Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Wheels And Deals For Flex And Power Systems
July 14, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue started its third financial quarter last week while we were on hiatus, and given that most of us don’t expect any major server announcements until some new Intel Xeon E5 iron comes out around the fall, now would be a good time for IBM to start doing a little wheeling and dealing to get grease the skids a bit on some business. I poked around on IBM’s sites to see what is cooking above and beyond what happens in the announcement letters.
If you are looking to buy one of IBM’s Flex System converged infrastructure systems, a deal
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Counting The Cost Of Power8 Systems
July 14, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNow that IBM has put the four-core entry Power8 machine in the field to appease the processing and software group needs of a large portion of the IBM i installed base, it seems like now is a good time to finally get the price/performance analysis comparing Power7, Power7+, and Power8 machines out the door. There are many ways to dice and slice this, and I like to go through this methodically, as you all well know.
I have already compared the base system configurations in terms of their feeds, speeds, price, and raw value for dollar based on IBM’s Commercial
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Admin Alerts: Old IBM i Backups, New Tricks
July 9, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIf you’re like most IBM i administrators, your backup routine is probably set in stone and you don’t really need to change it all that much. It’s solid and it works. But sometimes things happen and you may need to tweak your backup to accommodate new situations or needs. This week, let’s look at three different scenarios where you might have to change or modify your backup solution.
Our Backup Scenarios
Here are three different backup situations you may encounter that could force you to make some small but significant changes to your backup routines.
- Developing a new IBM i
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Advantageous Options
July 9, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreIt happens to all of us. Someone tells us he needs a program just like an existing one, but with one small change. We clone the program, modify the clone, and now instead of one program to maintain when business requirements change, we have two. Before we know it, we have eight or 10 or more. Fortunately, there is a simple but seldom-used technique we can often use to avoid cloning programs.
The technique to which I refer is to use an option parameter. An option parameter controls the behavior of a program. Contrast option parameters to data parameters, which
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The Geezer’s Guide To Free-Form RPG, Part 4: Prototypes and Procedure Interfaces
July 9, 2014 Jon Paris
… Read moreAs promised in Part 3 of this Geezer’s Guide, this time I am going to be looking at the new support for prototypes and procedure interfaces. There are not a large number of enhancements in this area. Mostly they consist of improvements in the compiler’s use of defaults. Of course they also inherit all of the data definition enhancements in areas such as data type and length.
Prototypes
Let’s start with prototypes and see how they have changed. The basic building blocks are dcl-pr and dcl-parm. As with dcl-subf in data structures, the dcl-parm is optional and only needed when
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IT Does Its Part For U.S. Job Growth In June
July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is nothing quite like an economy to send mixed signals. The growth rate in gross domestic product was estimated to grow at an anemic one-tenth of a point in the first quarter when the Bureau of Economic Analysis put out its initial figures in April, numbers that were revised two weeks ago to a decline of 1 percent. Declines in exports and inventories accounted for most of that fall, and it is not clear yet what, if any, effect this will have on the jobs market. Thus far, this signal does not appear to have gotten through the system.
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Gartner Shaves IT Spending Projections For 2014 Again
July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreEvery year starts out anew with its own optimism and then the reality of the year gradually becomes apparent. It may seem like it has been a long time since a year of spending in the IT sector started out strong and got stronger as the year progressed, but it has happened, in 2010 as the world started to come out of the Great Recession. But in recent years, as in lingering recessions of years gone past and during major transitions in the IT sector itself, it does seem like forecasts of IT spending growth get cut as the year
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Reader Feedback On Power S814 Power8 Running IBM i
July 7, 2014 Hey, TPM
… Read moreThank you for the news stories and industry commentary. Coming back to the IBM i fold after eight years, this is exactly what I need.
I have a comment on your P05 Power8 story though. You mention that the memory cap is the same as IBM put on the Power7+ P05 machine, which is not what I have encountered. I have just installed a Power7+ 710 Express and it has a 256 GB memory limit but is a P05 box.
Kind regards,
–Matthew
That cap is only on the Power 720 and Power 720+, which has room for expansion for
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Maxava Puts Up Another $50,000 For iFoundation Grants
July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHigh availability software vendor Maxava has generously opened up its checkbook and for the fourth year in a row has committed funds for the Maxava iFoundation to help support efforts to bolster the IBM i community.
The iFoundation was set up by the New Zealand company, which now has a presence around the globe, four years ago because the company’s managers wanted to actually do something to promote the community. Specifically, iFoundation makes grants to not-for-profit organizations promote the IBM i platform and support activities that are involved with the exchanging of knowledge, skills, or ideas about the IBM i
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Still A Community Of Common Interest
July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhenever we come upon the anniversary of the launch of the AS/400, which passed on a week when The Four Hundred was off on hiatus, most of us are inclined to contemplate and celebrate the genius of the system and the adventurous techies inside of IBM who took a lot of cool ideas about how a system should be designed and created a platform that made it possible for midrange businesses to do sophisticated things without having a lot of propellerheads on their staff to make it all work. This is a very top-down view of the AS/400 and its