Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Big Blue Talks About IBM i And PureSystems
April 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the $2.3 billion sale of the System x division to Lenovo Group back in late January, IBM is selling off the underlying X86 hardware, chassis, switches, and other components of the PureSystems line to the Chinese PC maker and server wannabe. But don’t get confused. IBM has every intention of selling regular rack and tower Power Systems machines, will be making its own storage and Power nodes for the PureSystems machines, and will be OEMing the remaining hardware from Lenovo to continue selling PureSystems.
PureSystems will still be a significant platform for IBM going forward, but one that is
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Admin Alert: Elements Of An IBM i Incident Management Plan, Part 1
April 2, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreHow do you react when there’s an issue with your IBM i partition? This isn’t an easy question as IBM i incidents can involve many different areas, including networking/infrastructure, applications, storage, performance, and third-party vendors. This issue and next, I’ll outline the critical elements of an IBM i incident management plan and how it helps you quickly determine what to do and who to call when problems come up.
The Elements Of IBM i Incident Management
Here are the critical elements I believe every IBM i incident management plan should include.
- What type of monitoring are you doing: Manual, automatic,
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Embedded SQL Exception/Error Handling
April 2, 2014 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreAt times, I wish embedded SQL would act more like RPG. A case in point is with exception/error handling.
Embedded SQL assumes you are using SQLCODE or SQLSTATE to check whether or not each statement worked. In RPG, the equivalent would be have an E extender on every file operation code and checking the %error() after the operation code.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get embedded SQL to cause the program to fail if it gets an unexpected error–just like RPG? Well, you can, just by adding one line of code after each SQL statement.
Figure 1 shows
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Deal For Windows Server 2012 On System x Expires Today
March 31, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs you all know well, the IBM i platform exists in a sea of hostile Windows Server waters. In many IBM i shops, Windows is the other application and database platform, and sometimes it is running the application layer for code that uses DB2 for i as its main database. So maybe it is not hostile, but cooperative.
No matter. The fact is, Windows Server is part of the IT budget, and as long as IBM sells System x servers and as long as IBM i shops buy them, then any deal IBM gives for the Windows platform leaves more
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IBM Builds Out With Software Stack Smarter Counter Fraud
March 31, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we have pointed out a number of times now, IBM is gradually building an arsenal of application software and related services to make up for the fact that it ceded the market for ERP, supply chain, and customer relationship management to others in the 1990s and 2000s. IBM has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring companies with expertise in analytics, security, sales, and marketing and it is now moving into counterfraud applications.
The Smart Counter Fraud effort brings together experts from its Software Group, Global Services, and IBM Research units to take on fraud and various kinds of
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Micron, Altera, And Servergy Join OpenPower Alliance
March 31, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe OpenPower Foundation, formerly known as the OpenPower Consortium and dedicated to the advancement and opening up of the technology related to the Power8 and future Power processors, has three new and publicly announced members. They include Micron Technology, Altera, and Servergy.
As far as I know, the OpenPower Foundation had 14 paid members as of last week, when I talked to IBM about the effort, and presumably this included those three companies mentioned above. (I talked to Big Blue before these announcements, but their paperwork was done). I have been told that there are over 100
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Power8 Launch Rumored To Start At The Low End
March 31, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs The Four Hundred has already told you, it looks like IBM is going to be moving the launch of Power8-based systems up a bit to try to blunt the attack by Intel‘s latest Xeon E5 and E7 processors, which have been refreshed last September and this February, respectively. We have heard rumors to expect the Power8 systems launch in late April or early May. New data is pointing to that time, and other rumors we have heard are suggesting IBM will do the launch in a different part of the market than it did with the Power7 and
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Graphically Setting Up TCP/IP Host Routes With System i Navigator
March 19, 2014 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI read your article on setting up IBM i TCP/IP host routes. But the article only contained green screen commands for host routing. Is there a way to graphically set up IBM i routes?
–Jose
You can graphically work with TCP/IP Host Routes by using the System i Navigator program that comes with IBM i Access for Windows (OpsNav).
To get to a partition’s host routes for IPv4 configurations in OpsNav, open the Network→TCP/IP Configuration→IPv4→Routes node under your target partition. To work with a partition’s IPv6 host routes, open the Network→TCP/IP Configuration→IPv6→Routes node. Your OpsNav tree will look something
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Quick And Handy RPG Input
March 19, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreLife was so much simpler when terminals and printers ran on twinax, Java was an island or coffee, and all my data was structured in records. I don’t have to fool with wiring at present, and the Java programming language is to me only an occasional, plodding nuisance, but data is a different story.
Unstructured, non-relational data comes at me from all directions at an ever-increasing velocity, and no wonder, as stream I/O is the standard for much of the computing world. (For the benefit of anyone who’s interested, I’ve added a second article to the end of this article.
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IBM Offers Europe A Power Blade-To-Flex Migration Deal
March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreResellers pushing new Flex System nodes to customers with BladeCenter blade server machines using Power-based nodes can get a deal from IBM to help cushion the blow migrating to Power-based Flex System nodes. The deal is being offered to resellers across Europe, but there is a bug in Big Blue’s announcement system and it is only showing up for resellers in Italy as we go to press. IBM is advertising this deal in websites and marketing campaigns, and resellers are supposed to pass the rebate down to the solution providers, who in turn pass it on to end user customers.