• COMMON Announces Speaker Awards for 2008 Conference

  May 5, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Thirty-five System i experts, including IT Jungle‘s own Ted Holt, were given awards by COMMON last week at its annual meeting and expo in Reno, Nevada. The awards were for sessions presented at the 2008 conference in Nashville, Tennessee. COMMON divides its Speaker Hall of Fame (formerly called the Speaker Excellence Awards) into eight categories. The best of the best receive Gold Medal awards, while Silver and Bronze Medals round out the general purpose awards. COMMON also gives awards fore Best New Speaker, Best New Session, Best Traditional Lab, Best Open Lab, and Best IT Executive Session. Winners of

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• Door Manufacturer Consolidates Data Processing with VAI

  May 5, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Lynden Door and its sister company, Alliance Door Products, have tapped VAI for an upgraded suite of ERP products, the software vendor announced last week. The implementation of S2K Enterprise 5.0 has enabled the company to consolidate the IT services from several locations onto a single System i server running S2K. Based in Lynden, Washington, Lynden Door is a small company that has developed a reputation for manufacturing premium residential, commercial, and architectural flush wood doors. The company’s products are distributed through Alliance Door Products, which operates several wholesale distribution sites and warehouses throughout the Pacific Northwest. The company has

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• New Power6+ Iron: The Feeds and Speeds

  May 4, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I gave you the scoop on the Power6+ rack, tower, and blade server announcements that Big Blue was making at the COMMON midrange trade show out in Reno, Nevada. A lot of the details about the new machines were not available at the time, and I have done some digging to get you more information on the new boxes. (That story talked about a lot more than the new boxes, so if you missed it, you should check it out here.) You will recall that IBM announced that it was

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• COMMON Exceeds Expectations in Reno, But Group’s Future Uncertain

  May 4, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Looking back, we’ll likely view the 2009 COMMON conference held last week as a turning point for the user group, and perhaps the midrange industry as a whole. Despite the significant drop in attendance compared to last year’s show, conference-goers expressed a glimmer of optimism that things are about to get better. And while COMMON coped admirably after being dealt a mixed hand in Reno, the group’s financial situation means significant changes are likely before the group’s big 50th anniversary show a year from now in Orlando. By most accounts, the System i industry’s biggest conference of the year, which

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• Bettin’ on the Blade

  May 4, 2009 Dan Burger

  Will the BladeCenter serve the IBM i community along the same lines as the AS/400 served the System/38 community? It could happen. And if you are Ian Jarman, manager of Power Systems software, you make the crossing from “could happen” to “will happen.” Moving from the current BladeCenter on i installed base of several hundred to thousands and tens of thousands seems like a long row to hoe, but Jarman says the pieces are coming together. In typically IBM i fashion, there’s no rush in putting all the pieces on the table. After all, the i community does not welcome

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Age of Acquire Us

  May 4, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  It looks like Oracle is going to buy Sun Microsystems. This will probably happen soon, but it’s hard to be sure. Not long ago it looked like IBM was going to buy Sun, at least according to a passel of ace reporters, but it didn’t happen. However as events unfold, one thing seems clear: Sun’s role in computing is huge. For an America suffering economic collapse, Sun is a necessity, which makes it a mother of invention. Sun is akin to hope, that strange invention, which may have feathers. And we need hope so much right now.

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• Power Systems Finally Get Solid State Disks

  May 4, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As readers of The Four Hundred have been anticipating for more than a year, IBM has finally gotten around to adding flash-based solid state disks, or SSDs, to the Power Systems lineup. SSDs are all the rage because of the much higher data transfer rates they offer compared to traditional hard disk drives and the lower prices they have relative to main memory, which is still considerably faster than flash. For this reason, all the cool servers are getting flash-based SSDs. Flash-based disk drives fill a gap between disk and main memory speeds, much as Level 1, 2, and 3

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• What’s the Story with Power6+ Chips?

  May 4, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I explained in last week’s issue, I was not surprised that IBM was making server announcements relating to the Power6+ processor. What I didn’t expect to learn was that Big Blue already began the rollout out of Power6+ machines last fall and decided to not tell anyone about it. What good is a kicker if you don’t kick up the clock speeds and brag about new features? This is still the IT industry, right? For many years now, the i platform folks have been trying to shy away from talking about feeds and speeds and talk about the benefits

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• IBM Cancels Systems Conference, Slated for This Month

  May 4, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s North American PartnerWorld business partner organization canceled the IBM Systems Conference last week, which was to be held in Orlando, Florida, between May 18 and 21. In an email sent out to business partners, IBM did not provide any explanation for the cancellation. The Systems Conference was to have a three educational tracks: one track on IBM’s servers and storage, one on solutions relating to IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure initiatives, and the third for professional development (teaching project management, negotiation, and economic analysis of IT solutions). This sounds like the kind of thing IBM’s Systems and Technology Group would

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• Kronos Survey Says Workers Are Under Pressure

  May 4, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The economic meltdown got you down? Well, you’re in good company, apparently. Kronos, the privately held application software company that provides various human resources management tools to companies on a wide variety of platforms (including the i platform), and the Workforce Institute, a think tank set up by Kronos in 2006, did a survey of 1,265 full-time and part-time workers between January 30 and February 3 to get a sense of how the economy was affecting their work lives. As you might expect, employees say they feel more pressure to go to work now than they might when

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