mainframe

T3 files antitrust complaint against IBM in Europe

Update at 9:12 a.m. PST, with comment from IBM.

T3 Technologies filed a complaint against IBM with European antitrust regulators on Tuesday, alleging that Big Blue is blocking competition by tying its operating system with its mainframe hardware.

T3, a maker of IBM-compatible mainframes for small to midsize companies, is asking the European Commission to investigate IBM's market pricing and alleged effort to eliminate competition by withholding its patent licenses for its mainframe operating system and certain intellectual property.

"Since November 2006, we have not been able to sell any of our hardware. No rational buyer … Read more

Old apps don't obsolete platforms make

I got an early-morning laugh out of this post on Timothy Sipple's Mainframe blog:

Will the popular press ever get it right about mainframe-hosted applications? I'm still waiting, after seeing this one: "...the computer mainframe handling unemployment claims is 30 years old and won't take many more technical improvements."

I can guarantee that the State of Florida is not running a 30-year-old mainframe. And "won't take many more technical improvements"? What on earth do they mean by that? That the application is holding a picket sign and threatening to march on the … Read more

Report: Siemens wants out of Fujitsu partnership

German conglomerate Siemens AG is looking to end its participation in Fujitsu Siemens Computer, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter."

The joint venture did $10.3 billion in sales last year, but Siemens CEO Peter Loscher apparently isn't pleased overall with the performance of FSC, which never found a real foothold in the U.S. in the face of competition with Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

"We have said that we want to focus on the three sectors--industry, energy, health care--and that we want to concentrate on them," a spokesman for … Read more

IBM and the resurrection of the mainframe

Steve Mills runs IBM's $20 billion software business. He obsesses about large enterprises running thousands of transactions per second with terabytes of data and a need for absolute certainty of execution. It's a stack of enterprise software writ large, but don't get the idea that Mills has his head in the cloud. The 34-year IBM veteran doesn't put a lot of stock in the latest IT disruptor--cloud computing--for his customer base.

I met with Mills at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles this week and asked the senior vice president of the IBM … Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac to ship in second quarter 2008 - Adobe previously said "early 2008," (http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9783661-39.html) but now it's second quarter. Not a big deal since Mac folks get iPhoto. Why bother offering pre-order months early? Answer: to make it not look like a delay. More Canon 5D Mark II Rumors | Photography Bay - Some guy's Canon rep said to expect an announcement of the new low-end full-frame camera at PMA (which starts January 31, but Canon's announcement looks like January 24). Tighter intellectual property restirctions at iStockphoto.com … Read more

OpenSolaris follows Linux to the mainframe

Free-wheeling Linux was an improbable enough operating system to be used on IBM's mainframe line, but now an even more unlikely operating system is making an appearance there: Sun Microsystems' Solaris.

Sun and IBM have been archenemies for decades, but through the combination of open-source flexibility and something of a detente between the companies, the operating system has arrived. IBM expressed interest in collaborating with engineering firm Sine Nomine Associates, which has been working on a mainframe translation of OpenSolaris since Sun opened the source code in 2005. Now Sine Nomine is demonstrating the software on a System z … Read more

Open-source history: See Multics source code

In a move more likely to appeal to technology historians than coders, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has published the source code of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a precursor to the Unix operating system begun as a research project at the university in 1965.

The code is hosted on MIT's Multics Web site. MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs worked to commercialize it, but Bell--originator of the more influential and still widely used Unix operating system--dropped out in 1969. Honeywell took over GE's computer business, and Honeywell became Bull, which donated the source code at the … Read more

VMware and the mainframe

Enterprise Strategy Group's resident expert on all things server virtualization, Mark Bowker, tells me that there were 15,000 people at VMworld a few weeks ago. Not a surprise, the industry is gaga over server virtualization as more users look to turn physical servers into consolidated virtual partitions.

The irony here is that while the server virtualization chatter focuses on VMware, Xen, Citrix, and Microsoft, the venerable IBM zSeries (i.e. mainframe) will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this virtualization frenzy.

The reason for this is fairly simple. Server virtualization is all about rationalizing IT assets … Read more