Upcoming Meeting Notice

The Association of Service and Computer Dealers International (ASCDI) is a 30 year old, worldwide non-profit organization made up of companies who provide technology solutions, technical support or value added services to the business community.

Members and non-members are invited to learn how to grow your business, find new business opportunities, hear from industry representatives and enjoy some fabulous networking events at our conferences:


2010 EUROPEAN CONFERENCE
June 23 - 25, 2010
Dublin, Ireland - Radisson Blu Royal Hotel

2010 SUMMER REGIONAL RECEPTION
July 14, 2010
Minneapolis, MN

2010 FALL CONFERENCE
October 6 - 8, 2010
San Francisco, CA

Click here for more information on ALL ASCDI MEETINGS, to view the agendas, lodging details, attendee lists and to REGISTER AT THE EARLY BIRD RATE.

Conferences
Data communications
Financing
HP
IBM
Market
Open source
Security

Conferences

COMMON unveils new Fall Conference and Expo to fill needs of community
COMMON announced a new educational conference offering, the COMMON Fall Conference and Expo, designed to satisfy the community’s needs.  Though not as large as the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition, this new three-day Power Systems educational and networking event will be packed with 112 educational sessions on a large variety of topics, including vendor-led sessions.  As expected from all COMMON conferences, attendees will have the opportunity to further enhance their education through numerous networking events and meeting with leading solution providers in the tabletop-style expo.  The inaugural event will be held in San Antonio, Texas from October 4 – 6, 2010.
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Data communications

Third I/O demonstrates extraordinary Fibre Channel IOPS and port scalability
Third I/O Incorporated announced the results of a collaborative benchmark with Emulex Corporation, which achieved a sustained data rate of over 2.7 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) using Third I/O's Iris Storage Platform. In addition, this benchmark showed Fibre Channel port scalability of 98% across 24 ports in a single system. What makes these results even more incredible is that 100% of the benchmarked configuration was created using shipping and proven hardware and software. The configuration showcased a Hewlett Packard DL 370 G6 server configured as the Third I/O Iris Platform. The system contained 24 ports using Emulex LPe12002 and LPe12004 8Gb/s Fibre Channel adapters. This server was selected based on its Intel Nehalem architecture, extraordinary memory and PCI Express bandwidth. Six client systems were used to insure that the Third I/O system was placed under maximum load. Each client system contained a single Emulex LPe12004 adapter. All clients were running Windows 2008 Enterprise Server x64. The open source IOmeter benchmark was used to verify I/O data rates, as it is recognized as a standard performance tool in the industry.
Visit www.thirdio.com.
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Financing

S&P issues 'B+/B' rating on CIT Group; outlook positive
Standard & Poor's Ratings Services has assigned its B+/B counterparty credit rating to CIT Group. The outlook is positive. At the same time, S&P assigned its BB rating to the company's first-lien secured credit facility, indicating high confidence of full recovery of principal. The ratings agency also assigned it B+ rating to the company's second-lien secured notes and B rating to the unsecured debt, reflecting those issues' lower relative recovery prospects. Approximately 30% of the firm's unsecured debt was extinguished in bankruptcy, bolstering capital. (The full benefit to capital will be realized incrementally, as loan and lease discounts established as a result of the application of "fresh-start accounting" [FSA] accrete during the life of the assets.) Future credit costs will also be reduced because CIT marked its loan and lease portfolio to market upon emergence from bankruptcy. Additional marks are possible; however, S&P believes the improving economy and aging credit cycle may limit these. CIT has minimal debt maturing during the next few years, giving it additional time to implement its bank-centric strategy.
Visit www.cit.com.
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HP

HP prepares 3-layer storage cake
HP is readying a three-layer storage product as part of its converged infrastructure strategy to collapse multiple server, storage and networking products into single high-level data centre IT units.  Garry Veale, EMEA StorageWorks VP, said an announcement will come in the second half of this year. We should envisage a three-layer offering with a storage drive enclosure, a "3U mount unit" as the base. Above this is a set of storage processor blades and topping this tasty filling is the storage management software. The 3U mount unit contains SAS or SATA or, presumably, solid state drives (SSD), and an active:active pair of controllers for high-availability. The supported interfaces will be iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), as well as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand. Customers will add 3U mount units to scale out capacity in a single virtual pool. They'll add storage blades to scale out processing capacity separately if they wish. Veale mentioned that HP is also looking for a new architecture for scale-out cloud storage using Ibrix technology.
Visit www.hp.com.
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IBM

Change in hours -- parts ordering and designated parts sales locations (DPSL)
Effective August 1, 2010, orders for IBM maintenance parts will be taken Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m, Eastern time. This change is being implemented due to the low order volume outside of these stated times. Orders for parts submitted via the Internet (or other means) will be handled the next business day, if received after 7 p.m. Eastern time.

Coincident with this change in times for ordering maintenance parts, IBM's DPSL locations (shown below) will only be open during normal business hours for their applicable location. For your reference, DPSLs are in the following locations: Lyndhurst, NJ; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Honolulu, HI; Bensenville, IL; Forest Park, GA; La Miranda, CA; Puerto Rico; and Tempe, AZ.

For complete details on the sale of IBM parts and procedures, please refer to the IBM Sale of Maintenance Parts Bulletin and the Procedures for Sale of IBM Maintenance Parts Bulletin. On the effective date of this change, these Bulletins will be appropriately updated.
Visit www.ibm.com.
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Market

Semiconductor industry set for highest annual growth in 10 years
Ten years after the chip business’s whopping 36.7 percent expansion of 2000, the industry is expected to finally break the 30 percent barrier once again in 2010, with revenue set to rise to $300.3 billion, up 30.6 percent from $229.9 billion in 2009. However, unlike the Internet-crazed spike in 2000, growth in chip sales this year will be driven by real fundamental supply/factors that slowly have been gaining momentum during the past 12 months. This year will mark an all-time annual high for global semiconductor revenue, eclipsing the previous record of $274 billion set in 2007 by about 9 percent, according to a recent iSuppli forecast. The stage for strong annual growth in 2010 was set by unusually robust conditions in the first quarter. A major factor driving demand in the first quarter and beyond is consumer demand for electronic products, which continues to surpass expectations. Strong sales growth is predicted for 2010 in PCs, mobile handsets, LCD-TVs and other semiconductor-rich electronic systems. This will propel global factory revenue for electronic systems to a record high of $1.55 trillion in 2010, up 10.4 percent from $1.4 trillion in 2008. The previous high for electronic OEM revenue was $1.53 trillion in 2008.
Visit www.isuppli.com.
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Open source

xTuple continues to build momentum by meeting market demand for open source ERP
xTuple announced it has closed another very successful quarter with revenue up over 20 percent from first quarter 2009. This year-over-year growth was in part due to the expansion of its international partner network, which translated into multiple new companies outside of the US deploying xTuple’s world class ERP solution. Domestically, a number of new commercial customers came onboard as well, including EA Patten, a manufacturer of precision machined parts and custom formed tubing, providing solutions to the Aircraft and Aerospace industry since the 1940's. “We see commercial open source solutions as logical replacements for legacy platforms like the AS/400,” said Ralph Walsh, president of R. Walsh Associates, which has delivered trusted IT solutions to EA Patten for years. “Today, an xTuple ERP system running on a Linux server can provide greater functionality while costing a fraction of maintaining the old system.” On the community front, xTuple added 4,000 community members (bringing its global user community to more than 25,000 active members). Downloads of the free, open source PostBooks Edition of xTuple ERP surpassed 360,000 and the project remains the #1 most active project on the SourceForge.net open source portal.
Visit www.xtuple.com.
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Security

nuBridges file transfer and data security solutions support IBM i 7.1
nuBridges announced that it is providing a seamless and secure transition for customers adopting IBM i 7.1, IBM’s latest operating system release built for the IBM Power System server line. The company has successfully completed compatibility testing for its nuBridges Exchange i secure file transfer solution and its nuBridges Protect advanced encryption, tokenization and key management software with IBM i 7.1. A long-time provider of leading business integration and data security products to IBM i users and a seven-year IBM partner, nuBridges used an early release version of IBM i 7.1 to complete the compatibility testing of its products to coincide with IBM’s official April 23 release. nuBridges solutions are widely used in the IBM i market for securely operating business-critical processes such as credit card encryption for PCI DSS compliance, B2B exchange of purchase orders and invoices, and internal transfers of confidential information.
Visit www.nubridges.com.
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