Hey, Where’s the IBM i? NY Times Explains IBM’s April 11th Announcement

Update (4/11/12): Just got comfirmation from IBM that the Power 7 nodes of IBM PureSystems support IBM i 6.1 and 7.1. So we can stand down on that one.

In one of many articles breaking news on IBM’s announcement tomorrow, the NY Times has a pretty decent overview article about tomorrow’s event and what IBM’s announcing. It’s called a PureSystem and according to NYT, it’s…

bundles of server hardware and software packaged in simplified systems, with setup and maintenance automated by intelligent software

So it’s being billed as a way to cut out computer system overhead by deploying systems quicker and making it easier to manage multiple servers in one place. Why, one could almost call it a “Magic Box”;-)

But being an old-time IBM i guy, one particular sentence jumped out at me. See if you can spot the omission here (emphasis mine).

The I.B.M. options include four operating system environments — Linux running on either Intel microprocessors or I.B.M.’s Power chips, I.B.M’s AIX and Microsoft’s Windows. And there are four choices of load-juggling, virtualization software including VMware (a unit of EMC), Red Hat’s KVM, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and I.B.M.’s PowerV.

Aside from the Times’ very weird punctuation of IBM, they must be counting Linux as two operating system choices because there ain’t no IBM i operating system listed here. I’m gonna assume the writer wasn’t the most technically literate guy in the world but omitting the IBM i from this story doesn’t exactly give me warm or fuzzy feelings.

Anyhow, you can read the whole story here.

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