• IBM Withdraws Various iSeries and System i5 Features

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM announced that it would be withdrawing from marketing a number of iSeries and System i5 features. A bunch of software is also being torn out of the System i product catalog, too. All of these products have replacements, so don’t get too nervous. The most significant announcement is that starting on May 1, 2007, IBM will no longer sell 35.2 GB, 15K RPM disk drives (features 4326) on the iSeries or System i5 for supporting OS/400 and i5/OS, and that similar (and lower cost) 36.4 GB disks for supporting AIX and Linux partitions on the iSeries and

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• Russell to Stay on at COMMON as President, Contrary to Rumors

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The COMMON System i user group is holding elections for three seats on its board of directors, and if you are a member of the group, COMMON wants you to take a little time to get to know the candidates and cast your votes. COMMON’s president, Beverly Russell, also wants to let everyone know she is not stepping down, contrary to reports elsewhere in the OS/400 trade press. Russell sent us a note last Thursday explaining her continued commitment to COMMON. “It was reported today that I was stepping down from the board,” she said. “I am not and I

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• IBM Rejiggers and Broadens i5 Capacity BackUp Edition

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just a little over three years ago, when IBM was rolling out the final phases of its first-generation of Power5-based “Squadron” servers, the company began talking about two new kinds of OS/400 servers. Both machines, the Capacity BackUp (CBU) Edition and High Availability (HA) Edition sought to offer standardized iSeries platforms with built-in low prices for customers who wanted to do high availability clustering and offsite disaster recovery. Last week, after much input from customers, IBM substantially changed how it packages and sells the CBU Edition. As readers of this newsletter already know, IBM actually started rejiggering the CBU line-up

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• IDC Says Disk-Based Data Protection Is Booming

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Predicting the demise of tape is something of a pastime in the computer industry, but the continued ubiquity of tape for archiving large data sets for the smallest amount of money possible does not mean that other backup and archiving technologies do not come along and find a place. And so it is with disk-based data protection. The thing about tape that is not so attractive is that it is orders of magnitude slower than disk technology, which is why the latter costs a lot more and has been used for the better part of three decades as the means

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• Software Hungry IBM Eats ECM Rival FileNet for $1.6 Billion

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past few weeks, IBM‘s Software Group has been on an acquisition binge, and last week it was still hungry. And so, Big Blue shelled out $1.6 billion in cash to acquire FileNet, one of its most significant rivals in the increasingly important enterprise content management (ECM) software business. With the acquisition, IBM is now better positioned to take on EMC, which bought its way into this market when it ate Documentum in October 2003 for $1.6 billion, and Open Text, which just bought rival Hummingbird for $489 million two weeks ago. The IBM deal

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• Big Blue Kills the ‘It Pays to Lease’ Deal

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM usually has at least one special leasing deal for its various server lines on the books at any given time. But last week, the company killed off a deal called “It Pays To Lease,” which was last tweaked back on April 26. So if you were hoping to get a new System i5 under the leasing term of this deal, snoozing results in losing. As far as I know, the “Get More, Pay Less” financing deal is still in effect. Under the It Pays To Lease deal that was just withdrawn, the latest iteration of which dates from March

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• The System i Is the Top Banana for Fruit Producers

  August 14, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  As we are biting into a pear, munching on cherry cheesecake, or pouring apple juice for the kids, most of us do not wonder how that fruit gets from the fields where it is grown–in California, Florida, Argentina, or Chile–to our dining room tables. And how many of us have ever stopped to ponder how, on those rare occasions when there’s a product recall because of a bad apple in the barrel, how anyone can possibly identify where the banana that wound up in that banana crème pie came from? In many instances, the technology that powers the companies that

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• Yankee Cases the Platform Vendors in the SMB Space

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The analysts at Yankee Group have just issued a report with the unwieldy name of Is IT Computing for the SMB and Mid-Market a Strategic Priority for Dell, IBM, HP and Sun?. And in that report, Yankee tries to assess who the winners and losers are among the vendors who chase the SMB space in the United States. Every year, Yankee does a giant study of IT buying patterns among SMB shops concerning their opinions of and purchases of laptop, desktop, and server computers. This recent SMB report is actually based on data extracted from SMB customers in 2005.

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• As I See It: Biology and Technology–the Uneasy Union

  August 14, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Legend has it that the King of France had a problem. Too many people to kill and too little time. So he commissions a fellow named Joseph-Ignace to invent an expedient way of dispatching the assorted criminals, heretics, and revolutionaries who are deemed enemies of the state. Joseph-Ignace sets to work and, using a Scottish apparatus as a model, creates a device originally called the Louison (no doubt a sardonic tribute to Louis XVI), and presents it to the King. But, alas, Louis is busy with affairs of state and the contraption is moved to some neglected corner of Versailles

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• The PC at 25: If I Had a Time Machine, I Would Make One Small Change

  August 14, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On August 12, 1981, I was a pimply faced teenager who knew computers existed but who did not have the cash to acquire the new IBM Personal Computer that was launched that day. I didn’t even have a clue that I would end up in the computer business. Because I was a space buff, I knew about IBM, which designed so many systems for NASA. But the IBM PC–soon to be in my high school, sitting right beside the TRS 80, Commodore, Atari, and Apple in the computer room–is what made IBM a household name. If you want to pick

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