IBM Archive

"Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, 'Handelsblatt' reports that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM's in-house Lotus software. The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past... IBM's management have obviously decided to practice what they preach. 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony, reports the newspaper. The motive for the migration appears not to be the saving of license fees, and according to an IBM press officer, the move is a clear statement in appreciation of open source standards."

With every new server processor generation, there is always the possibility that the chip and its associated chipsets and system components are so different that both the chip and the server platform have to change at the same time. This will not be the case for the Power7 processors due next year, says IBM.

The year 2008 will forever be remembered as the year of the off-the-shelf (OTS) supercomputer, thanks to the Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) and IBM team that constructed the world's first machine (Roadrunner) to break the peta-FLOP (1,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second) barrier. Get an overview of OTS strategies to architect high-performance computing (HPC) systems as well as the methods and concepts behind building HPC systems from OTS components and open source software.

The struggle within companies between their software and hardware business can lead to interesting co-opetition, and sometimes disaster. (A most extreme example being Sony's ignominious fall from the top the portable music device heap as a result of its reluctance to disturb its music production arm's legacy business). IBM, of course, is probably the canonical example, with its various partnerships with Microsoft ending up not only with Microsoft on top, but with its own PC hardware business suffering a long decline into oblivion as a result. Big Blue, presumably trying to avoid a replay, has entered into software licensing agreements with, among others, arch-rival Sun. Now, it seems they're backing off on plans to offer Solaris support for GPFS, their shared disk cluster file system.

IBM has released Lotus Symphony 1.2, with a beta release for Mac OS X. "Lotus Symphony release 1.2 is now available and includes Beta support for the Mac OS X platform in English. I know many of you have been waiting for this new platform and hope you will take the time to try it out and give us your feedback. We expect to have a Generally Available version for Mac in all the languages we support in 1Q09." You can get it from here.

IBM has marked its 10 years of participation in Linux and open source with an open source code contribution focused on supercomputing.

"IBM has just announced it is Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), its small but most significant competitor. PSI is/was a small mainframe manufacturer that had sued IBM over the same anticompetitive practices in Europe and New York. The Computer & Communications Industry Association sees this as a clear attempt by IBM to purchase a company solely to foreclose competition in the mainframe marketplace, protecting IBM's cash cow at the expense of consumers. This acquisition should be a cause of concern for competition authorities throughout the world." Update: more discussion on this story here

IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 under an open source license. While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's UK director of information management software. "We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."

IBM is discontinuing the System p and System i server brands and changing the name of the i5/OS operating system to "i" or "i for business." An IT Jungle article notes that "servers developed and manufactured by its newly christened Power Systems division with the name--drum roll please--"Power." As in Power 520, Power 550, Power 570, and Power 595, whether the machine is running AIX, Linux, or the operating system formerly known as i5/OS."

IBM has unveiled its latest mainframe, the System z10. The product is designed to improve performance and reduce power requirements and cooling costs. The new machine, based on quad-core technology, is equivalent, in terms of performance to nearly 1500 x86 servers, according to IBM. The z10 is designed to be up to 50% faster and offers up to 100% performance improvement for CPU-intensive jobs compared with its predecessor, the z9, with up to 70% more capacity, IBM said. IBM said the new mainframe would also consume 85% less energy and have a footprint that is up to 85% smaller.

IBM plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft's dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Steven A. Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group, said the programs promote an open-source document format. The company is announcing the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, at an event today in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the IBM Web site.

"Discover why you need to change your applications and build environments that supply 32-bit-only kernel extensions to accommodate IBM AIX Version 6. With AIX Version 6, the kernel environment is 64-bit kernel only. Previously, the AIX operating system provided both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels, requiring 32-bit and 64-bit kernel extensions. In this article, apply two easy solutions to help you make the transition and start reaping the benefits of the simplified kernel environment."

An interview with IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards about their Open Source Strategy, the recent pledge of its patents for more than 150 open software standards, his take on the ODF vs. XML issue, and much more in The LXer Interview of Bob Sutor.

"IBM and Sun Microsystems did indeed announce an agreement for deploying the Solaris operating system on IBM servers, but it wasn't the system we guessed: IBM will deploy Solaris for its Intel x86-based System x and BladeCenter servers. It's a significant move, as it validates the presence of Sun's operating system among a broad customer base that few can mistake as a "niche." As Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told reporters today, IBM becomes the first Tier 1 reseller of Solaris products and services for x86 platforms." His blog is here.