Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Tells STG Workers To Take A Holiday On A Third Of Pay
August 12, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is doing a little belt tightening in the parts of the company that make chips, servers, storage, and systems software, as well as those workers who buy all the myriad parts that go into these devices.
Big Blue confirmed last week that it was indeed asking selected employees in the United States to take a week of mandatory holiday. The employees are in the company’s Systems and Technology Group and in the cross-divisional Integrated Supply Chain operation that procures parts for devices made by IBM.
An IBM spokesperson tells The Four Hundred that the employees are being asked to
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X86 Servers Decline At Avnet, But Proprietary Servers Up A Bit
August 12, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe server business continues to be a bit sluggish for master distributor Avnet, but the company is coping with it reasonably well by boosting sales of other IT products. Avnet was seeing similar softness in the prior quarter as well, and it is no doubt due to the many product transitions out there in Server Land as well bumpiness in various economies around the globe.
In its fourth quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in June, the Technology Solutions group at Avnet’s sales were up 3 percent to $2.62 billion, but the company separates out organic growth from that due
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Reader Feedback On A New IBM i Team Is Needed
August 12, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDan:
First, let me say that I agree with the general idea that midrange shops would be better positioned to meet the future with a modern database. I might even be convinced that data-centric development is a good idea, although I personally feel this that we’re already too data centric; locked into the tooling and architectures that existed in the 1980s. But even if we move toward SOA, we aren’t going to get very far without a modern database including RI, triggers, commitment control, stored procedures–the works.
I understand this article was about letting midrangers know how important the modern
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IBM Rolls Out Three New Power7+ Flex System Nodes
August 12, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Flex System modular server design is an improvement over the BladeCenter blade servers in that the IBM i operating system running on Power nodes is an equal and a peer to AIX and Linux running on the same iron and is similarly not a second-class citizen to Windows and Linux running on nodes using Intel‘s Xeon processors. But as I have said many times since the Flex System machines were launched in April 2012, the two-socket Power nodes are overkill in terms of processing power and IBM i software tiers for the vast majority of midrange shops.
What
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IBM Forms OpenPower Consortium, Breathes New Life Into Power
August 12, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in July, I started what will eventually be a series of stories on what IBM should be doing with its systems business. And like a bolt from the blue, the company did something that I have been mulling for the past several months in earnest and noodling for the past several years off and on. And what IBM has done is to mimic the ARM collective and open up the intellectual property surrounding its Power chips to help foster a broader ecosystem of users and system makers.
I know what you are thinking. Isn’t it a little too little
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Admin Alert: Budgeting For Your Next Power Systems Upgrade
August 7, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIf you’re acquiring a new Power systems machine in 2014, you may be preparing your capital budget right now. However, there’s more to purchasing a Power system running IBM i (Power i) than just a good purchase price. This week, I’ll look at some other expenses you may encounter when buying new hardware, and what you can do to budget correctly and minimize those costs.
Budget For Operating Expenses, As Well As Capital
A frequent Power i purchasing mistake is that companies sometimes make sure they have enough capital budget for new or upgraded machines, but they forget to budget
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SQL and Invalid Decimal Data
August 7, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreI’m sure no reader of this august publication likes decimal data errors. One single such error can ruin an entire day. The wise programmer uses tools and techniques to keep invalid numeric data from becoming a problem. One such tool that you can use to find and fix invalid data is SQL.
Assume that a physical file has a customer account number stored as seven digits packed decimal, with no decimal positions. Suppose there are one or more blank records in the physical file. You query the file by customer number, like this:
select * from baddata where customerid =
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IBM i 7.2 Sighted At The iDoctor
August 5, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe all know that the next update to the IBM i operating system, release 7.2, is coming to market sometime in 2014. But it may be sooner than we think.
Last week, on August 1, IBM updated its iDoctor for IBM i performance tools, which are used to collect and analyze performance data on Power Systems machines running the grandchild of the venerable OS/400 operating system. And check it out:
This is the first sighting of IBM i 7.2, which is called V7R2M0 in the old-style, OS/400 naming convention inside of the iDoctor tool.
By the way, if you don’t
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IBM Names New GMs For Power Systems And System z
August 5, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in May, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty switched the roles of her chief strategist and the head of Systems and Technology Group, and the changes are now rippling through the various IBM server divisions.
As The Four Hundred previously reported, Tom Rosamilia and Rod Adkins switched desks. Adkins had been running Systems and Technology Group for the past couple of years, and Rosamilia, who used to work for Adkins as general manager of the System z business and then the additional Power Systems business unit within Systems and Technology Group, was tapped by Rometty to be vice president of corporate
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Big Blue Chops PureSystems CPU And Memory Prices
August 5, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the Power Systems business and the System x business not growing in the most recent quarters, I have been expecting IBM to start testing the elasticity of pricing on its plain vanilla Power and X86 boxes as well as on the PureSystems modular systems to stimulate a little business. IBM has not made a lot of pricing changes this year, but did last week on its PureSystems line as part of a third quarter push.
Specifically, in announcement letter 313-060 on July 31, IBM tweaked the prices on X86 processors used in the Flex x220, x240, and x440 processor