Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Chips To Get A GPU Boost Through Nvidia Partnership
December 2, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhat is old is new again. The AS/400 and its progeny are well acquainted with the concept of coprocessors–adjunct computing elements that hang off the central processor to help the collective do more work. Using graphics processors is all the rage in the high end of supercomputing these days, and now IBM will be working with GPU maker Nvidia to marry its Tesla GPU coprocessors to future Power processors. It is not entirely clear how this will help IBM i shops, but there are some intriguing possibilities.
If there is one rule in the computer business, it is that products
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Minimizing IPL Surprises With The IPL Startup Kit
November 20, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreUnlike a Windows server that can be rebooted several times a year, an IBM i machine is so reliable that it can run for a year or more without being IPLed. But infrequent IPLs can cause their own problems, as functions that should be restarted after an IPL may not necessarily actually restart after an IPL. That’s where it comes in handy to have an IPL startup kit available.
Why Create An IPL Startup Kit?
Since an IBM i box can go so long between restarts, your system startup routine may not include all the functions that were added to
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Alan’s Easy Method For Building A CSV File From A Report
November 20, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreI love simple solutions to common problems, and boy, have I got a good one for you today! Clever and faithful reader Alan Urtubia recently told me how he turned a report into a CSV file and I was impressed. Alan kindly allowed me to pass this tip along to you.
Alan needed to create a CSV file from a report without modifying the RPG program. He found a method to do so without modifying or recompiling any of the original source code.
To illustrate his technique, let’s begin with a simple report. Here’s the DDS for printer file QAD001P:
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Allow Repeated Change With SQL Triggers
November 20, 2013 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreIn my previous article, I described how an RPG program as a before trigger, could be used to synchronize two columns in a table. There is an alternative. Instead of using an RPG trigger, we could have used an SQL trigger. An SQL trigger allows us to be more specific about when the trigger is activated and also has the advantage of portability to other database management systems.
The scenario was where a date, stored as a packed numeric column, was to be converted to a proper date field. This was accomplished by duplicating the packed numeric column (and
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Abacus Offers IBM i Performance Assessment
November 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePower Systems reseller and IBM i cloud provider Abacus Solutions wants to help you figure out the performance bottlenecks in your system. To that end, the company is partnering with Midrange Performance Group to use its Performance Navigator performance monitoring and capacity planning tool to help IBM i shops figure out what is keeping their systems from optimal performance and then using its own systems expertise to make recommendations about what to do to improve performance.
The answer, says Patrick Schutz, director of managed services and support at Abacus, is not to do what Big Blue often does, which is
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Power8 Offers Big Blue And IBM i A Clean Slate
November 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSometime around the middle of next year, IBM will start shipping the initial Power Systems machines based on the Power8 processors. Now is the time to start thinking about the business that Big Blue wants to have with the IBM i platform. And it is also the time for IBM i shops to start thinking about what kind of platform they want from IBM and how they want it to fit into their business and budgets. This is a perfect time to shake things up.
As you will recall, earlier in the summer I went through the details on the
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IBM Brags About Its Cloud Prowess Thanks To SoftLayer
November 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is ratcheting up the marketing machine after having lost out in a contentious bidding war with Amazon Web Services for a $600 million contract to build a private cloud for the US Central Intelligence Agency. To get a different story out there, Big Blue is now citing the data of a third party hosting counter to claim that the IBM Cloud, which means the SoftLayer cloud it bought earlier this year for an estimated $2 billion.
Citing data compiled by HostCabi, IBM is saying that it has over 270,000 Web sites hosted, ranking it second in the world
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IBM Offers Freebie Flex System Chassis To Pump Up PureSystems
November 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs The Four Hundred told you two weeks ago, Big Blue has just put out a new bundle of Flex System converged iron and the IBM i operating system using a Flex p260+ node designed especially for entry IBM i shops. Now, IBM is giving a deal on the underlying Flex System chassis to sweeten the deal a bit more.
In announcement letter 313-113, IBM is offering two models of the Flex System chassis and their power supplies, power cables, and breakout cables at a very steep discount. How does 100 percent grab you?
IBM’s Flex System chassis, front
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IBM Enhances Disk And Flash For Power Systems
November 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe are winding down our coverage of the fourth quarter Power Systems platform announcements, and this week we take a look at the substantial enhancements for I/O controllers, disk drives, and flash storage that IBM has made. There is a little something for everybody in here.
First up are two new flash-based solid state drives that weigh in at 387 GB and 775 GB capacities. These units come in a 2.5-inch form factor and plug into SAS controllers in the Power Systems machines or their remote I/O drawers that hang off of them. The new devices have twice the I/O
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Admin Alert: The 4 GB Access Path Size Time Bomb
November 6, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreMany IBM i shops run enterprise software originally created more than 10 years ago. While this allows you to run older applications on newer hardware, older apps can also cause issues with files that are no longer suitable for today’s processing. This week, let’s look at one older file parameter that if not changed, can stop application processing dead in its tracks: The 4 GB Access Path Size Time Bomb.
Time Bomb, What Time Bomb?
The time bomb I’m referring to is the Access path size (ACCPTHSIZ) parameter in some application files. In older versions of the OS/400 operating system