IBM PureSystems is designed to enable ISVs to deliver their software solutions faster and easier than before. The develop-once, run anywhere model for the system can offer time and costs savings by eliminating the need to develop multiple applications particularly for public and private cloud environments.

As an open system, IBM PureSystems also protects existing software investments by providing the choice of developing a Patterns of Expertise or running other applications on the system. Patterns of Expertise is a new software capability unique to IBM PureSystems, which combine operational know-how and industry expertise directly into the system to automate a variety of common IT and industry tasks and can cut the time and resources needed for basic and complex tasks.

More than 150 Patterns of Expertise have been developed and optimized for IBM PureSystems based on insights from thousands of client engagement. With technical and validation resources from IBM, developers have the flexibility to optimize applications to run on either the IBM PureFlex or IBM PureApplications systems.

IBM PureSystems changes the game

For software developers, IBM PureSystems changes some of the rules for balancing time and resources against the need to do those great, innovative things that can make your applications more competitive. Instead of becoming bogged down in time-consuming maintenance tasks, IBM PureSystems can get you up and running in as little as four hours, cutting months off the time required to deploy new applications.

The four essential capabilities of IBM PureSystems offer great benefits to IT software development and delivery teams:

• Consolidation:
  IBM Application Portfolio Management (APM) tools enables better understanding and management of application assets. They can be integrated into the IT workload lifecycle with the workload deployment patterns included in IBM PureSystems, or the user can additionally create custom patterns to provide continuous application delivery with reduced cost and risk, and assured consistency throughout the end-to-end lifecycle.
• Optimization:
  The new solution is a multi-platform development and test environment, that offers integrated development tools, compilers for IBM Power Systems and testing capability to rapidly build, deploy, and test applications for IBM PureSystems systems.
• Innovation:
  The IBM Application Lifecycle Management solution provides end-to-end visibility and traceability across teams, projects, platforms, and processes for faster time to market. By managing the application lifecycle effectively from inspiration through creation and into consumption, you can deliver quality software and services faster through better team collaboration, automation, and governance across platforms. The Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management supports creation through consumption on IBM PureSystems
• Accelerate the move to cloud:
  By putting in place a continuous build, integration, and delivery strategy (DevOps), automate the building, testing, and deployment process for cloud-enabled environments including IBM PureSystems, as well as speed up delivery by automating deployment of application workloads.

The Acardia/ IBM Developer Seminar takes place at IBM South Bank on 1st May 2012

Acardia, a specialist IBM Business Partner serving UK ISV’s and software developers, has announced a half-day technical seminar entitled  ”A Users Guide to Building Unix & Linux Applications on IBM Power“. The new event is scheduled to take place on the morning of the 1st May, at IBM’s South Bank building.

Dave Shearer, CEO, Acardia said, “If you’re a software developer or ISV, there are compelling reasons why you should consider IBM’s Power platform for your mission critical applications. Our technical seminar will provide an invaluable guide to engaging with IBM in order to get access to the right tools and the right levels of support and assistance to port your application to IBM’s Power architecture.”

“IBM continues to be the most popular Unix platform, with an increasing share of market. Today, IBM has a comprehensive range of services and resources to help you port your software, including creating iPhone and iPod apps from existing green screen applications. This seminar will introduce you to the offerings and help you navigate your way to obtain the best support throughout the development cycle.”

The seminar sessions will be brief and to the point, technically biased, and with no marketing or sales hype. However, since places are limited and will be allocated on a strictly first come, first served basis, delegates are asked to register as soon as possible by visiting the Acardia Events web page.  Acardia encourages you to attend the IBM Developer Seminar whether you’re considering developing on Unix platforms, or already doing so.

The Acardia/ IBM Software Developer Seminar is a unique opportunity to be brought to date on IBM offers, and will cover all aspects of physical and virtual hardware for development, software tools and developer services to help you optimise your application for the platform. For more details, please call Acardia on 0845 230 1055 or visit the Events page on the Acardia website to book your place.

The Register

Big Blue is bragging once again about its ability to unseat its Unix-racket competitors from customer accounts after a big win at online stock trading company E-Trade Korea.

E-Trade Korea is a big Sparc/ Solaris shop, and was established a dozen years ago as a joint venture between the US-based online brokerage of the same name; Japanese telco, finance, and media conglomerate SoftBank; and South Korean LG Investment & Securities. In 2008, the online brokerage was acquired by a private-equity group that includes LS Networks, another South Korean conglomerate.

The online brokerage, which is located in Seoul, has 200,000 customers, who use the Sparc/Solaris systems to look at account information, get stock quotes, access bulletin boards, and do other things that online traders like to do. Online trading is big in Korea, with about 40 per cent of the trades done on the Korea Stock Exchange (KSE, established in 1953) and the Korean Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (KOSDAQ, established in 1996) being done by shareholders online.

IBM was not at liberty to disclose how much and what kind of Sun iron was running at E-Trade Korea, but the platforms supporting its trading systems were last upgraded in 2005 and were based on Sun Enterprise machines of various makes and models running the Solaris Unix variant.

Whatever Sun iron was installed at E-Trade Korea, it must have been a lot of machinery, based on what IBM is replacing it with. Sources at IBM tell El Reg that the new E-Trade Korea trading system, which will be installed by July, is comprised of two Power 740s (two-socket machines) two Power 770s (eight-socket machines), and six Power 780s (which come with eight or sixteen sockets, depending on the model).

The new trading platform will run AIX and will be able to settle 970,000 financial transactions per hour – 16 per cent more than the current Sparc/Solaris cluster. Presumably, E-Trade Korea has plenty of unactivated cores in the various Power Systems iron and will be able to boost capacity and performance as need be and on the fly in future years.

E-Trade Korea also has plans to expand into private banking aimed at the middle class in South Korea, and will run applications for this business on the new systems.

IBM did not supply a value for the E-Trade Korea contract, but assuming heavy configurations of the servers outlined above and that the machines are lightly configured with disk and heavy on the memory and processor cores, you’re talking about something on the order of $5m to $7m at list price just for the servers.

To read more of this story, visit The Register website

Oracle Solaris 11 from Acardia - the first Cloud OS

Solaris is known for its scalability, especially on SPARC systems, and for originating many innovative features such as DTrace, ZFS and Time Slider. Solaris supports SPARC-based and x86-based workstations and servers from Sun and other vendors

Today, Oracle Solaris 11 delivers advanced features that have been in development for more than five years in an easy-to-use, production-ready package, allowing you to immediately deploy new applications. The operating system adds network virtualization and resource management to complete, built-in virtualization capabilities to provide the highest performance virtualization environment with the lowest overhead.

On his Oracle blog, Marius Scholtz poses questions including:

• What are the compelling reasons to move or upgrade to Solaris 11?
• What does a CTO want from an Operating System (OS)?
• Assuming an OS should be safe, secure, easy to upgrade, have lots of application support, clear roadmap, easy to manage, fast, good and cheap, does Solaris 11 actually offer these features?

1. 

   10 Resources for Oracle Solaris 11 Developers

   Developing/Deploying Applications on Solaris Oracle 11 Course
   Addresses developer training requirements to learn, understand, develop, and deploy applications on the new Oracle Solaris 11 platforms. It introduces customers to “How to develop specific new features” with a hands-on practical approach to solving problems. Click through to your own country’s Oracle University Site – note that eKits are available for iPad too.

2. Oracle Solaris 11 ISV Adoption Guide
   This must-read White Paper, published in November 2011, is designed to help software developers and ISVs transition their applications smoothly from Oracle Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11. It provides a list of all currently known modifications, which may be needed for existing applications to run on Oracle Solaris 11.
3. Oracle Solaris 11 Preflight Checker
   An essential tool which enables you to determine the Oracle Solaris 11 readiness of an application by analyzing a working application on Oracle Solaris 10. A successful check with this tool will be a strong indicator that an ISV may run a given application without modifications on Oracle Solaris 11.
4. The IPS System Repository
   Tim Foster’s blog from IPS, OpenSolaris
5. Packaging and Delivering Software with the Image Packaging System – A Developer’s Guide
   In Oracle Solaris 11 and onwards, system software is packaged with the Image Packaging System (IPS), which takes care of installing and upgrading new software. This useful 81-page manual is for developers and advanced administrators who want to better understand IPS, how Oracle Solaris is packaged with IPS and how to use IPS to package their own software
6. How to Create and Publish Packages to an IPS Repository on Solaris 11
   Oracle Solaris 11 takes a new approach to lifecycle and package management to greatly simplify the process of managing system software helping reduce the risk of operating system maintenance, including reducing unplanned and planned downtime. With IPS, administrators can install and update software from locally connected or remote software package repositories using a much-improved and modernized process.
7. Solaris 10 Branded zone VM Templates for Solaris 11
   Jeff Savit’s blog provides access to an important tool that lets you “painlessly inhale a Solaris Container from Solaris 10 or entire Solaris 10 systems (‘the global zone’) into virtualized environments on a Solaris 11 OS”.
8. Oracle Solaris 11 Security: What’s New For Developers
   More links for software developers, this time about security
9. Optimizing Applications with Oracle Solaris Studio Tools and Compilers
   This 10-page Oracle White Paper was published in December 2011, and tells how Oracle Solaris Studio software provides a proven set of compilers and tools that offer C, C++, and Fortran developers the flexibility and power they need to develop correct and performant applications.
10. Other Solaris 11 Technology Spotlights
    Technology Spotlights pages provide more information on key Oracle Solaris 11 technologies from simplified Installation, security and availability to ZFS Technology, IPS and Virtualization

IBM continues to dominate in the hardware, software, and services markets they compete in as evidenced by the release of a new report from Gartner. The global growth of cloud computing and the slowing PC market have forced companies like IBM to focus on growth markets and IBM has been quick to shift courses in recent years.

According to the  report IBM leads the Global server market in Q4 of 2011. IBM was proud to pick up on the Gartner report and confirmed the No. 1 position as the leading server vendor in the fourth quarter of 2011. They recorded 33.7% of the total server revenue in this market.

On an annual basis for 2011 IBM recorded 30.5% of the revenue share, 1.5% more than rival HP. The Gartner report also noted that IBM retained the #1 position in the Unix server market winning 52.8% of market share in the fourth quarter. IBM grew quarterly revenue by 17% year-over-year with IBM Power Systems taking the top position.

For the full year of 2011, IBM led the Unix server market, with an impressive 45.9% market share coming from a gain of 6.9% over 2010. IBM grew Unix revenue by 23% over 2010, according to Gartner.

Read the rest of this story on CIO Zone

New Oracle Netra Carrier Grade servers from Acardia offer 5x performance

Oracle has announced new Netra SPARC T-Series servers. The single processor Netra SPARC T4-1 and dual processor SPARC T4-2 servers, along with the Netra SPARC T4-1B server module are built to meet the demanding needs of today’s fast paced telecommunications market. Based on the SPARC T4 processor, they provide the security, performance, and scalability required for 4G network infrastructures and cloud-based deployments with up to 5x better performance over the previous generation of servers.

Combined with Oracle Solaris, the industry’s leading carrier grade OS, these new Netra systems can reduce TCO and drastically shorten service development and deployment times. Oracle Solaris 11 runs applications faster than Solaris 10 and eliminates the need for load balancing hardware, which can save tens of thousands of dollars per deployment. In addition, it includes enhanced virtualization, isolation of workloads, and network virtualization to support enterprise-scale workloads in cloud environments.

In recent tests running Oracle Communications ASAP on the new Netra SPARC T4-2 server, each SPARC T4 processor delivered 7.7x the performance of the Intel Itanium 1.7 GHz processor in an HP server.

Netra SPARC T4-2 SPECjvm2008 World Record Performance

A Netra SPARC T4-2 server equipped with two SPARC T4 processors running at 2.85 GHz delivered a World Record result of 454.52 SPECjvm2008 Peak ops/m on the SPECjvm2008 benchmark. This result just eclipsed the previous record which was run on a similar product, Oracle’s SPARC T4-2 server, which is also a two SPARC T4 processor based system. To read more of this story, please visit the Oracle website.

Oracle is dedicated to the continued delivery of highly reliable servers by offering a complete portfolio of Netra carrier-grade products to meet the wide variety of workloads required in communications networks.

• 3-5 years old and due for capacity and architectural upgrade
• No longer supported by Oracle

There are many reasons to upgrade your storage – to reduce management and service costs, boost performance and efficiency, simplify management, and maximise data availability. Customers with legacy storage systems will benefit in a number of ways:

• Costs/Serviceability
• Data Access and Agility
• Performance and Efficiency
• Scalability

IBM Power 720 Express 4U server

by Timothy Prickett Morgan, IT Jungle

If you are using an old PowerPC, Power4, Power5, or Power5+ system, you have no doubt long since paid for the machine. And I would even go so far as to guess that you have created your own applications to run on OS/400 or i5/OS–and perhaps even IBM i–on these old machines, or maybe you have some third-party apps that do what you tell them to and, more importantly, don’t do things you don’t tell them to do, like crash all the time.

So with the economy not exactly exuding exuberance, rational or any other kind, you are probably feeling a bit smug right now. Your AS/400e or iSeries or System i machine does its job and doesn’t cost you much money. Until you do the math, that is, at least according to the way that IBM does it.

I was fishing around on the IBM Website and came across the Move Up To IBM Power Systems area that shows the monthly operational costs of keeping a vintage entry or midrange machine around and contrasts that with moving up to a new Power7-based entry Power 720 model. IBM’s analysis is a bit simplistic, of course, but it is an example of the kind of comparisons that you can gin up for yourself if you are not feeling so smug about the old iron and software you are using in your data center and want to get a new system.

IBM’s comparisons just stack up the cost of software maintenance, hardware maintenance, and power on a monthly basis for these old machines against software maintenance and a monthly lease for a new Power 720 Express. I presume the costs on the Power 720 are for a machine with one core activated running either IBM i 6.1 or IBM i 7.1, but Big Blue doesn’t say. (You can infer it from the 5,950 CPW performance rating in the comparison, since a four-core Power 720 is rated at 23,800 CPWs.)

Please click here to read the full article on IT Jungle

Organizations are struggling to meet the demands of rapidly shifting customer buying patterns in the era of mobile and social networks. This new digital marketplace requires companies to be highly responsive to consumer demands on the fly. Whether it’s setting and executing the right pricing strategy or the ability to automatically adjust pricing based on online and offline data, being able to rapidly shift to market changes has become a key competitive advantage for global businesses.

IBM estimates the market opportunity for Smarter Commerce at $20 billion in software alone. Extending these capabilities to the cloud gives organizations immediate access to consumer information, providing instant return on investment.

DemandTec delivers cloud-based analytics software that enables businesses to examine different customer buying scenarios, both online and in-store. As a result, companies can spot trends and shopper insights to make better price, promotion, and assortment decisions that increase revenue and profitability.

By gaining a quick and accurate analysis of consumer trends, for example, a retailer can predict how consumers will respond to a price change before making that critical decision. A brand manager can adjust the marketing mix for a product to better drive sales in the grocery channel. A merchant and supplier can work together to understand how one shopper segment differs from another to craft the best merchandising plan. By understanding shoppers across channels, companies can adapt more quickly to rising customer demands.

“IBM Smarter Commerce is redefining how brands buy, market, sell and service their customers in ways that their customers want,” said Craig Hayman, General Manager of Industry Solutions at IBM. “Bringing science to the art of pricing and promotion is a big part of this strategy, and the combination of DemandTec and IBM will help marketing and sales executives in retail and other industries drive more revenue and increase profitability.”

“DemandTec has unprecedented capability to improve customers’ price and promotion tactics on a stand-alone basis and connect retailers and manufacturers for collaborative planning through the cloud,” said Dan Fishback, President and Chief Executive Officer of DemandTec. “IBM Smarter Commerce is the perfect fit for DemandTec. IBM is the only provider of price and promotion offerings within a rich solution set that supports companies’ buy, market, sell and service processes.”

Consistent with IBM’s Smarter Commerce strategy, IBM will continue to support and enhance DemandTec’s technologies and clients while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio. DemandTec will be integrated into IBM’s Software Group, which is a key driver of growth and profitability for IBM.

DemandTec is based in San Mateo, Calif. and has more than 350 employees, with additional offices in Minneapolis, London, Paris, and Bangalore.

The acquisition is subject to DemandTec shareholder approval, applicable regulatory clearances and other customary closing conditions. It’s expected to close in the first quarter of 2012.