• IBM Storwize V5000: A SAN For The SMB Masses

  November 4, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM has introduced a new member of its Storwize family of storage arrays designed for use by small and midsized businesses, including those running IBM i on Power Systems. The Storwize V5000 sits happily in the “Goldilocks” zone between the V3700 and V7000 arrays, and provides some high-end features, such as support for IBM’s Easy Tier, Flash Copy, SAN Volume Controller (SVC), and remote mirroring for high availability. The V5000 looks to have many features that will make it popular among IBM i shops. Anecdotal evidence indicates that IBM i shops are increasingly adopting storage arrays to get a handle

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• As I See It: Can We Have More, Sir?

  November 4, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Of all the relationships we have, few will ever be as demanding, tumultuous, frustrating, worrisome, aggravating, and full of unrequited longing as our relationship with money. Money is a stern and demanding mistress. It leaves you spent and always wanting more. We chase it for a lifetime, but only ever catch enough to continue the chase. And those who catch more than their share, run even harder. It’s a primal force, an elemental attractor, and everyone would love to test the notion that money can’t buy happiness. In that regard, IT professionals appear to have a leg up in the

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• Watson’s Prodigy Leads Power Systems Into The Cognitive Era

  November 4, 2013 Dan Burger

  Your entire career has played out in the programmable era of computing. That’s not likely to be the case for young IT professionals with recently launched careers, as new trails are being blazed into cognitive computing. Leading the way is IBM‘s most famous computer, the Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer that goes by the name Watson. But Watson’s Jeopardy! fame was just the beginning of things to come. And if that’s all you know, you have some catching up to do. “The next 20 years will change computing as we know it today,” says the person chosen to guide Watson development.

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• IBM Chops High-End Power CPU And Memory Prices

  November 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The fourth quarter is well under way and everyone now knows that Power8 systems are not going to start rolling out until the middle of 2014 or so. And this means IBM has to do some wheeling and dealing, particularly at the high-end where the Power7-based Power 795 machines are looking a little long in the tooth. This is because IBM did not provide a Power7+ bump at the high end of the Power Systems line in late 2012 or early 2013, and it has no plans to, either. IBM generally does not provide a “plus” bump to its high-end

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• The Sales Pitch For The PureFlex For IBM i Bundle

  November 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about the new PureFlex Solution for IBM i bundle that Big Blue rolled out as part of the October announcements. This bundle is based on the Power7+ processor and the p260+ two-socket server node in the PureFlex system and is a more suitable setup than a similar bundle announced in June using the quad-socket p460 node, which is based on the Power7 chip. Just how good of a deal is this new bundle? The machines cost about the same on the hardware front. The p460 bundle had a

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• ManH Reports 17 Percent Revenue Increase

  October 29, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Manhattan Associates brought in a total of nearly $108 million in revenue during the third quarter ended September 30, a 17 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago. The provider of supply chain and warehouse management software for IBM i and other platforms also recorded a 43 percent increase in net income, with more than $19 million profit. “We’re pleased with our third quarter performance in a generally tepid macro environment,” Eddie Capel, Manhattan Associates’ president and CEO, said in a statement. “The financial results and operating metrics were solid and our competitive win rate remains strong.” While

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• Mobile Security a Top Priority for CISOs, IBM Finds

  October 29, 2013 Alex Woodie

  An IBM survey of chief information security officers found that mobile security is the top initiative at the moment, with 25 percent of CISOs having deployed some mobile security solutions in the last year. IBM also rolled out a new security service, based in part on partner Akamai‘s technology, that’s aimed at dealing with distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. While mobile security may be on the minds of CISOs, there’s still a lot to be done. According to IBM’s survey, less than 40 percent of organizations have security policies in place to deal with the bring your own

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• Rocket Revs iCluster HA Tool

  October 29, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software this month issued a minor update to its iCluster IBM i high availability (HA) software, which it bought from IBM last year. iCluster 7.1 Interim Fix 3 (IF3) adds support for SQL functions and procedures and gives iCluster customers the capability to replicate those SQL creations using the HA software. It has added two new object specifiers–*SQLFUNC and *SQLPROC–to support this capability, which was also enabled with its TR1 release, the company says. The move was made primarily in response to Rocket customers who also use its Aldon LifeCycle Manager for i (LMi) change management software, the company

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• LANSA Touts Long Relationship with German Material Supplier

  October 29, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Baustoff Union, a provider of building materials, equipment, and construction services in the German state of Bavaria, implemented an AS/400-based ERP system in the late 1990s. Since then, the ERP system has been extended and modernized in multiple ways using tools from LANSA under a partnership that continues to this day. LANSA recently revisited its Baustoff Union (BU) relationship with a case study posted to its website. It all started in 1997 when BU implemented the RPG-based ERP suite from S.M. Hartmann (SMH) GmbH, a German software company. “The choice that we made over 15 years ago still proves

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• MicroStrategy Giving Away Analytic Tool

  October 29, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops in the market for a data analytic and visualization tool may want to add MicroStrategy‘s Analytics Desktop tool to their short list, for one very good reason: It’s free. Analytics Desktop is a new, in-memory business intelligence tool unveiled last week by the Tysons Corner, Virginia, company. The product is a scaled-down version of existing Windows-based desktop analytics tools that it previously offered. MicroStrategy says its new software will enable customers to detect patterns, trends, and relationships hidden in their data, and build visualizations and dashboards. Users can view, sort, pivot, drill, and apply statistical analysis

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