Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Where Did My Faulting Guidelines Go?
January 15, 2014 Doug Mewmaw
… Read moreI remember when I first started in the industry how difficult performance management was, especially in the area of memory. The good news was IBM provided clear defined service levels in regards to memory pools.
I’m not sure what year I discovered the guidelines, maybe in the 1980s, but I do remember that the published guidelines were so easy. In fact, I can still see the faded yellow sticky note on my desk with the following guidelines.
After managing the box for years and attending numerous performance sessions and the like, I discovered the guidelines were not only not talked
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US Jobs Hit By Big Chill–IT Workers Relatively Warm
January 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBlame the bad weather that blanketed much of the country in December. Last Friday, the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy only added 74,000 net new jobs, which is a lot less workers than is needed to be hired for the unemployment rate to come down and, more importantly, is needed to get people who have long since stopped working getting a paycheck again.
According to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people who were unemployed in the United States went down by 490,000 to 10.4 million in December, which should be
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IBM Carves Out Watson Business Headquartered In The Big Apple
January 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue wants its analytics business to grow to $20 billion by the end of 2015, and it wants its Watson question-answer machine to do more to help the company make those numbers. And so, last week in New York, Big Blue created a new business unit, called the Watson Group, to further commercialize the technologies that are at the heart of the Jeopardy! playing system.
IBM has been working with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, WellPoint, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Cleveland Clinic, and Elsevier on various uses of the Watson expert system in the medical field. Sloan Kettering is
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Reader Feedback On All Your IBM i Base Are Belong To Us
January 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTimothy,
Merry Christmas and best wishes to you and your staff. I can’t tell you how much we enjoy your analysis and the thoughtful articles you, Dan, and Alex write. IBM should create a Media BP class and invest some co-op marketing funds in you given what you do to educate people about IBM Power Systems.
I want to make a couple additional points in reference to your article, All Your IBM i Base Are Belong To Us.
Lately, we’ve seen a steady trickle of small customers who have been running old software on old boxes, transferring their entire
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IBM Preps Flashy Servers For January Launch
January 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like Big Blue is going to get the jump on its server competitors in previewing its next generation of flash-enhanced servers based on Intel‘s Xeon processors. IBM has an announcement scheduled for January 16 that will include the top brass from its System x, PureFlex, BladeCenter, and Flash Systems business units, but don’t be fooled. Anything IBM does for System x it will eventually do for Power Systems.
As it has been doing for the past several years, IBM will be hosting a webcast to launch its new systems and their flashy storage, and you can sign
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New Year’s High Def, Most Def
January 13, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLike many of you, I think New Year’s resolutions are suspect. While I think it is perfectly reasonable to stop and contemplate everything you have done and everything that you have yet to do after a certain period–the time it takes the Earth to make one circuit around the Sun is as good as any–I know enough about human nature to know that people do the best they can under the circumstances and that this often falls far short of the ideal. This is a good thing, I think, because the perfect can become the enemy of the good enough
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IBM Inks $115 Million Flex System Deal With EU
December 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI have been saying for a while that anything that helps the Power Systems line get stronger helps the IBM i platform live longer. I have a new phrase for you. Anything that helps the Flex Systems converged boxes sell helps IBM i as well. With IBM putting money and mouth behind its Flex Systems platform, and Big Blue needing to stay in the X86 system racket to be a relevant system supplier, all of IBM’s customers need for the Flex Systems to compete and win deals in the market.
It is with this in mind that we tell you
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Reader Feedback On RPG And Java At The Crossroads
December 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHey, Dan:
In reading your article on open software and the IBM i platform, you said: “One of the faulty labels spray painted on the IBM i is that it’s a bad neighborhood for open source.”
I just spent a very frustrating week trying to figure out how to call a PHP program from an RPG program, so I can understand how people can feel that way. I was able to call the program and pass parameters to it, but the output from the PHP program remained behind some wall in Qshell and was unavailable to the RPG program.
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All Your IBM i Base Are Belong To Us
December 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I gave you my best estimate of what the current distribution of machines by processor family and software group was based on some information I have heard through the grapevine from IBM and my own estimates. The data showed a number of remarkable things, among them the fact that there are some pretty old machines out there in the installed base despite the massive improvements in price/performance with successive generations of Power-based systems in the past decade.
What can be done to ensure that this base of customers, which accounts for
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Big Blue Buys Another Cloud-Ish Business
December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has promised Wall Street that it will have a $7 billion cloud business by the end of 2015, and it has gotten out the checkbook once again to help it along its way to that goal.
Last week, IBM said that it has inked a deal with Dexia, a financial services company based in Brussels, Belgium, to take over the operations of its Associated Dexia Technology Services unit. ADTS is a service company not unlike IBM’s own Global Services that provides services to Belfius Bank, Belfius Insurance, International Wealth Insurers (IWI), Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (BIL), Dexia and Dexia