May, 2008

Lotus 8.5 Beta is out for everyone to test and tinker

I am excited about the new 8.5 client and other Lotus stuff that is out today. While 8.0.1 is nice, it still has some issues. The Linux and Mac Lotus Notes Clients are out as well so this should be one of those “steps in the right direction” things.

Link to the Lotus 8.5 Beta Download page 

What’s in a name? More from the front to change the name

After what has been a pretty quiet week, and a few weeks of nothing much from IBM about anything at all and more over not much in the way of the i. I was reading around the web and found a nice little article about “Becoming a System-i-Vangelist”, at least the name is catchy.

I like the part about learning the cheer!

“It’s the Power and the i, stupid! Bid a fond farewell to “AS/400″ and “iSeries” and even “System i.” It’s IBM Power Systems. It’s IBM i (”for Business”), not OS/400 or i5/OS. (Okay, V5R4 and earlier are still i5/OS, but you get the idea.) The more unified your terminology is, the stronger your message is. (By the way, IBM swears it won’t change the name again.)”

I think it’s important to be able to make the corner IBM is all asking us to make, but in order for it to work you have to stay on the ball and not call it the AS/400 please.

I was of course dissappointed that Trevor Perry Angus the IT Chap was mentioned and not yours truly. I would think that if you are passonate about the i and you want to share your thoughts, ideas, and opinions about it I would recommend you start a blog or something that people out there can find. Trust me they are looking and the hits go up everyday for people looking for one of the most stable, hard working server platforms in IT right now! the i running on POWER.

“Don’t hide IBM Power Systems under a bushel. The worst thing you can do is make them a “black box” to those around you. In my experience, the biggest job protection comes from sharing information and growing the footprint and value of IT in your firm. The companies in the most danger of having the platform pushed away are those in which the Power Systems people build a wall around their “strange practices.” That is the road to ruin.”

Memorial Day - Say THANK YOU!

I would like all of my wonderful readers in the US to take a minute or two to think about Memorial Day. For all the brave soldiers, sailors, airmen & marines who did their job so that you and I today can be proud Americans. This blog is proof of that in  it’s the most simple example of free speech in America right now. I have my own voice and I am allowed to share it with you because of these heroes.

Thank You all who have served and still do.

-David

Feeding IT - you should never let it starve

Feeding IT 

I was talking to someone just the other day who works for a large company with a nice set of offerings for sale and a hearty market, short for they have money to spend, but the “C” level people in the company still see IT as a bottomless pit of money. Something they could soon live without and this is not a new conversation. I have heard this many times that if the money hungry IT was removed from the company we could be more profitable. This is like saying if I could get the heavy engine out of my nice shinny Porsche 911  then this car would be much faster without all that dead weight in the rear of it. A-hem, I apologize for interrupting your conversation about the “dead weight” and the “Porsche” but that heavy thing in the back is the heart and soul of the car, the engine kind sir, you might wan to keep it around unless you needed a garden planter? Most companies today still see IT as the dead weight in the back of a car and would rather ignore it and starve it only to find out later it needs a little maintenance and money to fix it up from time to time. Without IT companies fail to operate. That’s right I said it if you pull the plug on the server and fire the IT staff your fine company with all it’s nice things to sell will grind to a halt.

Planning for the perfect data center - It’s not possible

The Data Center

I have been in big IT for over 18 years. I have seen data centers grow from back rooms and basements to multi-million dollar facilities with fences, security, and other features. With all this planning there is still something that can go wrong and lately I have been thinking about what the perfect data center would look like. What would perfection cost and is it obtainable? Certainly not most would add and like anything in life it’s impossible to predict everything that could cause you pain in a well planned out data center. I say a hosting company today that is selling server hosting and web hosting and the office is located in down town San Francisco. I am not making this up. They have a nice 5 story building in the heart of downtown and while I am sure they have done everything to keep it from rumbling to the ground I would not have placed a high up time, mission critical data center in the heart of Earth Quake country. It’s not a selling point to me when I am looking for server co-location.

Where is the perfect place to put a data center? That is of course the question that most CIOs are looking at today and no one had the “perfect” answer.

An abandoned oil rig off the cost of the UK? No I would guess not, hard to commute to work daily.

Just outside a large city? Well maybe but which large city and how far out?

If you look at the earth you have to pick a place that is close to your customers or close to large amounts of cheap bandwidth so that you can be close via a ping rather the proximity. That is not an easy bill to fill right now as most place with load of pipe are also close to major cities and no one wants to be in down town anywhere the next time something bad like 9/11 happens.  You don’t want it down South near the Gulf of Mexico or Florida since there are hurricanes. You don’t want it in California, Oregon or Washington there are earthquakes. You don’t want it in the North East the salaries are to high and everything is so close together that your risk of anything happening goes way up. The south west? Nope the cooling cost are much higher and if the power goes out you need tons of on site electricity and that gets very expensive. What about the Mid-West? Tornadoes and hard to attract good technical talent. So where is the perfect place to put a data center?

Even if you did find a good place for a data center how would you build the building? I might place it underground so that it would be safer, but then you have to think about flooding in the case of heavy rain, so the list goes on and on and in the end you are stuck with a truck full of servers, switches and racks that can’t be located anywhere. Then you think maybe that is the answer, we put it all in an 18 wheeler and drive it to the safest place in the country at the time and never stop rolling…while it sounds like fun it would be a logistical nightmare.

There is no perfect data center and if there was everyone would want to be in it and no on would place on in the heart of down town San Francisco ever, not even on a bad day and think that was a good idea.

What do you call your AS/System iSeries 400 in your IT shop?

I like every one still call the i all kinds of things. Which is of course bad but I like others in the industry want to know the following things?

1. What do you call the i now?
2. What do you call the i in conversations with peers?
3. What do you call the i in conversations with executives or senior level staff?
4. What do you call the i in private?
5. What do you call me in private?
6. Is the name change to i a good one?
7. Do you like the idea of one price on box?
8. Do you also run AIX in your IT shop?
9. Does it make you crazy when others call it the AS/400?
10. Does it make you crazy when others call it the iSeries?
11. Do you get a warm felling when someone says I still have a System/36?

I can go ahead and get the ball rolling:

1. i
2. i or System i
3. i or AS/400 - Most of them still call it the AS/400 so when in Rome…..I try to say AS/400 or i and then always say i
4.  My little treasure
5. David
6. Yes
7. Yes
8. I have and would if I could YES!
9. YES - CRAZY!
10. Not Really but YES
11. Of course - but not like if they said Macintosh Classic II

2008 IT Leaders Forum in Denver, CO

Link to Site

Make sure you reserve your place at the 2008 IT Leaders Forum in Denver. If you are in Denver, and I know some of you are, this would be a great place to meet other IT Leaders from around the country. It looks like it will be a blast and has some really great speakers too.

“Combine business with pleasure at the 2008 IT Leaders Forum in beautiful Colorado! Enjoy the unmatched scenery and summer activities and learn from the industry’s top experts.”

Slow Tech Week

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. It’s been a slow boring tech week for me here and I have been pondering what I should post about all week and I have a big empty bag of nothing to post about. At least not much in the POWER or i arena.

I am now living in Charlotte, NC and it’s kind of the home of NASCAR now and this week has been ALL-STAR week so not much going on here with that either. Sadly the city does not seem to give two winks about placing some local hype around the fact that the largest sporting event in the US right now is having it’s ALL-STAR weekend and you live here right next to all the fun,  maybe you should come on out. Instead we get nothing. I think Charlotte has mis-managed the presents of NASCAR int he area and forgets it brings over 1 Billion dollars to the state every year.  Once again local cities and state governments ignore the people. So that has nothing to do with tech but I thought about it all week and I read and searched for any information about NASCAR in Charlotte this week.

I did happen to find an old Navy buddy of mine this week after searching for him for over a decade (My Listing). He is just a few hours away. It was one of the highlights of my week. Stew and I spent our first three commands together and I really missed just cutting up with Stew. He is a blast most days and pretty easy going. If you have been in the service go check out Together We Served. They have one for each branch of service so it should be an easy way to connect up with others. ARMY NAVY AIR FORCE MARINE. For a small annual fee you get to be a full member and I think it’s well worth the cost.

The OLPC project I think is way over-rated. Way to much press on it and I think it all depresses me. I had the opportunity to use one recently and was not impressed with it and think while the idea is good and it’s nice it’s not vapor wear  but I don’t think it’s making it to the hands of the people who need it. I have nothing to support that only there are no big stories about thousands of kids in far off places getting big shipments of OLPCs? I could be wrong.

Ubuntu 8.04 is out and you all knew that but what I have not done is installed it on my PC at home. I have a pretty nice gaming rig, it has an ASUS mother board AMD 6000 64bit Dual Core CPU, 2 GB or RAM, 2 MSI nVidia 8600 GTS Over clocked Video Cards in SLi mode and some other stuff. I like to play America’s Army, COD4, and a few other games. It’s a nice rig and plays them all really well without glitches. I use XP as my OS on that machine. Ubuntu 7.10 and 7.04 would work once I installed the the second video card and placed the SLi strap on it. Ubuntu just was angry about that arrangement. So I had given up in it. I would run Ubuntu Server on a VM on my Mac and call it a day.  So I installed Ubunut 8.04 and you know what, it didn’t die or not work. Ubuntu 8.04 works, and i have the nVidia driver loaded and all seems well. I didn’t have some trouble with the boot loader but fixed it after a few minutes of working on it. The average user would have been stumped but there is a Super GRUB kit that helped me fix it. So me and Ubuntu are pals again.

I mostly tinker on Ubuntu as MacOSX is my main computer on my MacBook PRO but I have to use Linux for some things and I like to help out other Linux people from time to time so Ubuntu is working good for me most days. I considered moving to OpenSuSE but still don’t like what they have done with KDE. It’s ugly and to confusing. KDE 3 is a huge mess and I have not played with KDE 4 yet in hopes they get the ugly out before I see it.

Top Gear is my new TV addiction. I don’t watch that much TV but I have just fallen head over heals for the BBC program called TOP GEAR. I have watched in the past and have always enjoyed it but lately I have just really gotten into the show and even made a purchase from the web site to let people know “I AM NOT THE STIG”

I seem to spend a small amount of each day keeping up with my “peeps”, and one of the site where I like to keep track of people is LinkedIN. If you are not on LinkedIN please go sign up today. It’s a great site to help you find your way around and seek out new people who you can interact with on a business level.

Well that is all for me right now. I hope this makes up for not posting much. I am sure I will get a stern talking to by the HEAD BLOGGER about not posting. It was just a pretty boring week for me in IT, and I tried and tried to find something to share but could not bring myself to think anything was interesting. IBM did some releases this week with the i and I think they approved LTO4 for the i, but that is boring too in that it should have been out months ago when the LTO4 was released. Oh well….see nothing exciting.

Is your workspace important?

I think there is something to be said for a company that can create  a workspace for it’s employees that is fun and functional. I liked this article: LINK

“What makes for an appealing workspace? The envelopes they leave in your mailbox every two weeks. But after that, it comes down to design and amenities. Also, we like windows and brick. Lots and lots of brick. After spending some time on Office Snapshots, we present the ten best-looking offices in tech, below.”

OpenSolaris released in time to die?

Sun has never been buddies with IBM and since I still bleed blue and like the company named IBM, most days, I have a bit of disdain for SUN and it’s not just because they are who they are I have tons of reasons not to like them. Sun has spent the past 8 years fumbling the ball and failing all over the place and even while they have poor financial performance and what I would consider average. It’s sad that the stock holders do call it quits and let them be purchased by someone who might pay half of what they think that are worth. Not sure who would touch them now that they are all over the place.

With that said I am an open source advocate, and I think Linux is doing pretty good, I do however have questions about OpenSolaris and the lack of WOW wrapped around it. I read daily the blog put out there by Jim Grisanzio and while it is the most popular blog at Sun’s site he reveals some of the problems with OpenSolaris and is always willing to air their dirty laundry to make a point.

I also have trouble with the Sun Open Source model, where some things are open and others are not. While I can’t keep track of any of it, the whole idea just seems very stupid to me. Plus the fact that the hardware they are selling on the “cheap” side of things is just that, cheap. It’s utter rubbish and should be avoided at all costs. Any IT person woth their salt would avoid Sun equipment until they get their act together. I have seen some if it and it’s not worth what they are charging.

While I would love to see some hearty competition between Linux and OpenSolaris I think the fact that OpenSolaris is out there supporting a company that makes a profit on the backs of the free help is a bit of an odd model to me.

Here are some interesting points:

“OpenSolaris has been released under an Open Source license,” it doesn’t have “an Open Source development community.”

“OpenSolaris’ biggest trouble is that while it’s taken three years for OpenSolaris to reach a point where general techie sorts will get it a try, the Linux distributors, especially Red Hat, Novell/SUSE and Ubuntu, has been moving in strength both to the public and to enterprise customers.”

While I wish the project luck I don’t see much future for it, the teams inside OpenSolaris fight constantly and there are some unsavory IT has beens on the board as well who have not done well in IT much less helping OpenSolaris.

I also think Sun and Jonathan Schwartz are really hanging on, and in the next four or five years unless they make something truly remarkable will be sunk. He is a pony tailed silicon valley chatter mouth and if we were to shake his head you could hear his brain rattle around in it. Sadly everyone at Sun likes his goofy know nothing smile and puts up with his poor performances and his blathering blog where he rambles on and on about nothing of significance.

This post is not an attack on Jim at all. I point out that Jim is one of the most well spoken and articulate people in the OpenSolaris community. I respect the work he does and know at the end of the day if OpenSolaris fails it would have more to do with Sun doing to much and developers arguing and belittling each other inside the project vs. anything Jim did. I just recently saw a video with Johathan on it talking about how Sun is going to make a comeback here in the next few years with their new server strategy. I still think Solaris is flawed in that it is not easy to deploy or use for the average business. It does not make computing easy at any point like the i does. I also read this which is just like to males getting out the yard stick. More does not always mean better, and in this case with all that hardware they still have run out of capacity?