• IBM Emphasizes Security with OpenID and NSA Commitments

  February 11, 2008 Dan Burger

  The emerging Web authentication standard known as OpenID, has received a high-profile boost as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and VeriSign have joined forces to bolster security (to whatever limited degree that is possible) on the Internet. The security blanket offered by OpenID is that it increases individual control of digital identities and the personal information shared with participating Web sites. The above-mentioned companies were seated as corporate board members of the OpenID Foundation. The OpenID Foundation supports and promotes OpenIDs, which can be thought of as portable Web identities used in a single sign-on fashion.

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• Entry System p Servers Get Power6 Chips, System i Boxes Await

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, the System p line got ahead of the System i line with the introduction of Power6-based servers again last week in two new boxes aimed at entry and midrange server customers. Of course, with IBM‘s AIX and Linux variants outselling the i5/OS variants of its Power Systems boxes by a factor of 3.7 to 1 in 2007–that’s just under $4.2 billion versus $1.1 billion in hardware–you can imagine why IBM might want to start first in the AIX and Linux area. Then again, there are far more customers running i5/OS and OS/400 than running AIX. So I could

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• The Power6 Server Ramp: Better Than Expected

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With many software makers having made the shift to per-core pricing for all or some aspect of their software price–and moving away from server tier pricing or user-based pricing in some cases–it is no wonder that both AIX and i5/OS customers are looking at IBM‘s Power6-based System p and System i 570 servers as a means to upgrade their existing machines while keeping their software bill the same or even possibly lowering it. This may be a big reason why the ramp of shipments for the 9117-MMA and 9406-MMA machines, as the two 570s are called, is better than

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• IBM Takes System i Disk Clustering Up a Notch with HASM

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of ways of skinning the high availability and disaster recovery cats in the System i market. And the merger of the System i and System p divisions last year into a single Power Systems division, which creates the Power server platform, its operating systems, and high-level systems software, is culminating in yet another product coming from IBM to address the HA and DR needs of System i shops: High Availability Solutions Manager, which was announced with i5/OS V6R1 last week. According to Steve Finnes, business continuity product offering manager for the Power Systems division, HASM is

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• The X Factor: Survive, Adapt, Repeat

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are like me and you have been working for at least 30 years, you are supposed to be rich by now. Isn’t that the American dream? To be an entrepreneur, to cut your own swath through the business world, to find your niche and expand it, to be safe. So it is with us personally, so it goes for most of the millions of companies that are trying to stay in business in the world. Isn’t this supposed to be a lot easier than it is? What on earth is wrong with the economy–I mean the global one

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• i5/OS V5R3 Support Ends in April 2009

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The other shoe has dropped, like most of us expected it would, for OS/400 V5R3. With the announcement last week of i5/OS V6R1, which begins shipping on March 21, IBM getting customers on the older V5R3 release of the operating system ready for the day when support will no longer be available for that platform. That day, we learned last week, is April 30, 2009. Just about a year ago, IBM announced that it would stop selling OS/400 V5R3 and related systems programs as of January 8, 2008. And with i5/OS V6R1 looming large since July of last year, it

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• Reader Feedback: Run Collection Services Before You Upgrade

  February 4, 2008 Hey, TPM

  Good article and guidance regarding moving to V6R1. [Editor’s Note: The reader is referring to Bracing for i5/OS V6R1 and the Winding Down of V5, from the January 14 issue of The Four Hundred.] If you get the opportunity, remind folks to run the system’s Collection Services before moving to capture a set of baseline performance data. Once they move the data, if not needed, it can be erased. If they move and have some performance issues, they have a base to compare to. Otherwise, it’s really a challenge for the performance analyst to make good decisions as

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• IBM Brings SAN Performance to Parity with Internal Arrays

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform has been on the vanguard of technologies lots of times in its long history. They were rack-mounted long before that was cool, they always used the most advanced CMOS processor designs, they employed asymmetric multiprocessing, small form factor disks, the densest main memory, and so on. One area where the i5/OS and OS/400 platform has not been at the front end of technology is in storage area networks, or SANs. With the announcements from IBM last week, that is about to change. The concept of storage area networks is a bit “back to

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• Let’s Take a Closer Look at JS22 Blade Servers Running i5OS V6R1

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No new server hardware relating to the i5/OS platform was announced in conjunction with the launch of i5/OS V6R1 last week, but IBM did, as expected, say that V6R1 would be the official release supported on the JS22 two-socket, Power6-based blade server that IBM announced last November. The JS22s come in a standard BladeCenter form factor and can be plugged into either the new BladeCenter H chassis, which runs on 220/240-volt power and comes in a 9U rack-mounted form factor with room for 14 vertical blades. The BladeCenter S chassis, which is aimed at small and medium businesses and office

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• Alternate Operating System Support Improved with i5/OS V6R1

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  To a certain way of thinking about it, the System i server is not an operating system running on a piece of hardware. It is a hybrid machine that runs a collection of operating systems (i5/OS, AIX, and Linux) running on Power processors. The box can also support other operating systems (Windows and Linux) on inboard or outboard System x servers that are all linked into the same storage infrastructure either under the skins of the server or attached to it through iSCSI adapters or Fibre Channel links to storage area networks. As part of the rollout of i5/OS V6R1

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