Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Admin Alert: Elements Of An IBM i Incident Management Plan, Part 2
April 16, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLast issue, I started outlining how to set up an IBM i incident management plan, going through four of the seven elements that are crucial for IBM i monitoring and response. This issue, let’s finish up and discuss the final elements an IBM i incident management template should provide.
The Elements Of IBM i Incident Management, Revisited
As presented last time, here are the critical elements every IBM i incident management plan should include.
- What type of monitoring are you doing: Manual, automatic, or hybrid?
- What are you monitoring for?
- Call trees: Who should be alerted when a problem
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Here’s Help For A Huge Hardship
April 16, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreMultimillion-row tables are more and more common in IBM i shops these days. Querying those monsters can be a strain on the system. Fortunately, IBM gave us some help in DB2 for i 7.1.
The help comes in the form of a new wrinkle in indexing. The smart people who produce the world’s greatest relational database management system found a way to store aggregate (summary) information in encoded vector indexes. Here’s an example.
Assume a table (physical file) of sales history, such as this one:
create table Sales ( ID integer as identity, Invoice dec (9,0), Line dec (3,0), InvoiceDate -
The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 2: Data Structures and More
April 16, 2014 Jon Paris
… Read moreIn the first part of this series I discussed why I thought that RPGers should care about the new free-form support. Since you may have seen other articles on the basics of this support, I thought in this tip I’d focus on a few examples of how existing D-specs are converted to the new format so you can see how it all works.
Before we begin though, let’s have a quick review of the basics of this new style of data definition.
All definitions begin with a declaration operation code. For D-spec type definitions these take the form dcl-X where
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In Mainframe We Antitrust: System/360 Compels System/3
April 14, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe mainframe, as first embodied in the System/360 and carried forward to the System z, celebrated its 50th birthday last week. And while we technically do not cover the mainframe in this publication, the very fact that IBM created the mainframe and was paranoid about losing this fast-growing and lucrative business is perhaps the very reason that the IBM i platform as we know it exists.
I am not going to go through the entire history of the IBM mainframe line. So many others did that last week, and that is all interesting and fun reading. Over at EnterpriseTech,
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Reader Feedback On Penton Media IBM i Shutdown And Women In IT
April 14, 2014 Hey, Dan
… Read moreApril 1, 2014, marks the end of a publication, but the end of the “NEWS” culture ended not very long after Dave Duke sold his company, Duke Communications, to Penton Media.
The “corporate” mentality never understood or believed in the passion of NEWS’ editors, tech editors, contributors and readers and passionate and instrumental folks such as Dale Agger and I took advantage of exit opportunities when we saw where this was inevitably headed.
Looking back . . . at Dave Duke’s invitation, I joined Bob Tipton and Chuck Lundgren in 1986 to provide Dave with strategic advice on content in
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IBM Schedules Power Systems Event For April 28
April 14, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe cat is officially out of the bag. IBM is hosting a big launch event on April 28 and it is all about Power Systems. Well, and Watson and big data and analytics and the manufacturing operations at IBM Microelectronics, from the looks of the agenda. So it may be the long wait for Power8-based systems is finally over.
You can register for the online event at this link, and at the moment as we prepare to go to press, the specific time of the launch has not yet been announced for that Monday.
The agenda for the launch
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Big Blue Launches IBM i 7.1 TR8 As 7.2 Looms
April 14, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like IBM did not want for IBM i 7.1’s Technology Refresh 8 update to get lost in the shuffle of various Power Systems, operating system, and systems software announcements that are no doubt on the way with the impending launch of Power8 processors and systems that use them. Last week, IBM put out TR8 without nary a warning to the usual gang of suspects, including those of us here at the Four Hundred stack of newsletters.
As you can see from announcement letter 214-097, this is the first of what will be two TR updates for IBM
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A Mixed Bag For IT In The Latest Jobs Report
April 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe economy in the United States is plugging along but not really zooming ahead if job creation is any measure of a real recovery. In March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the part of the Department of Labor that tracks employment statistics and comes up with the official unemployment rate, reckons that the economy added 192,000 net new workers. That is just shy of the 200,000 to 250,000 workers that the economy has to create to keep up with population growth.
According to the latest report from the BLS, the number of people who were unemployed in the United
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GlobalFoundries Is The Front Runner To Buy IBM Chip Biz
April 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf the rumor mill is correct–and stories with concrete details that appear in the Wall Street Journal usually are–then it looks like IBM is one step closer to selling off its chip manufacturing business. And it looks like GlobalFoundries, the former chip-making arm of Advanced Micro Devices that is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, is the front-runner to acquire the business.
According to a report in the WSJ last week, Intel and GlobalFoundries are in discussions with Big Blue to acquire its chip making unit, IBM Microelectronics, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, which is another
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IT Spending Projections Revised A Smidgen Upward
April 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe prognosticators at Gartner keep a constant eye on the state of the global economy and revenues each quarter at all of the publicly traded IT suppliers. So they are constantly adjusting their projections for IT spending, and last week, the company did it again. Luckily for all of us, the news is thumbs up instead of thumbs down.
According to the IT spending models developed under the guidance of Richard Gordon, managing vice president at the company, global IT spending as measured in U.S. dollars will rise by 3.2 percent to $3.771 trillion. This is a tad bit higher