Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IDC Revises 2014 Global IT Spending Projections Downward
May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen it comes to global IT spending, any shift of a percentage or two means a shift of tens of billions of dollars up or down. The prognosticators at Gartner took their IT spending projections down a notch a few weeks ago, and now the economic forecasters at IDC have taken a look at the situation and have followed suit.
Specifically, the Worldwide Black Book now says that IT spending across the world will rise by 4.1 percent as measured in both constant currencies and in US dollars. IT spending worldwide across hardware, software, and services rose by 4.5 percent
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Reader Feedback On We’re Integrated, We’re A Platform
May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo thoughts:
The AS/400 (world’s single best brand dumped in the trash) wasn’t as integrated as IBM claimed. From a command line, why did I need to STRQSH to get a console for POSIX commands, or STRSQL to get a console for SQL commands? If I remember correctly, there are not any conflicts in command names. Yes, to a OS/400 newbie the king of Three Letter Acronyms would seem strange, but not any stranger than the operating system from AT&T extended by Berkeley CS students strung out on small pharma. SED? AWK? GREP? Are you kidding me? But maybe they
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Lining Up Power7+ Versus Power8 Machines With IBM i
May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI checked my math and feeds and speeds twice, and I did it again just to be sure. And I would be the first to admit that after many weeks of traveling, most recently at IBM‘s Edge2014 conference in Las Vegas where I got to raise a few pints with my steady IBM i compatriot Dan Burger and some good people at IBM, I might be so tired that I didn’t do the math right. But I think I got it right, and I think that at least as far as base configurations are concerned, the Power7+ machines from
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Reader Feedback On Power8 Processing Power And What Matters
May 19, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI have been accused of a lot of things, and liking hardware is certainly one of them. And, as one avid reader of The Four Hundred points out, maybe this is not the only thing that people care about. I think we do a pretty good job providing balanced coverage of software and hardware as well as management and other issues, but everyone is entitled to their say here in the IBM i community.
So, let’s give Paul Harkins a chance to clear his chest in response to a few stories that have run recently.
To IT Jungle executive staff,
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More Vintage Power Systems Feature Withdrawals
May 19, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou might be thinking that all of the old iron and peripherals for earlier generations of Power Systems machinery were long since removed by IBM from the product catalog, but there are a lot of components that go into a product line. And last week, IBM cut a few more from the catalog.
In announcement letter 914-128, you will see that a bunch of features for Power Systems iron are going to be withdrawn from marketing effective July 31. There are a bunch of cables and power cords and such that don’t interest customers until they discover they need
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IBM i Shops Pay The Power8 Hardware Premium
May 19, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe initial entry Power8 systems were announced a month ago, and we have been analyzing the IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 8 and IBM i 7.2 releases of the operating system over the past few weeks because that software runs on lots of different hardware and the Power8 systems were not going to be available until June. We are getting close to the date when the machines will be available and so I figured I had better get the lead out and do some configuring and pricing.
IBM i customers are not going to be happy, I think. Once again,
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We’re Integrated, We’re A Platform, Let’s Catch The Wave
May 19, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn my 25 years of watching the AS/400 and its progeny, I have had my share–some might say more than my fair share–of crazy ideas about how to modify, grow, stimulate, and vitalize the market for OS/400 and IBM i systems. As I sit here and contemplate the rising market for integrated systems, I am busting my brain to try to figure out how to leverage this wave on the behalf of all of us. While bare-bones rack and tower servers still dominate shipments worldwide, integrated machines, often with pre-tuned and pre-configured software stacks, are finding their places in the
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Admin Alert: When Journaling Slows Down Your System, And What To Do About It
May 14, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreOne interesting feature of the IBM i operating system is that under certain circumstances, journaling can actually slow down batch job performance. Here’s a real-life case study of how journaling can slow down processing and what tools IBM provides to handle the situation.
When Journaling Attacks
After migrating a production IBM i partition to a new Power 7+ machine from Power 6 hardware, a batch job that previously took five hours to complete was now taking over 11 hours to finish and had to be cancelled each time it ran. This package rebuilt an item table in the company’s ERP
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Interpreting Stream File Timestamps
May 14, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreFortunately, IBM i has an Integrated File System (IFS), into which you can store any kind of data your heart desires. Fortunately, IBM provides an API that your programs can use to retrieve information about IFS stream files. Unfortunately, this API is rooted in the Unix world. Unfortunately, timestamps are stored in what I would call a bizarre manner. Fortunately, you are intelligent enough to learn how this API works.
When you need to know programmatically about a stream file, you can use the stat API. Like many things UNIX, stat is idiosyncratic, especially in the way that it reports
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Magic Software Still Has The Touch In Q1
May 12, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSoftware development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises is riding up the wave of mobile and cloud software development and tools to integrate legacy systems into these new-fangled apps and devices.
In the first quarter ended in March, Magic Software reported revenues of $40.95 million, up 22.6 percent from the year ago period. Its costs did not rise as fast as sales, and neither did research and development costs and other operational costs, and so the company was able to bring $4.85 million to the bottom line, an increase of 29.4 percent over the same quarter in 2013.
The company’s cash