Ethiopia’s biggest bank has undertaken a huge expansion and modernisation programme based on model 795 and 770 Power Systems. Founded in 1942 and headquartered in Addis Ababa (pictured), Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has more than eight million account holders and annual revenues equivalent to $586 million. It now operates 868 branches across Ethiopia and…

Halcyon Software has launched Exit Point Manager, a rule-based security solution for IBM i. Halcyon’s new security tool protects the main exit points on i-based machines and uses a range of criteria to determine system access including users, IP address, date, time and other datasets. It logs all activity and provides a complete audit trail…

HelpSystems‘ ShowCase division has released a new version of its eponymous IBM i BI tool. ShowCase10 includes new executive dashboards, dynamic drill-down analysis, improved reporting and a redesigned interface. Its creators say that a new ShowCase Deployment Bundle expands basic ShowCase into an ideal data access tool for both technical and end users. With a…

IBM has made a number of tweaks to its Power Systems lineup. First up, buyers of its new 4-core or 6-core Power S814 models (pictured) have the option of choosing IBM i Express Editions. Similar to the old model 720 Express Editions, these work out cheaper but have some restrictions. Secondly, the maximum memory of…

Altera has unveiled new accelerators for Power chips and Nvidia is to introduce compilers to run x86 Linux apps on the processors more easily. Silicon Valley-based Altera makes field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are used to speed up processing (pictured). It announced support for IBM’s OpenPower Foundation in November, 2013, and is listed as a…

As well as landing a mega deal from the U.S. government, IBM and Nvidia have teamed up with Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Together, they plan to set up the POWER Acceleration and Design Centre to “advance the creation and optimisation of research applications on GPU-accelerated OpenPower-compatible systems”. The Centre will bring experts together from the…

IBM’s OpenPower alliance with Nvidia has borne its first fruit in the form of a $325 million contract from the U.S. government’s Department of Energy to build two of the world’s fastest supercomputers. A huge Power9 processor-based machine codenamed Summit will be installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee by 2017. It will…

Maxava is gearing up to introduce multi-threaded IFS replication to help firms back up their ever-increasing mountains of data faster. According to the HA specialist, IBM i replication solutions have generally only been able to run IFS replication in single-threaded mode until now. This, in effect, drip-feeds data replication – which can be a problem…

You’ll be able to catch some of the biggest names in the Power i industry around Europe in November. Dr Frank Soltis, father of the AS/400, Steve Will, IBM’s head of Power Systems and Trevor Perry, leading evangelist for the platform, all feature on this year’s iBelieve Common Europe Tour. The iBelieve roadshow will visit…

Major Power i reseller and managed service provider APSU has secured a £7 million investment from the UK’s Business Growth Fund (BGF). The Cirencester, Gloucestershire-headquartered firm aims to use the cash to recruit more tech staff to support a growing overseas customer-base. It also plans to expand operations to North America and is considering acquisitions.…

Call me biased, but isn’t one of the primary messages from IBM’s latest disappointing quarterly figures simply that it needs to sell more Power Systems? Big Blue certainly made no bones about fingering its Systems and Technology server and storage division for some of its failings in its earnings announcement on Monday. Revenues from Power…

British midrange specialist Proximity is to hold two consecutive events for IBM i users in November. The first, on Tuesday, November 25, will focus on apps modernisation and mobilisation. The second will concentrate on IBM i security on the following day. Both will be held at UK Power Systems’ distributor Avnet‘s new offices in Bracknell,…