• IBM Throttles Storage I/O With New SAN And LTO6 Tape Drive

  October 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled a new Power7-based disk array called the System Storage DS8870 that delivers up to three times the I/O as its previous flagship storage area network (SAN) array. Big Blue’s big fall product launch also brought a new LTO6 tape drive that promises a significant upgrade in backup throughput compared to older LTO5 drives. A new release of the Storwize V7000 midrange SAN management software and a new SmartCloud storage offering round out the storage announcements. The new DS8870 replaces the DS8800 at the top of IBM’s SAN heap, and while the two arrays look very similar

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Thinking About Thinkstuff

  October 8, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  If you are like most business computer users, it’s been a long time since your go-to gadget was a ThinkPad. But outside the declining post-industrial economics, Lenovo‘s client computers are market leaders. This year, with Hewlett-Packard and Dell slipping, Lenovo’s third world first strategy could bring it to first place on a global basis. The company’s next conquests might be in the server business. You don’t think so? Well, EMC does. Soon, your servers might say Lenovo instead of IBM, if not on their outside name tags, very possibly on the inside ones that count. Unusually, the people

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• IBM Tweaks Power Systems, Flex Systems Prices

  October 8, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of last week’s Power Systems announcements, IBM tweaked a bunch of different prices in the Power Systems and Flex Systems lineup. In announcement letter 312-113, Big Blue cut prices on disk drives in its PowerLinux 7R1 Linux-only machines, which already have artificially low prices compared to plain vanilla Power Systems 730 machines that can run AIX or IBM i in addition to Linux. I described the price differential that the PowerLinux machines enjoy here back in May, and the gap just got larger. Feature Old New Percent Type Number Description Price Price Change PowerLinux 7R1 8246 EL0P

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• IBM i 7.1 TR5 Updates Come Out, Like Clockwork

  October 8, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week at the iBelieve NY event hosted by looksoftware, Allison Butterill, the IBM i product offering manager, was hinting about as strongly as she could without getting into the Big Blue doghouse that Technology Refresh updates for the IBM i operating system were going to be on a regular pattern, like the ticking and tocking of a clock, on a April-October bi-annual cadence. So it was not much of a surprise to all of us that IBM i 7.1 got Technology Refresh 5, or TR5 for short, right on time as part of the October 3 announcements last

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• Power7+ Launches In Multi-Chassis Power 770+ And 780+ Systems

  October 8, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As an avid reader of The Four Hundred, you were thinking that IBM was going to start rolling out the Power7+ processors at the high-end of the Power Systems server line, where volumes are lowest and where the company can extract the most money possible out of each chip that comes off the line. And as usual, you were right. And if you are by any chance in the middle of a Power 770 or Power 780 deal, you need to stop and take a hard look at the new Power 770+ and Power 780+ machines that were announced

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• Admin Alert: Seven Things You Should Be Monitoring On Your System

  October 3, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Last year, I wrote a two-part article outlining a basic plan for monitoring and answering IBM i error messages. But while it’s important to detect and answer error messages that require a response right now, it’s equally important to detect developing situations that will cause system problems if left alone. This week, I’ll discuss seven other things besides error messages that you should be monitoring for on your IBM i systems. The Basics For this article, let’s assume you are already using a system monitoring product to send out pager, email, or text alerts whenever an error message shows

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• Alternatives To SQL Literals

  October 3, 2012 Ted Holt

  Literals have caused me grief on more than one occasion. Trying to figure out what a certain number or character literal means in a program has wasted too much of my time, and my time is more valuable to me than money. I have written about this topic before, but I have not talked about literals in SQL. The example I’ve chosen may not be the best one, since the ratio of pounds to kilograms never changes. I chose it because it’s one most people should be able to relate to. The article I just referred to covers the

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• Debugging Server Jobs In Green Screen

  October 3, 2012 Susan Gantner

  A few years ago, I wrote a tip about my favorite way to debug programs using the Service Entry Point (SEP) feature of WDSC, which I have now replaced with RDP Rational Developer for Power Systems. If you’re a WDSC or RDP user and have somehow missed out on using SEPs for debugging, take a look at my tip. If you don’t use WDSC or RDP, you probably didn’t pay any attention to that tip. As it turns out, SEPs aren’t just for the graphical toolset. You can use SEPs with the traditional STRDBG “green screen” debugger as well.

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• Some Things To Ponder On The Impending Power7+ Era

  October 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, the Power7+ era of IBM‘s Power Systems family of servers and now its Pure Systems modular systems is nearly upon us. Or at least the beginning of the era is. It has been a long time since IBM refreshed an entire lineup of Power-based commercial systems from top to bottom, all in one fell swoop, and there is every reason to believe that IBM will have a staggered approach to the Power7+ rollout this time around, too. In fact, I wracked my brains, and I cannot think of when IBM last did such a rollout. Certainly not since

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• LADWP Taps Fresche Legacy for RPG-to-.NET Conversion

  October 2, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has signed a contract with Fresche Legacy (formerly Speedware) to convert key real estate management and water quality monitoring applications from RPG to .NET so that they can run on X64-based Hewlett-Packard servers instead of Power-based IBM i servers. The LADWP is a major figure and a prognosticator in the western water wars of the last century. The city department owns vast swaths of land extending hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles into the Sierra Nevada mountains, and more importantly, the water rights that go with the land. Much of the

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