available

  June 28, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The companies behind the Linear Tape Open (LTO) format announced last week that they have begun selling licenses the LTO Gen 6 format. While the release of the final LTO Gen 6 specifications won’t happen for at least 12-24 months, the LTO group says giving licensees a sneak peak into the development of the LTO Gen 6 format will allow them to enhance their own products. It’s been just over a year since the companies behind the LTO program–IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum–extended the roadmap for the LTO Ultrium half-inch tape format out to eight generations. LTO

  …

  Read more

• Maidenform Picks CYBRA for RFID

  June 28, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The next time you or your loved one purchases intimate apparel from Maidenform, it will include a little something extra: an RFID tag. What’s more, that RFID tag will be encoded by Maidenform using software from CYBRA. The Yonkers, New York, software company announced this month that Maidenform selected its EdgeMagic software as part of its item-level RFID tagging program. This will enable Maidenform and downstream retailers to track the whereabouts of individual items, which will bring efficiencies to inventory handling in the supply chain. (Consumers need not worry that Maidenform items will transmit location information.) Maidenform’s vice president

  …

  Read more

• Building a Legacy

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i platform and its bigger brother, the System z mainframe, take a lot of guff for being a legacy platform. But guess what? Solaris is turning 30 next year, as is HP-UX the year after that. AIX will be 25 this year, Windows server variants are almost 20 years old (remember Windows for Workgroups 3.1?), and Linux pretty much freeze-dried after a hectic 20 years of development. OS/400, of course, just turned 23 last week, but has deeper roots back into CPFon the System/38 in 1978 and SSP on the System/36 in 1983. They are all legacy environments

  …

  Read more

• Cloud Computing: Just Another Word for the Internet?

  June 27, 2011 Alex Woodie

  When terminology from the IT department breaks through into the mainstream culture, you know you’re onto something really hot. This is the case with the term and the concept behind “cloud computing,” which has spread like a west Texas prairie fire. However, for all the hype surrounding cloud computing, surveys show that only a fraction of organizations have adopted or are actively pondering a cloud offering. And the most popular cloud application? Email. Apparently, “the” cloud is the same as “the” Internet. According to a recent survey by CDW, only 28 percent of organizations are actively implementing or maintaining

  …

  Read more

• Winners and Users: IBM’s ISV and SMB Choices

  June 27, 2011 Dan Burger

  The manner in which IBM co-exists with its independent software vendors (ISVs) says a lot about how Big Blue has changed its business plans in the Lou Gerstner-Sam Palmisano era. The IBM i user base is a good example, even though it is unique in many ways. None of IBM’s other platforms have or had the participation of so many application and tool vendors. From the time the AS/400 was introduced, it was the application server. And it was extremely successful. Thanks, in large part, to the ISV community. In those halcyon days of business computing, particularly in the

  …

  Read more

• Mad Dog 21/21: In Hack Signo Vinces

  June 27, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  Would you want your company to be highlighted in the news like Citibank, the International Monetary Fund, Lockheed Martin, Google, and Sony? Maybe not. Recently, they all became famous when high tech vandals invaded their computer systems. Of course you might think you are safe because you’re True Blue and IBM‘s products and its developers’ skills will protect you. Think again. In January, hackers were able to trash IBM’s iconic developerWorks site. Maybe it’s time to brush up on security. You might learn something that saves your cookies, including the ones in your browser. The concepts

  …

  Read more

• Old Gear Gets The Ax In More Power Systems Trade-In Deals

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were thinking that you might be able to combine some of IBM‘s trade-in deals to get your hands on older Power Systems machines, think again. IBM is continuing to sift through its deal books and removing just about everything that doesn’t have a Power7 chip embedded in it. I say just about because the Power6-based high-end Power 595 server seems to be, for the moment, immune from the scissors, as was the case in the modified deal I told you about two weeks ago. But all the other Power6 and Power6+ based gear in the deal

  …

  Read more

• Reader Feedback On The Power Systems-IBM i Road Ahead

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hello, Timothy: I have always liked your articles. For large shops doing MSHA using replication, we would love partition mobility, but the high volume of I/O our internal storage performance gives us seems to also preclude any chance at the mobility we need. Note: IBM SANs could not provide the performance required when we tried the shift way back in 2003 and to this date nobody wants to risk SAN performance–even with EMC technologies. If I could have SAN replication functions (and clustering functions) with internal storage (and its great performance) without having to implement iASPs, then we would be

  …

  Read more

• iFoundation Grant Application Deadline is June 30

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What is better than free money? (Keep it clean here, people. This is a family newsletter.) Very few things, and one of them is free speech and the other is free beer; I even like free puppies. But few things beat free money, and high availability software maker Maxava is giving away $50,000 in grants to the IBM i community. But you only have until June 30 to submit a grant application, so hop to it. Maxava launched the iFoundation effort back in late March to help carry the cost of local and national user group meetings, education and training,

  …

  Read more

• Worldwide ERM Software Sales Growing Fast in 2011

  June 27, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  This year has brought a lot of encouraging economic recovery news to the IT market, and here comes another bright spot. According to IDC, the worldwide enterprise resource management (ERM) applications market year-over-year revenue growth of 4.6 percent in the second half of 2010, and that trend is continuing into 2011. It’s not unexpected that companies with money to spend would be looking to put it toward integrating disparate systems, which would hopefully free up more dollars for other projects in the long-term. The number of dollars predicted to pour into this market is a little surprising. IDC forecasts

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles