• Big Blue PowerVC, SmartCloud Entry Provisioning For IBM i

  October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM put out a new tool called PowerVC, which is short for Virtualization Center and which is a new management tool to set up and manage virtual machines on top of the PowerVM hypervisor. Earlier this year, IBM committed to porting the KVM hypervisor to Power processors and also making the OpenStack cloud controller work in conjunction with the Power Systems, and PowerVC is one of several new products that are coming to market based on these efforts. In announcement letter 213-409, you will see that what IBM has done is

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• IBM Peddles Another 2,000 PureSystems Machines

  October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The ramp of IBM‘s PureSystems converged machines continues apace, with the company growing its installed base of unique systems by 25 percent in the third quarter ended in September. “PureSystems continues to gain momentum,” said Mark Loughridge, IBM’s chief financial officer, on a call with Wall Street analysts going over the third quarter financial result for IBM. “In the major markets, we grew more than 30 percent sequentially. Globally, we shipped over 2,000 systems in third quarter, with over 8,000 total shipments since announcement.” Depending on who I ask, and when I ask them, a PureSystems system is a

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• Successful CIOs Have Machiavellian Tendencies, Says New E-Book

  October 21, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics or advancing one’s career. These aren’t the skills you’d expect to see listed on the average resume, but if you’re looking to rise to the top, especially if you’re gunning for a CIO spot, maybe they should be. A new e-book from Gartner vice president and fellow, Tina Nunno, takes a look at some new leadership styles for CIOs and IT leaders that can help ensure their own success and that of their teams. The Wolf in CIO’s Clothing: A Machiavellian Strategy for Successful IT Leadership examines the role of CIOs, who are

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• Butterill Brings Crowd To OCEAN Meeting

  October 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  A week after IBM i Technology Refresh 7 was announced, Alison Butterill, product offering manager for IBM i, showed up at the OCEAN user group meeting with plenty to talk about. Butterill, who travels like the wind except the wind has trouble keeping up, was asking a group of IBM midrange executives, in a roundtable discussion with software vendors, how many knew about TR7. Very few acknowledgements were signaled. That led to a question about how many in this group were running IBM i 7.1 on Power Systems. Again, very little response in the affirmative. How about 6.1? The

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• As I See It: Reading the IT Leaves

  October 21, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Economic activity is notoriously difficult to predict because it depends on the daily decisions of millions of individuals who themselves are difficult to predict. Behavior can often be capricious, and the money guys who manipulate markets are even more uncomfortable with uncertainty than a nun opening an attachment from Carlos Danger. Consequently, any time the needle moves in the wrong direction, hand wringing and consternation are sure to follow. So when Gartner reported that IT spending would fall $74 billion below predictions, the sky wasn’t exactly falling, but it teetered ominously. Granted, $74 billion is not pocket change, but the

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• Power Systems Sales Hammered Down In Q3

  October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What happens–or doesn’t happen–in China has a much larger effect on IBM i shops in the rest of the world than perhaps any of us might have anticipated. The return to profitability for IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group in the second quarter was short-lived and the group was pushed into a loss in the third quarter by a freeze on spending in China. Economic growth in the Middle Kingdom is the weakest it has been since 2000, and the government of President Xi Jinping has been working since May to put together reforms and a stimulus package. Those reforms

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• The i Cloud Wasn’t Built In A Day

  October 21, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM is building an IBM i-based cloud. You could say it’s already built, but it is an ongoing project. As good as the cloud services for IBM i are, there’s always work to be done to make it better. Taking a step in that direction, IBM hosted the IBM i Cloud Summit earlier this month to bring together a group of managed service providers (MSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), and business partners who are all, along with IBM, the stakeholders in the i cloud. The fact that there even is an IBM i Cloud Summit is an indication that this

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• Will Modern, Free-Form RPG Bring New Blood To The Platform?

  October 21, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Veteran RPG coders around the world are getting in a free format frame of mind in anticipation of the launch of IBM i 7.1 TR7 next month. While getting experienced RPG programmers to write more modern looking syntax is great, the real promise of free format RPG is the potential to get more people–particularly younger coders, but not necessarily students–interested in RPG. The big question is: Will it work? The IBM i platform could definitely use an RPG-shaped shot in the arm, because the pool of experienced RPG programmers is shrinking every year. Whether it’s shrinking as fast as the

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• UCG Reports Two More Vault400 Customers

  October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie

  United Computer Group has been on a roll lately with its Vault400 online backup and disaster recovery solution. In the past couple of weeks, the company has announced two new customers, including Tredit Tire & Wheel Company and the city of College Park, Maryland. Tredit Tire & Wheel Company is a large distributor of trailer tires and wheels to trailer manufacturers throughout the country. The Elkhart, Indiana-based company uses the Infor10 Distribution Enterprise i (A+) ERP software from Infor to manage operations at six locations around the U.S. The company purchased the Vault400 backup and DR service from UCG to

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• Halcyon Adds VIOS Monitoring to AIX Systems Management Toolset

  October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Halcyon Software last week announced that it’s shipping a new “lite” version of its Network Server Suite that brings the capability to monitor Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) on IBM Power Systems servers. The vendor also updated its full Network Server Suite, which is used to monitor AIX, Linux, and Windows environments. IBM introduced VIOS with the launch of IBM i 6.1 in 2008. The software virtualizes the disk and network adapters, and eliminates the requirement that IBM i LPARs have actual adapters dedicated to them. This not only reduced the number of physical adapters required in a Power Systems server,

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