Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Some Tweaks On Deals And Flex System Price Changes
September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is the fall, and IBM is trying to wrap up its third quarter in two weeks. So don’t expect a lot of wheeling and dealing through formal announcements. Depending on how the third quarter goes, IBM could keep the dealing more informal, but if it has specific goals and wants to rein in both its salespeople and resellers from getting too carried away, it will do some formal deals in the fourth quarter. In the meantime, you need to be aware of some tweaks to existing deals and price changes on Flex System iron.
First up, in announcement letter
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Help/Systems Takes Power7 Trends And Tech Tour On The Road
September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM and the major user groups like COMMON are not the only ones that bring together experts and users to talk about technology and business trends as they relate to shops who use Power Systems iron. Help/Systems, which is very likely the largest independent software vendor in the IBM i marketplace and which has been expanding into Unix and Linux in recent years, is taking its Power7 Trends and Tech show on the road, possibly to a city near you.
Tom Huntington, who is vice president of technical services at Help/Systems, will be hosting four events to go over
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Intel’s New Xeon E5s Push Back Against Power7+ Processors
September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe tug of war between the Xeon and Power processor lines from Intel and IBM continued last week as the largest chip maker in the world got its “Ivy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors into the field.
IBM, of course, has just finished rolling out its eight-core Power7+ chips across the Power Systems and Flex Systems lines, and only last month was previewing the capabilities of the future 12-core Power8 chips due maybe in the middle of next year. Now it is Intel’s turn, and it is starting with the rollout of chips for the workhorse two-socket servers that dominate
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IBM Aims NextScale Hyperscale Boxes At Clouds–And Possibly Power8
September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue is not quite as ready as it may have seemed to get out of the X86 server racket, at least not judging by the launch last week of the NextScale server line. And maybe, just maybe, the NextScale line of minimalist machines will sport current and future Power processors to give service providers and cloud builders a cheaper and denser alternative than the Flex System chassis announced a year and a half ago to build Power-based clouds. The future of the IBM i business may depend upon it, so getting Power processors inside of the NextScale nodes is
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Admin Alert: Six Tips For Managing IBM i Spooled File Storage
September 11, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWhile recently reviewing system storage on an IBM i partition, we were shocked to discover that spooled files (SPLFs, pronounced spliffs) took up over 10 percent of our usable system storage. Based on that experience and what my shop learned cleaning it up, here are six techniques for keeping your spooled file storage under control.
The Big Six For Spooled File Storage Management
- Don’t have FNDBIGSPLF? Get FNDBIGSPLF!!!
- Check your IBM i cleanup parameters (GO CLEANUP) to delete old job logs and system generated output
- Check for automatically scheduled jobs that are generating unnecessary spooled files
- The 2.5 million-page
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Thinking In Pointers
September 11, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreSuppose you were to ask me how large an alphanumeric variable should be, and I replied that I didn’t know, nor did I care. Wouldn’t that sound odd? Those of us who have been programming in business languages such as RPG, COBOL, and CL since the French and Indian War always think it’s important to know the size of a variable, otherwise we won’t be able to define it properly in a program. But when you work with pointers, a variable’s defined size doesn’t necessarily matter. Let me show you what I’m talking about.
Consider a command:
CMD PROMPT('Do something') -
How Does The Flex System Stack Up Against Cisco’s UCS?
September 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM‘s Flex System modular machines were without a doubt a reaction to the success in the data center of the Unified Computing System converged platforms from Cisco Systems. But how do the two machines stack up against each other?
According to a recent report (PDF) from Clabby Analytics that is published on the IBM Flex Systems website, there are some significant advantages with the Flex System iron from Big Blue. One of them is that the chassis allows for storage arrays to be embedded into the chassis and accessed locally instead of using external storage area networks as
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IBM i Tech Books Available Through BookHawkers
September 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor many years, IT Jungle operated a bookstore on Yahoo and then eBay that featured technical manuals by several of our authors. We shut that bookstore down at the end of last year because it was more grief than it was worth–others have long since cornered the market in IBM i publishing–but you can still get many of the titles we used to carry elsewhere.
Specifically, if you are looking for the Pocket Guides and other programming manuals and tutorials from author Brian Kelly, he has started his own virtual bookstore at BookHawkers. His inventory of IBM i-related titles is
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Servers Sales Swoon A Little From April Through June
September 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith so many transitions going on in the server racket these days, it is hard to say if the ups and downs of revenues for each quarter are a leading indicator for the overall IT market anymore. But a lot of people believe server sales do portend future budgets in data centers, and so when the numbers head south, as they did again in the June quarter according to IDC, people take notice.
It is best to keep perspective. There is a lot going on in Server Land, to say the least. And the pace of change is not
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Power8 Processor Packs A Twelve-Core Punch–And Then Some
September 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell, IBM i shops hankering for some more processing oomph, Big Blue has a very big jump in performance coming your way with the future Power8 processors. Just after The Four Hundred went on vacation at the end of August, the techies who designed the Power8 chip took the podium at the Hot Chips conference, hosted by the IEEE every summer for the past 25 years at Stanford University, and revealed the major aspects of the design of the successor to the current Power7 and Power7+ processors.
As I was watching the presentation by Jeff Stuecheli, chief nest architect for