• Volvo IT Partners to Operate ERP Apps for IBS Customers

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you like the ERP software created by Swedish company International Business Systems but you don’t want to mess around with supporting the systems that run it, then IBS has an interesting services partner for you: Volvo IT, the IT services arm of the Swedish car maker of the same name. Last week, IBS, one of the few remaining free-standing ERP software makers that has a strong presence in the OS/400, i5/OS, and i platform, announced that it has tapped fellow countryman Volvo IT to provide operational support services for the IBS ERP suite. Volvo IT is to Volvo as

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• The BladeCenter S Gets a New SAS RAID Disk Module

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM wants small and medium businesses to adopt the blade server form factor, but the storage options available for blades are not really appropriate for SMB shops. On-blade disk capacity is limited to one or two drives, which means the blade cannot support lots of file capacity and certainly is inappropriate for supporting anything but the most ridiculously modest level of online transaction processing; and storage area networking is well beyond the budget of SMB shops, and a bit like killing a gnat with a cast iron frying pan. This is one reason why IBM has announced a SAS module

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• Expanded Power Systems i Boxes on the Horizon?

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a quiet summer in Lake Woebegone, er, rather Rochester, Minnesota, and its Silver Lake. The run from late June through September is traditionally a quiet one, with a few nips and tucks here and there in the Power Systems lineup. But as we all know from reading The Four Hundred, IBM still has a little unfinished Power Systems business for 2008. And the word on the street is that some tweaked gear might be coming down the pike any day now. Heaven only knows if what I am hearing is true, because Big Blue doesn’t usually

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• Entry Power System i Boxes Compete Well with Windows Boxes

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the key reasons why IBM merged the System i and System p product lines this year was to get the i platform more competitive with the rest of the system market. By converging the Power server family and stopping its practice of overcharging System i customers for hardware and software, Big Blue has made the entry Power Systems i Edition lineup–that’s the Power 520 and the BladeCenter S with JS12 blade servers–absolutely competitive with equivalent Windows boxes running online transaction processing workloads. This is the second time in two years, with two generations of products, that this has

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• X64 Servers See Pricing Pressure in Q2, Big Box Sales Grow

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The urge to virtualize servers and a resurgence in mainframe sales has helped buoy overall server sales in the second quarter, according to statistics compiled by IDC, which reckons that the corporations and organizations of the world bought an aggregate of $13.9 billion worth of iron. Compared to the prior year’s quarter, sales rose by 6.4 percent, hitting the highest revenue level in a second quarter since 2000, the peak of the dot-com boom. Server shipment growth in the quarter rose by 11.1 percent, driven substantially by 2 million X64 servers that went out the door in the quarter–a

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• The Law of Attraction

  September 8, 2008 Doug Mewmaw

  This year, I was introduced to a concept called the law of attraction. For those who have never heard of the LOA, my laymen’s interpretation of the concept is the following: Based on the science of quantum physics, the law of attraction explains how everything in our universe is made up of energy. The net affect of this energy is that every person has the ability to manifest things into their lives based on the negative or positive energy they project. While the concept boggles my mind, I love the idea that I can manifest success simply by putting myself

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• Arrow Says Midrange Shops More Worried About Security than Money

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT distributor Arrow Electronics gets a lot of its sales and profits from the midmarket, and it likes to take the pulse of small and medium businesses so it knows how to position its products and services and polish its sales pitches. To that end, the Midmarket Group of Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions division, which distributes servers, storage, and other IT gear to a network of resellers around the globe, did a survey to find out what midrange shops are and are not concerned about. You can take a look at an executive summary of the survey at this link

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• CIOs in the States Say IT Hiring Still Happening in Q4

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever the economies of the world start getting dicey, as they certainly are in the United States and in parts of Europe, IT personnel start looking around to their left and right to see what the pecking order might be if job cuts become necessary. With the American workforce shedding jobs at an alarming rate and continuing issues in the housing market and financial services industries, it is no wonder that IT managers, programmers, project managers, system administrators, and other IT staff are a little jumpy. But, apparently IT is doing alright in the States. According to the most recent

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• IBM Hosts Power Systems Tech Conferences This Week

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As many of the i platform intelligentsia know, IBM‘s educational and technical teams for the AS/400 Division and its successors have hosted two technical conferences (one in spring and one in fall) in North America and one in Europe each year for as long as anyone can remember. When the System i and System p were merged into one line earlier this year, IBM said it was going to create a unified set of tech conferences for Power Systems. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. As it turns out, there are two Power Systems Technical Universities being hosted

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• CA and IBM Pull Together for CMDB Interoperability

  September 8, 2008 Dan Burger

  The promise of IT interoperability often feels like the brass ring that is just out of our grasp. Yeah, it seems closer each time we pass it on the IT merry go round. But if you never lay your hands on it, what difference does it make whether it’s close or far away? A good example of this reach not meeting grasp is the configuration management database (CMDB). For most organizations, any talk of a CMDB follows a familiar story line that leads nowhere. The lack of budget and resources gets much of the blame, but the gulf between IT

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