Team thinkASG executed the first Southern California POWER7 announcement event, on February 16, 2010 in their Irvine office.  Clients interested to learn about the world changing POWER7 architecture followed the thinkASG signs to the office and knew they had arrived when greeted by smiling faces in black and red polo shirts at the facility marked by the big "7" balloons.  Curiosity was peeked early by the IBM Wall Street Journal ads and the hints to the amazing price / performance enhancements of the latest generation of the IBM Power Server line. IT folks from across So Cal joined us, representing diverse industries including life sciences, automotive, manufacturing, distribution and services, all intrigued to get the latest updates. After a reception, the attendees segmented to AIX / L...

Sunsets Are Beautiful – Goodbye Sun IBM is not always the first to market nor do they always enter the market with the best product, but given time, they find a way to prevail.  Like the proverbial slow and steady tortoise that eventually beat the hare trekking through the forest, IBM whizzed past SUN Microsystems in the UNIX server wars.   A Foreign Culture When IBM introduced the RISC System / 6000 (RS/6000) in the early 1990’s, Big Blue entered the UNIX world of pony tailed geeks wearing sandals – not common place in the white shirt, ties, brick and mortar of mainframe customers.  Although the POWER (Performance Optimized With Enhanced RISC) processor that fueled the RS/6000 was accepted as a decent effort by the UNIX community, AIX was laughed at and scolded for be...

  Please allow me to extend a hearty "Merry Christmas" on behalf of team thinkASG.  We truly hope you and yours are able to enjoy the holiday, look back on 2009 with fond memories and look forward to 2010 with anticipation for all things positive. This year has been an interesting one for our nation, the world; certainly the business clime as we know it.  We have seen unprecedented economic duress that has put the pressure on us to sharpen our skills and at thinkASG this has been a year for "strengthening our core". We thank you for those partnerships that engaged us to help think of ways to save IT investment dollars.  We have worked hard with you to make sure we understand the business issues with which you are faced, to create solutions that will address these issues, and t...

IBM Tivoli has made some important changes to the SVC Entry Edition.  Check out the list of enhancements. The drive cap per cluster is now raised to 250 drives  no cap exists when virtualizing IBM DS3/4/5 disk and ordering through Passport Advantage SVC EE FlashCopy is now included at no additional charge with SVC EE base virtualization SVC v5 with iSCSI support, performance improvements, and integrated solid state drives, among other enhancements

IBM has extended IBM i v5r4 for an additional year. This removes a pending event but there are still good reasons to move to V6R1.  Contact thinkASG for an understanding of the best roadmap for your business. IBM Announcement on change of support withdrawal date.

A team formed from thinkASG employees and customers ran in the Irvine Lake Mud Run in support of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.   The run was to raise awareness and funds for the institutes SEAPLEX program.  The program is designed to study the amount and effects of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean. Congratulations to our team for putting in this awesome effort for such a great cause.

Team thinkASG wishes you all a safe and Happy Halloween! 

"Just a couple words, THANK YOU.  Thank you for your attendance, thank you for your support, thank you for your partnership.  At thinkASG our 2H09 playbook is based on three tenants                - Back to Basics                - Building a Book of Business                - Being Better B(t)ogether Basics means we all shoulder in together to make sure we are efficient, maximum leveraged and totally effective in identifying, progressing and closing the plethora of opportunity we know exists for our spectrum of cost containment infrastructure solutions.  Building a book means making sure we present all of our key partner offerings where we have existing relationships of influence, and offering our solutions as expanded value to where our p...

More and more customers that we talk to are considering cloud computing  and asking for our assistance with the design and infrastructure build out.   VMware vSphere 4 is the first and only OS Cloud Computing platform. VMware is working aggressively to encourage the world to embrace cloud computing by building critical infrastructure resources into ESX (the base technology of vSphere).   vSphere 4 enhances the infrastructure capabilities of VI3 to enable  customers to implement internal clouds with security, high availability, and fault tolerance.  Customers are building internal clouds with plans to enhance their environments with vSphere for expanding their infrastructure to incorporate utility based computing - allowing internal and external clouds to securely federate b...

Have you ever wanted to know when the next paradigm shift will occur in computing?  Will it be mobile computing or large servers?   I think it has started happening.  As I write this, the newest iteration of the Apple iPhone (3G S) hits the street.  Think about the metrics here.  We have reached a mass of users that can listen to music, get directions, play games, manage their servers and VNC into their desktop and home.  We have embarked upon a mobile device that is nearly all things to most people, of course, within the AT&T coverage. Today, this mobile device is about twice as fast and will be reveling in the new 3.0 apps. We shall see more and more industries embrace this technology as the days of multiple devices will get smaller. With the U.S. Senate now getting involve...