System iNetwork

December 2009

December 20, 2009 11:10 PM

COMMON Announces Candidates for 2010 Board Elections

COMMON has announced Jeff Carey, Pete Helgren, Kevin Mort, Jim Oberholtzer, and Ron Pilcher as the slate of candidates for the 2010 Board of Directors election. The five are running for three open positions, and COMMON says you'll hear more from them in the coming months. Although COMMON members who attend the 50th Anniversary 2010 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Orlando will be able to vote on site, COMMON will also hold electronic voting from April 5 through May 5, 2009.

The winners will be announced at the Meeting of the Members (MoM) on Wednesday evening, May 5, in Orlando.

In previous years, SystemiNetwork.com has asked candidates to respond via email to a couple of questions, which we then published online. Last year we asked four questions:

1. What is the single most important thing you would like to see during your term?
2. What other burning issues do you hope to address as a COMMON Board member?
3. How can your election and COMMON members have a tangible, positive effect on IBM and IBM i?
4. What is the biggest challenge facing the iSeries/IBM i today?

And four candidates responded (last year). If you've got any suggestions for new or additional questions, don't hesitate to holler here.

Posted by cmaxcer on December 20, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (3)

December 16, 2009 11:32 AM

Surviving 2009, Breathing Deep, and Looking Forward

Whoah. 2009 was a rough year. Think economy, war, layoffs, and a myriad of financial crises, big and small. You likely faced personal and business crises this year, one after another, hunkered down at home and at the office. IBM has continued to do its global thing, rebalancing, and generally not promoting the operating system and IBM i ecosystem you know and love. Yet, if you're reading this, odds are, you've got a lot to be thankful for. You probably have a job, and if you don't, you probably have skills that can be turned into a job. Or maybe you don't have either. Health? How about hearing a child's laughter? Drinking clean water or eating ripe oranges? We take a lot for granted, and we're lucky.

Not much of 2009 has been easy, but I know I feel lucky, and I hope you do, too.

As for the world of IBM i, what happened? And what might it all bode for the future? Let's take a look.

First off, our world has expanded. MySQL AB delivered a new storage engine officially called the DB2 for i Storage Engine for MySQL on IBM i, a.k.a. IBMDB2I. MySQL is, of course, the database component of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) open-source web development/deployment stack. Coupled with Zend Core (for PHP on IBM i, which is running strong), IBM i-focused organizations gained a new versatile architecture to use with thousands of open source applications or to build new ones, while still being able to use DB2. Just an example and a nice one at that.

IBM's Power Systems line continues to grow unabated, and while IBM i seems to be just another operating system -- as opposed to the system -- there's no end to IBM support in sight. Even if companies choose other paths, their existing IBM i systems will be able to connect to those paths or keep running for years to come. There's no dead end looming for any rip and replace scenario, and that little tidbit is something you can count on from IBM. Few systems have such a long history with applications that have been running for decades . . . and will be able to continue running for another decade -- as hard as that is to imagine.

IBM laid off thousands of employees with its workforce rebalancing efforts. Some jobs were created in North America, some lost, and many where created in far off lands. Has IBM been nefarious in its efforts? Perhaps. Irresponsible? Perhaps. Either way, IBM's efforts to create new data centers and competency programs in geographies around the world -- think business intelligence -- show IBM's hand: the company is clearly looking to create combined services offerings that confront common business challenges in a way that obscures the underlying software and hardware. It's not a path most of us appreciate, but it's hardly surprising. The question, "Is IBM Still a Hardware Company?" almost seems quaint these days.

Meanwhile, a group of Japanese IBM Business Partners and Vendors banded together and did something astounding: promoted IBM i and the System i and vowed to support the system far into the future.

The initiative spread to EMEA, then crossed the sea to North America. Both efforts have picked up thousands of dollars in funding, as well as support from strong vendors in the IBM i world. Will the efforts culminate in a published manifesto in Europe and the U.S.? Will the funding result in a Web site geared to promote the unique capabilities of IBM i? Will they take off and fly? Lots of open-ended questions remain.

Perhaps some vendors are waiting for 2010 and better days. Maybe some are waiting to see how COMMON's 50-year anniversary event in Orlando in May shakes out -- what might IBM CEO Sam Palmisano say to COMMON attendees?

And COMMON has had its share of challenges, too. The event in Reno went off well, despite low numbers, but the overall mood was good. But COMMON's money woes and changes to speaker reimbursements turned into a PR nightmare. Will new rising stars take the place of older giants of our industry? Will COMMON not just survive, but turn a corner and thrive? Will it become critical to IBM's new Power Systems ecosystem?

Of course, IBM i customers are getting new technology and new options, think better blade support, think storage, think SSDs. And next year, look for a new release of IBM i, enhanced support for XML, and enhancements to RPG that will let IBM partners, ISVs, and programmers more easily take RPG to new devices and screens.

Is the future bright, all blue skies and sunshine? Hardly. And yet, I gotta say, I'm looking forward to 2010.

Posted by cmaxcer on December 16, 2009 at 11:32 AM | Comments (2)

December 7, 2009 10:18 AM

Power Resilience Survey Reveals Tighter Timelines, Needed Tech

Vision Solutions is getting ready to release its second annual State of Resilience report, which is a detailed overview of disaster recovery expectations, technologies, and the overall state of resilience among IBM Power Systems users. The report is based on a year-long study including survey data from more than 3,500 technical professionals and executives involved with the management of IBM i (i5/OS) and AIX environments on IBM Power Systems.

Vision sent me an advance copy, and while I obviously can't share all of it, it does prove to be interesting reading.

"This report clearly demonstrates the urgency for companies of all sizes to ensure they have an effective data protection and business continuity plan in place," notes Edward Vesely, Vision Solutions' senior vice president of marketing. "Such strategy undoubtedly involves the right combination of high availability, systems management and disaster recovery solutions; however, many firms still lack the appropriate technologies to meet their overall objectives."

According to Vesely, the report explains how a range of business resiliency and optimization technologies benefit businesses of all sizes -- and this year, by the way, Vision expanded its data collection to include company size. While the results showed that, not surprisingly, larger organizations favored faster recovery time objectives in the event of a disaster or failure, the business requirements between large and small organizations wasn't nearly as wide as you might expect.

Overall, the survey reports a trend toward more aggressive recovery time and recovery point objectives across the Power Systems platform, including both IBM i and AIX. And yet, despite the more challenging objectives, Vision found that many firms don't have the appropriate technology in place to meet their own recovery objectives.

In addition, more companies are investing in disaster recovery capabilities over high availability these days, and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) "data rewind" capabilities are gaining support across companies of all sizes.

The Vision Webcast

Vision Solutions and IBM are hosting a free "State of IBM Power Systems Technology and Resilience" webcast tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. The event will feature Mark Shearer, IBM Systems & Technology Group vice president of marketing, communications and sales support, along with Vision's Vesely. They plan to share results of the report and recent Power Systems technology and market developments, including IBM's New Power Equation, Dynamic Infrastructure, and Smarter Planet initiatives.

Registered participants can get an advance copy of the report, though Vision will likely also make the report available for download after tomorrow's event. For more, see http://www.visionsolutions.com/stateofresilience.

Posted by cmaxcer on December 7, 2009 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

December 2, 2009 10:24 AM

Three Server Architectures to Rule the World?

According to Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics, there's a major shakeout underway in the midrange and high-end server market, and once the dust has cleared, there's a possibility that only three viable architectures for enterprise servers will remain, two of which IBM controls: POWER, x86, and the mainframe z architecture.

It's an interesting premise, which Clabby details in an online report, covering not only some of the strengths behind IBM's POWER, z, and Intel's Xeon, but also some recent floundering at HP and Sun. Here's a snip:

Based upon these trends, Clabby Analytics believes that, over the next few years, the midrange/high-end market segment of the computer market place will gravitate toward three microprocessor/server architectures (Xeon, POWER, and z). If Oracle can't right the Sun UltraSPARC/ chip multi-threading (CMT) ship (and we think it won't) -- and if Intel's Itanium architecture continues to struggle (and we think it will) -- then Sun and HP midrange/high-end customers will have little choice but to move to IBM POWER-, IBM z-, or Intel Xeon-based servers.

Information technology (IT) executives who don't recognize that this shift is underway -- and who continue to invest in Itanium- and UltraSPARC/CMT-based servers -- may find that they have wasted their precious information systems hardware budgets on dead-ended server architectures and operating environments.

For the entire report, check out http://clabbyanalytics.com/uploads/ServerMarketViewFinalFinal.pdf.

Posted by cmaxcer on December 2, 2009 at 10:24 AM | Comments (1)