• Reconsidering SAN in Wake of SCSI Disk’s End

  August 17, 2009 Alex Woodie

  In 11 days, IBM will officially stop selling SCSI disks for System i and Power Systems servers, leaving serial attached SCSI (SAS) and solid state drives (SSD) as the only option for internal storage on the platform. While support for SCSI disks will continue through 2010, storage experts recommend taking a hard look at external storage and storage area networks (SANs), not only for enterprise customers with big workloads, but mid sized shops, too. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, IBM’s transition from SCSI to SAS drives for internal storage should come as no surprise. Since the launch of the

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• As I See It: Daniel, Part II

  August 17, 2009 Victor Rozek

  There are now 6.3 million people receiving unemployment benefits, the vast majority engaged in a desperate race to find work before the benefits run out. For many, like Daniel, with a family and a mortgage, at best unemployment offers a tenuous lifeline, easily stretched to breakpoint by the expenses of day-to-day survival. But having lost his home and family, maintaining his unemployment eligibility became even more of an imperative for Daniel. What work he could find paid far less than his IT job and offered no benefits, but would strip him of his unemployment check. So Daniel entered the

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• A Quick Analysis of Business Intelligence Planning

  August 17, 2009 Dan Burger

  Dave Hatch is a vice president and group director of technology research at Aberdeen Group. His team of researchers create and publish reports on business intelligence, a technology that has grown to include many technologies, processes, and disciplines. The reports are not specific to the IBM AS/400 and its progeny, but much of the information pertains to any platform and encompasses most business plans. A strategy for BI on the AS/400 can start right here. Business intelligence describes the capability to create reports from data captured in a computer system. At least that’s how it used to be. It

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• IBM Readies Query Appliance for Mainframes; What About i?

  August 17, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of its Smart Analytics System announcement from a few weeks ago, Big Blue also talked a little bit–and I mean only a little bit–about another kind of business analytics hardware that it had cooking in its labs and factories and that would debut soon for its System z mainframes. And hopefully, this appliance, called the Smart Analytics Optimizer, will also soon be available for the Power Systems platform running i 6.1 (and AIX and Linux, if you care). The Smart Analytics System is a stack of preconfigured Power 550 systems running AIX, parallel file systems, and InfoSphere

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• Computer Economics: More IT Job and Budget Cuts Expected

  August 17, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the problems with trying to gauge the economy is that there is a big lag between when statistics are gathered and then analyzed and evaluated in some kind of report that actually gets into your hands so you can try to see how it relates to you and what is going on around you. It is with this in mind that I bring the 2009/2010 IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks from Computer Economics to your attention. This behemoth of a report has 1,053 pages across 21 chapters, and it costs a whopping $9,995. But chapters are available on

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• Reminder: SCSI Disks Coming to the End of the Line

  August 17, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I know that I have said this a few times in the past year in various stories The Four Hundred has done about nips and tucks in the Power Systems lineup, but SCSI disks for Power Systems and their predecessors are coming to the end of the line. Like soon. Like next week, in fact. So if you have SCSI disks in your machines and you want to stick with that technology instead of moving to internal SAS drives and or enclosures that support SAS drives, you don’t have very long to buy SCSI disks from Big Blue. As you

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• IBM Discounts Support for Lotus Wares, Sunsets Older Domino Releases

  August 17, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM knows times are tough out there for every company (excepting possibly Big Blue and Google these days), and to that end it is offering some discounts on Software Subscription and Support contracts for Lotus and WebSphere Portal software. The discounts came out last week in announcement letter 209-327, and here’s the deal with the Lock In With Lotus software offer. (You’d think software companies would be allergic to the words “lock in,” but what do I know?) If customers buy new licenses for a slew of Lotus or WebSphere Portal products and they agree to pony up the

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• Q&A with TVMUG’s Don Rima

  August 17, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with TVMUG’s Don Rima In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I told you that Don Rima had started up a new midrange user group, the Tennessee Valley Midrange User Group, or TVMUG for short. We couldn’t get ahold of each other because of our crazy schedules, but chatted over email about user groups, the i platform, and Chattanooga. Timothy Prickett Morgan: What on earth are you doing in Chattanooga, Don? Nothing against the place–I was raised a country boy myself–but you have been in the Washington, D.C., metro area for a long time. Don

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• A Peek Inside IBM’s Smart Analytics System

  August 10, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While The Four Hundred was on holiday at the end of July, IBM hosted a shindig at one of its adjunct T.J. Watson Research Center campuses in Hawthorne, New York, which is just a 30-minute drive from my house in Upstate Manhattan. And even though I was busy with a bunch of non-work work–you know what I am talking about here, people–I decided to put on some clean clothes and go listen to some of the top brass at Big Blue talk some about this business analytics and optimization (BAO) opportunity that IBM is chasing and the systems it is

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• Maximum Availability Foresees Growth with 20/20 Program

  August 10, 2009 Alex Woodie

  If its new 20/20 promotional program has its desired effect, Maximum Availability will have more installations of its *noMAX high availability software suite to look forward to. Under the program, which the company announced late last week, Maximum Availability is enticing users of other System i HA products to switch to *noMAX with the promise that they will pay 20 percent less than they do under their current contract. Competitive upgrade programs are nothing new in the i OS software market, nor in the IT industry as a whole, for that matter. Before the i OS HA space experienced its

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