Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Admin Alert: Major And Minor IBM i Power System Upgrades
July 10, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWhen upgrading your current IBM i hardware, you may have more choices than you think. With the incredible capacity built into late model System i and Power systems, you may be able to perform a minor upgrade on existing hardware, rather than moving to the latest Power 7+ machines. Here are some tips on how you might be able to stretch your existing hardware rather than buying a new machine.
What Can You Do?
If you sized your current machine correctly, you may have more than enough excess capacity to stay with the existing hardware for a few more years.
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First Normal Form On The Fly
July 10, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreConverting normalized data into a repeating group is a common requirement, and we have discussed that topic several times in Four Hundred Guru, even in this issue. Sometimes the need arises to convert data in the other direction, i.e., to convert a repeating group to a normalized form. This is a handy technique to know, and it’s easy.
Suppose you’ve been given a spreadsheet with 13 columns of data. The first column is an item number. The next 12 columns are replacement costs for each month. You’ve been asked to load the data into a normalized table (physical
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Presenting Vertical Data Horizontally
July 10, 2013 Victor Pisman
… Read morePresenting “vertical” data in a “horizontal” format is a challenging task in data management. Here is one method you can use to make SQL carry out this type of transformation.
Consider table CUSTGRP, which has two fields: a customer ID and a group code. Notice that one customer can have multiple group codes.
ID ID
GROUP
100
C
100
F
100
D
200
A
200
E
200
D
500
G
700
B
700
D
Here’s one way to
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Looks Like PureFlex GM Has Left Big Blue
July 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe live in a modern social world, and sometimes you find more things out about executives at IT suppliers through sites like LinkedIn than you do through proper press relations channels. And so it is with Andy Monshaw, who was general manager of IBM‘s PureSystems modular systems until last week it looks like.
Monshaw, who has been in the IT business for 28 years based on his biography on the PureSystems sub-site on the IBM web site, has had his official biography taken off the IBM executive bios section. And he has updated his LinkedIn account as thus:
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Reader Feedback On Silver Anniversary For Silverlake
July 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTimothy, great article! As always you nailed the message! Thank you!
–Anne Lucas
AS/400: Is it 25th or 35th Anniversary?
Sirs hello. How are you?
I am a steady follower of The Four Hundred. And as an IBM retiree, I really like it. I worked in IBM in many functions such as a systems engineer and as a manager. I joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1980 and was assigned to the System/38. You know it was announced in 1978. As far as I remember it was first sold in 1979 but for me the announcement date is
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IBM Wheels And Deals Just A Little To Push Iron
July 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe third quarter is now under way, and Big Blue’s marketeers are tweaking a few deals here and there to try to grease the skids, and the palms, a bit to get some business done before the end of September comes around and new CEO Ginni Rometty has to explain why the numbers were not so great.
Based on the relatively modest deals that IBM is doing, you would perhaps be given the mistaken impression that everything is going swimmingly out there in the Systems and Technology Group, and frankly, I would have expected for the company to get a
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Sundry Power Systems I/O And Storage Enhancements
July 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM seems to be more or less done with Power Systems announcements for the summer, and is not expected to make any major system changes before the end of the year. However, there are a bunch of I/O and storage products that will become available this month as well as other announcements that Big Blue made back in June that you need to be aware of.
A batch of I/P and storage tweaks were bunched up in announcement letter 113-087. The first is the fulfillment of a prior statement of direction from Big Blue to get its EXP30 Ultra
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Big Blue Offers Interest-Free Financing For IBM i Iron Down Under
June 24, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe OS/400 and IBM i platform has turned 25 years old, and IBM’s units in Australia and New Zealand are offering special financing to celebrate.
In announcement letter A313-099, IBM’s Global Financing unit, which provides leases and rentals to business partners and end users alike, is offering special zero percent interest rate financing on IBM i-based gear over a term of–wait for it–25 months, one for every year that the AS/400 and its progeny have been running applications in the midrange. The deal in New Zealand is structured the same way and is detailed in announcement letter NZ313-099.
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IBM Kills Off Original Flex p260 Node, Other Power Systems Features
June 24, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith new Power7+ processors in full production and Big Blue wanting to shift customers to the latest iron rather than stuff that is one to three years old, it is no surprise that the marketing and manufacturing people in Systems and Technology Group are cutting some pages out of the IBM product catalog.
In announcement letter 913-142, IBM said that effective September 20, it would stop selling the original Power7-based Flex p260 server node, which was announced back in April 2012 as one of two Power7 nodes for IBM’s PureFlex modular system. This is the half-width, two-socket node, which
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Disk Array Biz Has Sympathy Pains With The Server Racket
June 24, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe general rule of thumb is that for every dollar that is spent on servers, there is another 50 cents or so spent on storage and another 50 cents or so spent on networking. That is the ratio across the industry, and the server class average is brought up mightily by mainframes and other big iron that is pricey indeed. While server and storage purchases are not always directly tied to each other, they are often part of a single system upgrade or new installation and, in many cases, disk arrays are in fact internal to the server. So there