Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Arrow Sees Mixed Results For Proprietary Systems
November 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we reported in last week’s issue, Avnet saw a rebound in sales of proprietary systems in the most recent quarter ended in September. And thankfully for those of us who are in the Power Systems community, rival Arrow Electronics, which has a similar-sized business as a master distributor of electronics components and IT wares, also server a systems bounce. But the company also showed how small a portion of its business comes from systems, which is a bit striking.
In the third quarter ended in September, Arrow’s overall revenues rose by 11 percent to $5.61 billion, and
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IBM Will Fill The Hole In The Power8 Line
November 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power8 rollout has seen entry machines with one and two sockets, the so-called scale-out Power S-class machines. And IBM has just condensed the enterprise-class Power 770 and Power 780 machines with the high-end Power 795 to come up with the new scale-up or enterprise Power E-Class machines using the Power8 chips. But there is a pretty big hole in the middle between these two classes of machines, and one that IBM knows it has to fill before too long.
And the word from on high is that IBM will, indeed, fill the gap between the entry and enterprise class.
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IBM Offers Zero Percent Leasing On Power7+, Power8 Iron
October 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are looking to get a shiny new Power Systems machine running the current or most recent past generation of Power processors and supporting IBM i, AIX, or Linux workloads, then the Global Financing unit of IBM has a deal for you. It is a simple 24-month, zero percent financing deal that an elementary school student can understand.
As you can see in this announcement, the deal is dirt simple. You take the cost of selected configurations of Power7+ or Power8 systems, divide by 24, and pay IBM that much every month for the iron. IBM acts as
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Proprietary Systems See Growth At Avnet
October 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe large distributors of systems, storage, networking, and related systems software are perhaps a better barometer of what is going on out there in the enterprise than IBM these days, and that is one of the reasons why The Four Hundred watches very carefully how these companies are doing every quarter. The good news is that Avnet is doing a lot better than Big Blue in the past quarter. And its server business, for both proprietary and X86 machines, is growing.
In the 13 weeks ended in September, Avnet’s overall revenues rose by 7.8 percent to $6.84 billion and net
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Power Systems Show Sequential Revenue Gains
October 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere was not a lot of good news with IBM‘s third quarter financial results when they came out early next week, but one of the few bright spots was that the Power Systems business was at the least showing some sequential growth as the Power8 systems ramp begins in earnest. But the Power Systems division is still down year-on-year, and it is very likely that the declines will continue at least into early 2015.
IBM does not provide revenue figures for its various server lines, and never has included such information in its financial reports. It would be a
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What The IBM Chip Biz Selloff Means To IBM i Shops
October 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM finally went and did it and not only sold off its X86 server line so it could focus on Power Systems and System z mainframes, but it went the next logical step and got itself out of the chip making business. Both decisions were the inevitable consequences of deals long since done, and their consequences will be felt in the decade hence.
In the case of the System x division, IBM’s fate was sealed at the moment that it sold off its PC division to Lenovo Group nearly a decade ago. Big Blue had very sound financial reasons for
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The IBM i *LOOPBACK Interface Problem
October 22, 2014 Hey, Joe
… Read moreHelp! My IBM i credit card software stopped talking to our outside credit card processor. One minute it was working, and the next minute it crashed. When I restart the package, it immediately ends. What’s going on? We can’t process our orders.
–Henry
This is an unusual situation I’ve seen every once in a while, and it usually involves your TCP/IP setup.
Troubleshooting The Issue
The first thing to look at is whether all your TCP/IP interfaces are up and running, and whether anything changed with your TCP/IP setup. Before you call your software provider or IBM, check the
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Paging Cursors
October 22, 2014 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
I would like to share with you one of the techniques I use for paging large lists when using embedded SQL in RPG. This method came about when I needed to write a routine which could be used in both an interactive (green screen) and web environment. There were two main challenges:
- The size of a “page” could vary. This was easy enough to handle, I just had to decide what the maximum page size would be.
- The web interface would not be persistent. This meant that different
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SQL Functions You Didn’t Know You Had, Part 1
October 22, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreWhat if I told you that you may have some potential powerful SQL functions on your system that you are not aware of? What if I told you that I have no idea what those SQL functions are named? What if I told you that you could easily use existing RPG routines in SQL queries? Would you be interested?
(Take a tip from the Little Rascals (AKA Our Gang) and say, “And how!”)
It’s easy to make SQL functions out of the subprocedures in service programs. To illustrate, here’s the source code for an RPG module from which a service
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IBM Tweaks Power-Linux Discount Deal In Europe
October 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has made it pretty clear that it wants more Power Systems customers to adopt Linux for certain parts of their workloads in addition to selling more Power8 systems to customers with Linux workloads that might otherwise buy X86 systems. IBM’s European unit is actually doing something about it to try to push Linux.
In announcement letter ZA14-1126, IBM Europe is giving customers a discount on a Linux support subscription license for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The price is pretty cheap: €1, or about $1.28 in U.S. dollars or about 79 pence in British