Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Server Racket Concentrates Like Orange Juice In A Can
June 9, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen I was a kid, and we had orange juice concentrate because it was cheaper and easier to store. I remember popping off the lid to reconstitute the juice and, I won’t lie, scooping out a little bit to eat off a spoon like it was some kind of glorious, natural popsicle. The concentration that is going on in the server market doesn’t taste like that, and for those who make and sell machines, it probably tastes a bit more like bile.
I used to joke a few years back that I was really worried that there might only be
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Reader Feedback On Power7+ Versus Power8
June 9, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI enjoy reading your analysis of the new models (yes, I’m one of those that actually read the data tables). I would suggest that at the entry point (for the i models) $ per CPW doesn’t offer much insight into best bang for buck.
At the entry point (I will call that up to 50 or perhaps 75 users with mostly or all 5250 interactive application), there is now a lot more CPW than can be utilized. To me it would seem that a better comparison would be to take a base i system config with moderate to low memory
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Thanks For The Cheaper, Faster Memories
June 9, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe new Power8 systems started shipping last Friday, and this week, in our ongoing coverage of the new hardware and software technologies embodied in the systems, we are going to take a look at the memory subsystems in the new machines. There are a slew of new technologies that have been added to the Power8 machines so the memory can keep the processor cores well fed and humming along through their work.
The Power8 chip has two DDR3 main memory controllers, one on either side of the chip. Some of the DDR interfaces that were previously on the Power7+ controller
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IBM Gooses FlashSystem With Skinnier Flash, Faster Ports
June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the series of hardware announcements that Big Blue rolled out in May, the FlashSystem line of all-flash arrays that IBM got through its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems was updated. Among other new features, the new arrays have faster ports linking back to servers and can now be equipped with skinnier flash modules. The arrays also start at a lower initial capacity, which gives them a lower initial price and therefore makes the more amenable to the budgets of midrange and enterprise shops who want to have shared flash but who don’t want to have to lay
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IBM’s Server Business Has Its Downs In The First Quarter
June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe good news is that server shipments continued to rise in the first quarter, despite a slew of pressures weighing down some of the economies of the world. The bad news is that revenues are still dropping.
In the first quarter, the box counters at Gartner reckon that server unit shipments rose 1.4 percent to 2.36 million machines, but sales were off 4.1 percent across all server sizes and types, with only $11.36 billion in total revenues.
For its part, IBM is being hit with a kind of triple witching effect. The System z mainframes are in the middle of
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Reader Feedback On IT Jungle
June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI want to congratulate the whole team at IT Jungle for your excellent and aggressive coverage of IBM i technology and business concerns. (I didn’t check all the To: boxes in this web form, but please share my comments with your whole team, as may be appropriate.)
IT Jungle has become my primary source of wake-up calls about IBM business and the i operating system. In my opinion, you have become the new leader for timely technical information. You are making me look really good at my company for “my” ability to stay ahead of the curve in managing our
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Threading The Needle Of Power8 Performance
June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI am going to take a break from the price/performance comparisons between earlier Power machines and the new Power8 systems and talk about something a little bit different from but still intimately related to the performance that customers can expect from the latest IBM i operating system releases as they run on the new iron and on older Power7 and Power7+ machines. The issue is threading, and IBM has done some pretty clever things to help the operating system and processors juggle more work and boost throughput.
Most modern processors have some form of simultaneous multithreading, or SMT,
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The IBM i Journal Cache Sweeper Knob
May 28, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreAfter publishing my latest article on improving IBM i journal performance with journal caching, IBM Rochester Software Engineer Chad Olstad wrote in with the following comment, which expands on journal caching and offers an alternate view of journal caching’s relationship with commitment control.
“I wanted to point out the one thing you did not mention in the article is the cache sweeper knob, which controls how [old] stale cached journal entries are allowed to be before they are flushed to disk. [The cache sweeper knob] can be customized by the user as of V6R1 via [the Change Journal Attributes
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The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 3: Data Structures and More Data Definitions
May 28, 2014 Jon Paris
… Read moreIn my previous tip on the new free-form RPG support I discussed the basics of the new methods for defining data in RPG. In this tip I will be covering some additional aspects of the new style data definitions that are not so obvious from a simple reading of the documentation.
More on Data Definitions
Until now, if you wanted to ensure that all fields of a specific type (currency for example) used a common definition, you used the LIKE keyword. The one small problem with this was that you could not change the data type of the cloned field.
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Are You A Tactician Or A Visionary?
May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAre you a tactical IT shop, or a visionary one that has figured out not only how to implement cutting-edge technology, but convince your organization to keep plowing money into systems and software? If you want your company to make more money, a forthcoming survey from IBM suggests you need to have a vision.
At the Edge2014 event hosted by IBM’s Systems and Technology Group in Las Vegas last week, general manager Tom Rosamilia, who is familiar to the IBM i community as a former general manager running the Power Systems division before he was moved on up to the