Blu-ray Disc technology
HP
IBM
iSeries
Market conditions
Services
Solutions
Storage
Sun

Blu-ray Disc technology

Acer Inc. joins Blu-Ray Disc Association
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) announced that Acer Inc. will become the newest member of the BDA, joining more than 170 of the world’s leading consumer electronic, computer companies and content providers. Acer is one of the three largest personal-computer brands in the world and the number one notebook brand in Europe. Blu-ray Disc is the next-generation optical disc format being developed for high-definition video and high-capacity software applications. A single-layer Blu-ray Disc will hold up to 25 gigabytes of data and a double-layer Blu-ray Disc will hold up to 50 gigabytes of data. According to data compiled by Home Media Research and GFK Research, respectively, through the first half of 2007, Blu-ray Disc movie titles have accounted for 66% of the high definition movie sales in the US and 60% of high definition movie sales in Europe.
Visit www.blu-raydisc.com or www.acer.com.
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HP

HP expands Quad-Core server portfolio
HP enhanced its lineup of multi-processor-based server systems built to improve performance and cut costs. Based on the new Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series, these energy-efficient servers are designed for customers running data-intensive business applications such as databases, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and large mail and messaging platforms in virtualized environments. The rack-based HP ProLiant DL580 G5 server and the HP ProLiant BL680c G5, HP’s first four processor (4P) quad-core server blade, offer increased performance with double the number of processor cores. In addition, the DL580 G5 has double the memory capacity of its predecessor. These enhancements offer customers more compute power and memory to improve the performance of the applications that run their business. HP also announced a joint commitment with Microsoft to define a data warehouse reference platform with the upcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2008 based on the ProLiant DL580 G5 with HP StorageWorks 50 Modular Smart Arrays.
Visit www.hp.com.
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IBM

VAI S2K enterprise software goes live
Vormittag Associates, Inc. (VAI), an IBM Premier Business Partner, announced the successful implementation of its S2K Enterprise Edition software at Hercules Corporation, a Hicksville, N.Y.–based firm that sells, leases and services laundry equipment for multi-unit dwellings. Two of Hercules’ better known operating sites are Trump Towers and Penn South Mutual Redevelopment Corp. The project replaced several non-integrated, homegrown applications with VAI’s comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system including accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, customer orders, customer relationship management, sales analysis, inventory management, purchasing, material requirements planning, retail point of sale and service billing. As part of the implementation, Hercules also upgraded to a new IBM System iSeries server, updated PCs and installed new printers.
Visit www.vai.net.
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iSeries

Admin Alert: A primer for changing your i5/OS startup program
At some point, all System i and iSeries administrators will need to add new functionality to their system startup program (QSTRUP). While it's easy to change and recompile QSTRUP, there are a few pitfalls to avoid so that the new code executes properly and so that it doesn't hang the system in error. To help you understand QSTRUP modification, here's my primer on locating, changing and compiling your startup program. Changing the QSTRUP startup program consists of the following six simple steps:

Finding your startup program object
Finding the startup program's source code
Archiving your old startup program object and source code
Changing the startup program code
Compiling and identifying your new startup program to the system
Monitoring the results

These steps are routine but there are a few snake traps to beware of. Changing QSTRUP source code on an i5/OS or OS/400 system is tricky because you can't truly test the code unless you IPL the partition. So you have to be fairly methodical to avoid obvious mistakes that must be manually corrected after startup or mistakes that could hang your system startup program before it finishes starting the system.
Read full article.
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Market conditions

NABE economists cite slower growth, recession fears
The pace of economic growth in the United States will continue to slow into 2008 across all major spending categories, according to a new report from the National Association for Business Economics. The NABE survey presents the consensus of macroeconomic forecasts made by a panel of 46 professional forecasters.  The forecast predicts GDP annual growth for 2007 will be 2%, down from its May estimate of 2.2%. If the latest prediction proves correct, growth would be the weakest since 2002. NABE also pared its growth estimate for 2008 from 3.1% to 2.8%, with the reductions centered in the first half of the year. The panel reduced its outlook for consumer spending growth from 2.8% to 2.5%, and its estimate for business fixed investment fell from 5.0% to 4.7%. As a partial offset, likely reflecting in part the reduced forecast for demand growth, the panel cut back its estimate for import growth from 4.9% to 4.2% and reduced its projection of the trade deficit in goods. With the weaker outlook, the forecasters are concerned about the risk of recession. More than 60 percent of those responding cited recession "as the major risk facing the economy over the next year, while only a third cited inflation as the greatest problem," the group said.
Visit www.nabe.com.


Survey: CFO optimism plunges to record low
According to a September 2007 Duke University/CFO Magazine Business Outlook survey, optimism about the U.S. economy plunged to a record low this quarter among chief financial officers. CFOs expect slow growth in earnings, capital spending and acquisitions and no growth in hiring. They are very concerned about weak consumer demand, rising labor costs and credit markets. The survey asked CFOs from a broad range of global public and private companies about their expectations for the economy. The survey generated responses from 1,316 CFOs, including 580 from the U.S., 181 from Europe, 175 from Asia (not including China), and 380 from China. A summary of the findings includes:

* Capital spending is expected to increase only 3.2%, and domestic employment will be flat. Outsourced employment should rise 5.9%.
* Weak consumer demand, high labor costs and credit market turmoil rank among the top concerns of CFOs.
* The mergers and acquisitions boom will wither due to tighter and more expensive credit and weaker economic growth; there will be a shift away from private equity buyers toward corporate acquirers.
* Companies are shrugging off Chinese product safety concerns and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) accounting standards.
Visit www.cfosurvey.org.
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Services

ASNA unveils professional services
ASNA (Amalgamated Software of North America) announced the creation of ASNA Services Group. This new division provides services industry professionals with expertise in application development, migration and modernization to the System i (iSeries, AS/400) community employing ASNA’s product suite for Microsoft .NET.  The scope of the ASNA Services Group includes: Windows, Web and Web Services development extending legacy System i applications; consultative service in the design, architecture, and implementation of Microsoft .NET applications; complete or partial migration of AS/400 applications to Microsoft .NET with ASNA Monarch; and DB2/400 database conversion to Microsoft SQL Server. The services group responds to ASNA customers’ desire to supplement their RPG programmers’ talents with .NET developers who share in the knowledge of business applications.
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Solutions

CA Plex r6 enables model-driven development of .NET, J2EE and IBM System i Web services
CA announced the availability of CA Plex r6, a state-of-the-art rapid application development environment that uniquely enables model-driven development of .NET, J2EE and IBM System i Web services. By empowering developers to effectively apply data modeling to Web services across multiple platforms, CA Plex r6 helps IT organizations quickly deliver sophisticated and highly manageable SOA-based business solutions. Just as important, because it also supports traditional client/server and legacy architectures, CA Plex provides a unified environment for leveraging objects across all enterprise applications. This gives customers the ability to take advantage of new service-oriented technologies while extending the useful life of existing applications. With CA Plex r6, Web services can be managed as “first-class” objects. Developers can view, diagram, document, and manage these objects just as they do others in their enterprise model. This enables the re-use, inheritance and other attributes to Web services that developers require to achieve the efficiency, consistency, and reliability necessary to fulfill today’s demanding business requirements within increasingly tight development resource constraints.
Visit www.ca.com.
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Storage

Avnet Technology Solutions expands storage practice
Avnet Technology Solutions announced a new U.S. and Canadian distribution agreement with LeftHand Networks, a leader in open iSCSI SANs. With this new agreement, Avnet continues the expansion of its Storage Practice, providing Avnet’s value-added reseller (VAR) partners with incremental sales opportunities for virtualization and consolidation solutions that leverage HP and IBM x86 servers. According to industry research firm IDC, iSCSI is the fastest growing segment of the storage industry. During 2006, the iSCSI SAN market grew by 144 percent, to $746 million, and is predicted to grow to $5 billion by 2010. The combination of enterprise-class x86 servers from HP and IBM with LeftHand Networks’ SAN/iQ storage software creates a highly virtualized SAN environment for end customers. LeftHand’s easy-to-deploy, open iSCSI SAN is scalable and provides high availability, reliability and performance.
Visit www.ats.avnet.com or www.lefthandnetworks.com.
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Sun

Sun Microsystems expands high performance computing portfolio
Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced a definitive agreement pursuant to which Sun will acquire the majority of Cluster File Systems, Inc.'s intellectual property and business assets, including the Lustre File System. By acquiring Cluster File Systems, Inc., the leading parallel file system provider, Sun intends to add support for Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) on Lustre and plans to continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware platforms. As previously announced in July 2007, Sun also plans to deliver Lustre servers on top of Sun's industry-leading open source Solaris ZFS solution, which is one of the fastest growing storage virtualization technologies in the marketplace. The agreement further extends Sun's momentum in open source and Solaris and complements the Company's current direction to provide the industry's most complete end-to-end High Performance Computing (HPC) storage solution.
Visit www.sun.com or www.clusterfs.com.
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