• ClarkWestern Outsources i OS-Based EDI to Inovis

  November 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  ClarkWestern Building Systems, a manufacturer of lath and steel framing systems, is migrating ERP systems. As a result, it will rely on Inovis‘ managed services offering to run its i OS-based EDI system, Inovis announced recently. ClarkWestern is a privately held manufacturer based in Middletown, Ohio, whose steel framing and accessories have been used on some notable projects, such as the Enron Building in Houston, Texas (now called the Chevron/Texaco Tower). Like many mid size manufacturers, the company relied on the IBM midrange server to manage parts of its business. For communication with trading partners using EDI, ClarkWestern relied

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• GroundWork Monitor 5.3 Ready for Testing

  November 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  GroundWork last week announced the pre-release of GroundWork Monitor Community Edition 5.3, a new version of the company’s open source systems management software that works with all major operating systems, including IBM i. With version 5.3, the company is bringing together the latest releases of many of the open source components that make up its GroundWork suite, and threatening the hegemony of the Big Four. GroundWork is a San Francisco-based developer of open source systems management software. The company relies on a community of experts and enthusiasts–including the popular Ganglia, Nagios, NeDi, and Cacti open source projects–to

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• Tideway Betas New Release of Application Dependency Mapping Software

  November 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Curious about what undiscovered IT assets might be lurking in your data center, and what relationship they have with the systems you work with everyday? Tideway Systems, a provider of application dependency mapping (ADM) software, yesterday announced the beta for Foundation Community Edition, a new product aimed at helping small and mid size shops better understand their systems. Tideway’s Foundation series automatically provides data center discovery capabilities to help customers create an inventory of all the servers, applications, and network nodes in their IT environments, as well as mapping inter-system dependencies and relationships. The software helps administrators pinpoint weaknesses

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• Lotus Foundations and Smart Cube i: Brothers or Clones?

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I told you a few weeks ago, IBM is apparently cooking up a server called the Smart Cube that is based on its Power 520 hardware, the i 6.1 or a kicker operating system, and a stack of application software. This machine, which may have been under development as the “Blue for Business” platform, which I have reported on for the past year, seems to have a sibling: the Lotus Foundations Smart appliance. Last week, IBM provided a preview of the Lotus Foundations Smart appliance, which is actually a kicker to an existing set of systems and application

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• IBM Starts Cutting Deals on Power Systems i for Q4

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I was talking to a downstream Power Systems reseller, one of the guys with a few hundred customers that he tends to with new systems, upgrades, software configuration, application tuning, and so on, to make his daily bread. By the sweat of his browser, as it were. And guess what he told me? He had no System i or Power Systems i deals at all in the pipeline for the remainder of the fourth quarter. None. Nadda. Zilch. Zip. By the way, it has been a long time since this has happened to this particular reseller. We’re talking

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• Layoffs–Possibly Including Frank Soltis–at IBM Rochester

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a posting on the Midrange-L mailing list, where a lot of the AS/400 intelligentsia hang out to talk and gripe, IBM apparently had some layoffs at the Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400 and its successors. And, if what long-time and staunch AS/400 enthusiast Neil Palmer said in the post is true, the chief architect of what used to be called the System i until last year is getting ready to leave the building. I have tried repeatedly this week to get some kind details on the layoffs that Palmer refers to in one post, but thus

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Souls of Old Machines

  November 17, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  In the world of Jewish mysticism, there is a concept of demonic possession by a creature called a dybbuk. A dybbuk is basically a soul that has somehow broken free of its original body and for one or another reason becomes a spiritual squatter in the body and mind of a living person. IBM is big on this idea, putting the soul of a System i into the body of a System p. It is also doing well with a similar soul transplant that gives a mainframe life on a processor complex that bears some resemblance to a Power

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• Power Systems GM Discusses Upcoming i Announcements in Chat

  November 17, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM Power Systems head honcho Ross Mauri sat down for a one-hour “fireside” chat with members of the i community last week. The GM fielded a variety of questions, ranging from upcoming disk- and SAN-related enhancements for i-based blades (expected in 2009) to what are the platform’s hottest applications (virtualization and anything written in MySQL/PHP). Mauri was even asked to name his favorite operating system: IBM i, Linux, or AIX? The answer may surprise you. . . . Then again, it may not. Tuesday’s online forum was the first fireside chat for Mauri, who took the job as general manager

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• IDC Patches Punctured IT Spending Forecasts

  November 17, 2008 Dan Burger

  You can hear air leaking out of the tire, but it’s not flat yet. That’s how I view the most recent IT spending forecast by the analysts at IDC. We might be getting close to pulling over to the side of the road and putting on the spare, but, heck, we don’t even know with any certainty whether the spare has any air in it. So let’s keep driving on this one and see how far we get. We’ll just drive a little slower. Here in the IBM System i user community, there are tendencies to not spend as

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• IBM Updates Active Power Management Plug-In for Servers

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It took a little bit longer than expected, perhaps, but IBM has finally delivered its Active Energy Manager plug-in for its Systems Director system management tool. The tool can be used to monitor power consumption and thermal conditions of IBM and non-IBM systems, as well as capping the power that can be used on selected server models. I told you all about this plug-in back in December 2007 (see IBM Readies Power Management for Power Servers for more on that). The AEM plug-in runs on Linux partitions on Power, X64, or mainframe iron, and it can reach out into Windows,

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