Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
IBM And Lenovo Settle Down Strikes In Shenzhen Plant
March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we reported in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, IBM‘s $2.3 billion deal to sell of its System x server division to Lenovo Group touched off a protest in Big Blue’s factory in Shenzhen, an industrial area outside of Hong Kong.
The Shenzhen facility is important to Power Systems shops for a number of reasons. First, the factory doesn’t just make X86-based servers. For the past several years, it has been used as a staging area to refurbish Power-based systems and, while IBM doesn’t like to talk about it much, the factory also manufactures low-end Power
-
Disk Array Sales Rebound A Bit, Reversing Declines
March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDespite all of the software wizardry that storage array makers have come up with to help customers make better use of the capacity in their devices, revenues rose modestly in the fourth quarter. The revenue gains were driven by what can be now thought of as a decent uptick in aggregate capacity shipments, but to be perfectly clear the growth does not approach what seemed to be normal for almost two decades.
In the quarter ended in December, the analysts at IDC reckon that the world’s companies, institutions, and governments consumed a whopping 10.2 exabytes of capacity across all types
-
Systems Of Engagement
March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe language may change from time to time in the computer industry, but the problems do not. Vice presidents of data processing are now chief information officers. Instead of trying to create massive systems to deal with telemetry from an array of radar stations, as IBM did with the SAGE project in the 1950s and what at the time was the most ambitious computer ever built (with over 60,000 vacuum tubes and an estimated cost of between $8 billion and $12 billion when it was completed in 1963), we have the Googleplex of well over 1 million servers that spans
-
What Should I Monitor For On My IBM i Partition?
March 12, 2014 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI want to shore up my IBM i monitoring plan but I need ideas on what to monitor for. I know a problem when it hits me, but I’m not always sure what to look for. What should I be monitoring?
–Victoria
IBM i and Power i system monitoring is an important topic because like a shipping manager, your number one priority is to keep the production lines running. You need to find problems both before and after they occur. Here are the general areas I believe every IBM i administrator should be watching on a daily basis. In the
-
Quick And Handy RPG Output
March 12, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreAre you one of those people who thrive on complexity? Do you love bureaucracy and paperwork? If so, you’re reading the wrong newsletter. I like everything to be as simple as possible. Today I have a simple routine that is a time-saver for me. I hope you find it useful.
My little routine lets me print anything with minimal effort. I can print character variables, numeric variables, data structures, the results of expressions, and anything else that can be assigned to a character variable. I developed it because I needed a quick way to add output to RPG programs without
-
Who Needs Custom Perspectives In RSE?
March 12, 2014 Susan Gantner
… Read moreWho needs custom perspectives in RSE? Just about everyone. At least everyone could probably benefit from them. As you know if you’ve read my earlier tips, I’m a huge fan of the Remote System Explorer that is part of WDSC, RDi and/or RDP. But I rarely use it as it comes “out of the box” from IBM/Rational. I customize it in many ways, including creating my own custom perspectives.
I use custom perspectives primarily for two purposes:
- To provide a good target for “reset perspective. . . “
- To create special-purpose editing environments.
In this tip, we’ll look at
-
Moving Apps To The Cloud Saves Money, Users Say
March 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhether or not moving applications to the cloud actually saves money or not is one of those arguments that is not going to go away any time soon. And like most things, the true answer to the question is: Well, that depends.
Frustrated by that answer, the analysts at Computer Economics got on the horn and found some companies that have moved their applications–lock, stock, and barrel–from on premises to a variety of software as a service (SaaS) alternatives. The company did detailed interviews on seven customers, including two manufacturers, a life sciences organization, a wholesale distributor, a systems integrator,
-
IBM Gives 50 Percent Compression Guarantee On Storwize V7000
March 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI have no idea when this deal was announced by IBM, but considering how hard the company is pushing the Storwize V7000 disk arrays these days, I thought I should point it out to you just in case you are shopping for one of these puppies for your rack system or even your PureFlex setup if you are going that route.
IBM has thousands of customers who are using the Storwize family of arrays, one of the many storage products that the company bought rather than developed itself. Among many features, the Storwize V7000 arrays have a Real-Time Compression
-
IBM Rumors: Big Layoffs In Hardware, Protests In China
March 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe rumor mill is going round and round with talk about IBM‘s layoffs during the first quarter. The chatter as last week was coming to a close is that the layoffs are going to hit the Systems and Technology Group pretty hard and that there were protests at an IBM manufacturing plant in China.
It is not hard to figure out that Systems and Technology Group would be taking some hits, with sales and pretax earnings down in the fourth quarter. As we previously reported, sales at IBM’s hardware unit were down 26.1 percent to $4.26 billion in
-
Cheap Servers Sell Like Hotcakes, Big Systems Not So Much
March 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe box counters at Gartner gave their assessment of the state of the systems business in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, and this week we turn to the market data from IDC to get a slightly different view of the same system landscape.
The most jarring thing about the modern systems market–and something that is making it difficult for all server makers to meet their price points and profit margins–is how sales of rack and modular machines to hyperscale datacenters continues to ramp on public clouds and public Internet application providers such as Google, Facebook,