• VAI Partners with BFC Associates to Go After the Food Market

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software vendor and i platform enthusiast VAI is taking a page out of the IBM Vertical Industry Program (VIP) marketing effort and establishing specific partnerships to help push its software into targeted industries. In particular, VAI, which is based in Ronkonkoma, New York, said last week that it is partnering with BFC Associates, of West Chicago, Illinois, to go after the food services industry as a tag team. VAI sells a variant of its S2K Enterprise ERP suite that is tailored to food distributors–called S2K Enterprise for Food Distribution, of course–and BFC Associates sells a food distribution warehouse

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• LTO Tapes: Over 100 Million Served

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Linear Tape Open (LTO) form factor for tape drives just keeps hitting higher and higher numbers. Last week, the three big players behind LTO–IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum–said that since the first LTO products were announced at the turn of the millennium, a large number of tape decks and a huge number of tape cartridges have been sold. How many? As of last week, some 2.5 million LTO drives have shipped, with a million of those units shipping since the third quarter of 2006. The LTO format was launched in 1998, and products started coming to

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• A Flash in the Pan or the Future of Data Storage?

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s Hursley development lab in England and its Almaden Research Center in California are known for a lot of different innovations, particularly in the area of disk storage. Before IBM sold off its disk drive business to Hitachi a few years back, the labs in Minnesota and outside of San Jose in California were also hotbeds of disk development. IBM invented disk drives, and has a lot of knowledge about data storage in its institutional memory. Last week, the Hursley and Almaden labs announced that they have been collaborating on a new storage device, code-named “Quicksilver,” that will marry

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• Server Buyers Shop Like It’s 1999 in the Second Quarter

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the economies of the Western countries are heading into recession, the purchase orders for servers at companies sure don’t seem to be a reflection of this yet. And the Asia/Pacific, Eastern European, and South American markets still seem to be booming, despite more than a year of jittery economies where their indigenous companies have their own customers. And so, the second quarter looked pretty good in terms of server sales, according to research from box counter Gartner, with server sales up 5.7 percent to $13.8 billion and shipments up 12.2 percent to 2.34 million units. Of course, such

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• IBM Expects Customers to Build Security Best Practices Through SaaS

  September 2, 2008 Dan Burger

  Never let them see you sweat. That’s easier said than done if you’re in charge of corporate security. You’re watching those X64 boxes like a cat watching for a mouse. What about the System i? No worries, right? It’s not even top 10 on your security priorities list. It’s been that way for years, but that doesn’t make it the right way. The bright lights of regulatory compliance can make things hot for you, and suddenly that looks like sweat on your forehead. Tsk-tsk. If you ask Kris Lovejoy, IBM‘s director of corporate security strategy, she’ll tell you the

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• The X Factor: Why Maintenance Is Worth the Money–Sometimes

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of checks that IT managers and chief financing officers do not like to write when it comes to the IT budget, and hardware maintenance is one of the checks they increasingly dislike writing. There are good reasons for this–and there are also good reasons for writing that check. Equally important, IT shops have to be smart about what they put on hardware maintenance, and how they deal with break-fix issues in general as they relate to hardware. But before getting into why hardware maintenance is something of value and therefore worth a piece of the IT

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• Various System i and Power Systems i Nips and Tucks

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You can tell that Big Blue is pretty much done with thinking about–much less making or selling–Power5+ servers now that it is getting ready to support all of its key operating systems on the complete line of new Power6-based Power Systems machines. With i 6.1 and Linux support coming on the Power 595 big box in September and October, respectively, the Power6 lineup will be completely rolled out. And now it is time to start cleaning up the product catalog a little. And to that end, IBM announced last Tuesday that August 26 (the same day of the announcement) would

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• After Olympics Success, Lenovo to Go Global with Servers

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While companies in the Asia/Pacific region were familiar with the Lenovo desktop and laptop PC brand, the Chinese company did not really register on the radar of consumers and businesses in North America and Europe until Lenovo bought IBM‘s beleaguered PC business in 2004 for $1.25 billion. But the Lenovo name may get a little better known now that the company has successfully delivered the infrastructure to support the Beijing Olympics, including servers that the company is apparently getting ready to sell worldwide. Lenovo has made and sold servers in its home Chinese market for years, but is predominantly

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• IBM Partners with CloudShield for Network Security Blade Server

  September 2, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is so much malware, spam, and other garbage running around the Internet these days that it is fair to say that the idea of anonymity expressed in the Internet Protocol was probably a bad choice. But, because the world runs on TCP/IP these days and we are not about to all be issued permanent IP addresses at birth, whether we are humans or servers, we are stuck trying to cope with the onslaught as best we can with various kinds of security products. IBM rolled out a new one last week. The BladeCenter PN41 is a new kind of

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• Infor Launches EMEA Channel Recruitment Drive

  September 2, 2008 Dan Burger

  Among the ERP software vendors with customers on the IBM System i hardware, no one tops Infor. The privately held company has more than 16,000 customers running its ERP LX (formerly SSA BPCS), ERP XA (formerly MAPICS), System 21 (formerly JBA), ERP A+ (formerly DP Solutions), and HCM Infinium (formerly Software 2000) software suites. Last week, the company announced plans for improving its channel partner network across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The plan calls for the recruitment of new partners and the termination of underperforming partners currently on the team. Two years ago, Infor’s channel partners

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