Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Rumors Say Power8 Systems Debut Sooner Rather Than Later
March 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the Power Systems division in a secular revenue decline, as Wall Street calls such things, following down the Unix market and Intel having completely revamped its Xeon E5 and E7 chips with “Ivy Bridge” updates, IBM can’t afford to wait a day longer than necessary to get the Power8 processors into the field to counter the push that the Intel marketing machine will bring to bear on Unix and proprietary platforms. So it is not a surprise, then, that the word on the street is that the Power8 chip will appear in machines sooner rather than later this year.
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Admin Alert: Setting Up IBM i TCP/IP Host Routes
March 5, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreOn an IBM i partition, you may need to route IP traffic for a particular server over a specific IP address. You could be doing this to segment network traffic or because you can only reach a host server through a specific interface (say an interface that has access to a firewall). Here’s the drill for modifying your IBM i TCP/IP routing entries to set up host routing.
The Situation
The best way to demonstrate how to set up IBM i host routing is by showing you an example. So let’s start with a single IBM i partition with a
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Use Wireshark To Diagnose IBM i Communications Problems
March 5, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreTroubleshooting communications problems is akin to dealing with teenagers. There’s plenty of room for blame and finger-pointing, and resolving a problem sometimes seems impossible. I don’t have anything to help you with teenagers, but I can recommend a free tool for communications problems. It’s called Wireshark, and here’s how to use it with IBM i communications traces.
First, visit www.wireshark.org to get Wireshark. It is a network protocol analyzer that runs under Microsoft Windows and several operating systems of the Unix flavor. Like the best things in life, Wireshark is free.
Next, install the QSPTLIB library. This is a library
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IBM Offers Flex System Bundle Down Under
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are shopping for Flex System iron down under in Australia or New Zealand, then IBM has a deal for you. Or, more precisely, it has two deals for you because it treats the two countries differently because they have different currencies.
The deal is called the Innovate on IBM Flex Systems and Save Bundle, and you can get the details about the Australian version in announcement letter A314-022 and the New Zealand one is in announcement letter NZ314-022.
The deal is only available for Flex System bundles with Xeon-based nodes and are aimed at supporting virtualized servers
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IBM Makes More Room In The Catalog For Power8 Stuff
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs generally happens before a big product launch, IBM is gradually winding down sales of earlier generation Power Systems processor cards and various peripherals and giving resellers and customers ample warning that it will stop peddling certain products.
In announcement letter 914-047 dated February 25, a bunch of things were ripped out of the Power Systems catalog with two different effective dates. On May 2, a bunch of routing indicators for Power Cloud Integrated Solutions, PureApplication, Smart Analytics Systems, and Balanced Warehouse Solutions are being withdrawn. I haven’t the foggiest what this means, and I am pretty sure you don’t
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Proprietary And Unix Systems Decline In Q4, X86 Up A Smidgen
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLet me start by saying that I did not create the language that is used in the computer business, particularly in the server racket, with a few exceptions. I don’t like the terms “proprietary,” and I don’t like the terms “industry standard” as if all of the customers and vendors got together and created a non-proprietary machine. Best I can figure, the X86 architecture is still pretty much ruled by Intel and Windows was still the dominant operating system on X86 machines.
It is with this in mind that we go over the final quarter of server sales for 2013
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IBM Layoffs Begin In The U.S. And Canada
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSeveral weeks ago, IBM started a round of layoffs that it hopes to have completed by the end of the first quarter and from which it will book approximately $1 billion in charges. The next round of layoffs were expected to start on February 26, last Wednesday, but the rumors are that CEO Ginni Rometty was giving a big speech at the Mobile World Congress to talk about creating mobile Watson applications and the PR machine did not want to step on that story. So layoffs started in the United States and Canada on February 27.
Under normal circumstances, as
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Power Systems Coming To The SoftLayer Cloud
March 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM did not just buy public cloud SoftLayer last year because it needed to acquire a customer base and revenue stream to bolster its efforts to sell cloud-based infrastructure and software services. Big Blue bought SoftLayer to get a unique set of skills and operational experience in running clouds, which is distinct from the system and application outsourcing business in which IBM is already an expert. Perhaps the expert.
SoftLayer is a lean-and-mean operation, and has built up a fleet of over 120,000 servers in 13 datacenters. The machines have minimalist designs and come from motherboard and whitebox server maker
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Auto-Answering Record Lock Errors And More On Returning An IBM i Box
February 26, 2014 Hey, Joe
… Read moreMy Power i system is driving me crazy with RPG1218 record lock messages. Because of the way one of our applications was written, we receive RPG1218 messages several times a day. The record lock only lasts a minute. When we enter a retry on the locked record, the system is always able to update the record. Is there any way to auto-answer these record locks?
–Bert
Well the first thing I’d do is have your applications staff figure out why that program is causing so many record locks and fix it. (Ha.) Barring that, I may have a solution that
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The Case Of The IBM Systems Director And RBAC
February 26, 2014 Jeff Waldbillig
… Read moreIt was a dark night on a network that knew how to keep its secrets. Actually, that was last night. Today was going to be a busy day working on the network that knew how to keep its secrets. I’d been temporarily moved from my nightshift role at the help desk to the daylight hours to cover for a coworker who was out with an extended illness, but I was beginning to wonder if my late-night auction surfing had attracted some attention I did not need.
My phone rang, and I paused for a moment as I considered that this