• IBM Gives Big Discounts on Opteron Servers and VMware Hypervisors

  October 13, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You would think, with the economy in such a bad way and IBM wanting to help its resellers as much as possible, it would be giving them a little extra margin to peddle iron that, in turn, helps Big Blue make more sales. And this would be particularly true for X64 servers, which sit side-by-side with AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers at the vast majority of OS/400 and i shops. And maybe IBM is offering its System x and BladeCenter resellers some extra margin as we try to negotiate the fourth quarter of 2008. But if it isn’t, you

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• SAP Hits a Wall at the End of September

  October 13, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While IBM did its best to try to calm Wall Street down last week when it preannounced its earnings for the third quarter on Wednesday after the market close, enterprise software juggernaut SAP had already undermined confidence in the IT space on Monday morning when it warned that it would not make its numbers in the third quarter. “The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses. These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter,” said explained Henning Kagermann, the co-chief executive officer

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• Bytware Bought by Help/Systems and Audax

  October 6, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IT Jungle has confirmed that Help/Systems and its private equity backer, the Audax Group, have acquired Bytware, the developer of security and management tools for the i OS platform. The purchase, for which the companies plan no formal announcement, comes just a month after the combination of Help/Systems and Audax snapped up i OS security tool vendor PowerTech, and lays the groundwork for more acquisitions in the months ahead. A tip from an IT Jungle reader prompted Help/Systems to confirm speculation that the privately held Reno, Nevada, company had become the latest i OS software vendor to

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• The Power Systems 570 i Edition Versus Big Windows Boxes

  October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Now that Intel has its “Dunnington” six-core Xeon processor into the field, it would seem to be a good time to see how the Power Systems 570 i Edition servers stack up against Windows machines equipped with enterprise-class hardware features and systems software. It is a good time, with the fourth quarter under way and IT shops looking to buy–or not, as the case may be. Unless, of course, you were looking for some good news on the i pricing front. Aye yi yi yi yi, Power Systems i. As I pointed out in last week’s story comparing the

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• An Open Letter to i Shops from the Power Systems GM

  October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Ross Mauri, the general manager of the Power Systems division, published an open letter to the i half of the merged System i and System p communities. The open letter follows a few weeks after IBM hosted two Power Systems Technical Universities in Chicago, one for the i base and the other for the AIX and Linux bases. Given the state of the global economy, the letter was meant to be reassuring to IBM’s 200,000-strong customer base, which spans most industries and countries. In the wake of technical conferences, there is always a lot of talk about what

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• System Performance Management Is Like Having Insurance

  October 6, 2008 Doug Mewmaw

  One of the things in life that drives me crazy is paying for insurance. Okay, I realize it’s necessary and the responsible thing to do, but it just feels like I pay a premium and I get nothing in return. Then one thing happened. It rained. No, it rained a lot. Here’s something you don’t see every day. It was raining in my kitchen. Some $10,000 later, our house was back to normal, and thank heavens for the insurance. As someone that teaches performance management and capacity planning, I am often asked what software and methodologies I use when I

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• IDC and i: Next Time, Can You Talk to Some Real i Shops?

  October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of Power Systems general manager Ross Mauri’s open letter to i shops around the globe last week, IBM pointed to a new white paper put out by IDC to espouse the virtues of the i platform. Now, I know a lot of us have complained about the lack of marketing for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform, but there is another–and potentially larger–problem: a lack of critical thinking and empirical data that shows, beyond a doubt, the quantitative as well as qualitative benefits of the i platform. This IDC report that Mauri is pointing to, called IBM

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• Reader Feedback on As I See It: Insult to Injury

  October 6, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You got peanut butter in my chocolate; you got chocolate in my peanut butter. As you might imagine, any time Victor Rozek gets a burr under his saddle about something political or economical, we get a range of positive and negative feedback about why we even put such content into the newsletters. Well, to put it bluntly, last time I looked, my business card said president and editor in chief, and the buck starts and stops here. These matters impinge on our IT lives, and sometimes, you just have to speak your mind. As many of you did last week

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• IBM and Vision Solutions Align HA Distribution Resources

  October 6, 2008 Dan Burger

  High availability technologies come in a variety of flavors, including software with logical replication, hardware-based replication, cross-site mirroring, and switched disk. The options are not exclusive. Companies often deploy a combination of technologies that tie high availability, disaster recovery, and storage. Part or all of this, depending on the company strategy, fits into the category of clustering, and that leads to an announcement last week from Vision Solutions that it has a new distribution agreement with IBM for the i environment. The focal point of this arrangement is Vision’s Cluster1 and IBM’s PowerHA for i. IBM PowerHA for i was

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• Net Loss Clouds Lawson’s Q1 Report

  October 6, 2008 Dan Burger

  Enterprise resource planning software is as comfortable on IBM midrange computers as a cowboy is in the saddle. It’s been that way since the debut of the AS/400 and even earlier with the System/38 and System/36 boxes. But last week, when Lawson Software released its first quarter 2009 financial report, the lack of System i-based business was one of the reasons the bean pot was not as full as expected. In releasing its Q1 2009 report October 2, Lawson was pleased to report revenues were up slightly thanks in large part to maintenance renewals, customer migrations to Lawson Total Care

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