• Enthusiasm, Persistence, And The IBM i Payoff

  March 4, 2013 Dan Burger

  Innovation is an overused word that gets nailed to everything from a pair of socks to cures for baldness. Let me give you a place where it actually applies: the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group (SEMiUG). Membership in local user groups is not what it once was. The IBM midrange community is no different than most in that regard. One reason for the membership decline is a dearth of educational innovation with the result being decreased value. I’ve written about the SE Michigan user group before. Check out the “Related Stories” at the bottom of this article. In November, the

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• Power7 Is The End Of The Line For Power Blades

  March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were hoping to see Power7+ processors in blade servers later this year to build out your existing BladeCenter infrastructure, I have some bad news for you. As I had been suspecting with my newsy-sense (not as good as spidey sense, but it keeps me employed just as that sixth sense keeps Spiderman alive), IBM has no plans to put the shiny Power7+ processors into the existing PS700 through PS704 series of blade servers. I had been guessing that Big Blue might cut off the BladeCenters with the Power7+ or Power8 generations, especially given the launch of the Flex

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• Entry Power7+ Servers: Those 720+ and 740+ Boxes Are Gonna Cost Ya

  March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Let me give you a piece of advice. If your IBM i workloads are such that they are compute intensive but not data intensive, and you can cram all of the peripherals you need into a 2U rack server, such as the chassis used with the new Power 710+ and Power 730+ servers, then you most assuredly should do so. Because the expandability inherent in the 4U rack or tower enclosures used with the Power 720+ and Power 740+ servers, including the ability to hang lots of external disk off the box, are going to cost you. I have come

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• Manta Offers Free Student Reference Guides To Students

  February 25, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Most of us have adapted to the new and improved paperless way of life. Heck, many of you out there have led the charge to rid your company of wasteful pages that must be filed in favor of electronic documentation and storage. But you’re not alone if you wouldn’t mind seeing a good, old-fashioned hard copy every now and then. Budget cutbacks and rising costs have forced companies into eliminating expensive luxuries like paper, printers, and ink, but it’s not just about doing away with endless print jobs. The online world has many resources available. We get our news more

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• IBM Tech Conferences Feature Power, Hot Technologies

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM has three big technical conferences coming up in the next three months: one specifically for Power Systems, while the other two will take on strategies and best practices for all the hot technologies including mobile, social, big data, and cloud. The conferences begin with Pulse2013, which begins next week, March 3 to 6, in Las Vegas. IBM anticipates attendance to hit 8,000 and has put together an agenda of more than 450 technical training sessions, hands-on labs, skill certifications, and product demonstrations. The four educational tracks, sort of mini-conferences within Pulse, are Cloud and IT Optimization, Smarter Assets

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• Incentives For IBM’s Missouri Facility Scrutinized

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM opened its state-of-the-art Information Technology Service Delivery Center in Columbia, Missouri, in October 2010. At that time, IBM publicized it would create up to 800 jobs by the end of 2012. That’s the kind of news any city would welcome these days. And these types of things just don’t drop out of the sky. Cities and states woo corporations to their locations with offers of tax incentives and real estate deals. Of course cities and states are working with public money. And the public expects transparency in how its money–many millions of dollars–is being spent and what is guaranteed

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• Sony Ditches Power For PlayStation 4, And This Matters To IBM i

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Consumer electronics maker Sony gave a sneak peek at its forthcoming PlayStation 4 game console, expected in time for Christmas shopping seven years after the release of the Power-based PlayStation 3. The company did not say much about the technology inside of the new game console, but one thing we know for sure: Power is out, and X86 processing and GPU graphics from Advanced Micro Devices is in. The feeds and speeds of the new PlayStation 4 are not all that impressive: an eight-core “Jaguar” processor with an integrated Radeon graphics chip from AMD, the kind of thing you might

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• Cisco And EMC Chase Midrange Customers With Smaller Converged Systems

  February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is not the only one chasing midrange shops with converged systems. Last week, the Virtual Computer Environment partnership between Cisco Systems and EMC rolled out a new line of Vblock converged systems that the companies hope with help is radically expand its channel and then its customer base. The VCE partnership, which also includes server virtualization juggernaut VMware (which is majority-owned by EMC and therefore no matter what anyone says, this is still an EMC-Cisco partnership), stacks up Cisco’s C Series rack servers and Catalyst 3750-X switches, EMC’s VNXe 3150 disk arrays, VMware’s vSphere Enterprise Plus server virtualization stack,

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• IBM Dives Head First Into Mobile

  February 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled an expansive new strategy to deliver mobile business solutions under MobileFirst, its new brand of software and services for delivering apps on smartphones and tablets. With MobileFirst, IBM seeks to bring together all of the elements required by an enterprise to successfully roll-out mobile solutions, including development, deployment, device management, and security tools. And, IBM being IBM, it also includes a healthy dose of professional services, but no apparent IBM i hooks at this time. MobileFirst is an umbrella brand that brings together many pieces of software that already existed in IBM’s portfolio, but it introduces

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• As I See It: The Man Who Would Be Kim

  February 25, 2013 Victor Rozek

  He was born in West Germany, the product of a German-Finish union, and for most of his life he bore the surname of Schmitz. From an early age he proved to be a poor model of German conformity, contemptuous of rules and indifferent to authority. But by the time he entered his teenage years, he had found a profession and a place of refuge from the pangs of conventionality: his refuge was the Internet; his profession, hacking. Although he never got beyond junior high school, Kim managed to engineer a thriving career breaking and entering into other people’s phone systems.

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