Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Revises Another Power Systems Trade-In Deal
April 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe IBM online announcement system likes to play a game of cat and mouse with all of us, and sometimes there is an announcement of a new product or a change in a deal with a certain date on it, but damned if I never saw it when I looked through the announcement summaries, which I do pretty religiously on Tuesday and then double-check again late Friday night as The Four Hundred goes to press.
But, once again, IBM snuck another one by me. In announcement letter 313-022, updating a deal trade-in rebate deal that was last changed in
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IBM To Pump $1 Billion Into Flash Storage
April 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue likes to throw its billions around to show that it is an IT big shot, and when IBM uses the “B” word, you know that it is pretty serious about something. Usually it is dividends and share buybacks, but sometimes it is when the company sees an unstoppable force, like the $1 billion investment in Linux in the wake of the dot-com bust, or when it sees it needs to grease the wheels of commerce, as with the $4 billion in financing for partners that the company made available late last year.
The next hot area that IBM
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Where Is DB2 BLU Accelerator For IBM i?
April 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has created a neat new database feature for its DB2 database for Linux, Unix, and Windows operating systems that will hopefully make its way into the integrated DB2 for i database that resides inside the IBM i operating system. For now, this BLU Accelerator feature, which can radically speed up the sifting through data, is only available for DB2 10.5 and only for reporting and analytics, but there is every reason to believe Big Blue will put it on the IBM i and mainframe versions of its DB2 database and use it to help goose transaction processing.
Like other
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Abacus Running On Clouds At COMMON, Gives Free Trial
April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt may have taken some major changes in technology and culture, but the long-awaited promise of cloudy infrastructure for OS/400 and IBM i workloads is becoming a reality.
Abacus Solutions, which launched an IBM i cloud at last May’s COMMON Annual Conference and Exposition, is back at this year’s COMMON event in Austin with customer Brooks Running Company to tell potential customers all about the benefits of putting their applications out on the Abacus cloud.
Scott Johnson, senior iSeries solutions specialist at Abacus, tells The Four Hundred that the company is teaming up with Brooks to fit prospective customers
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IBM Extends Power Systems Trade-In Deal In Europe
April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith new machines out the door for entry and midrange Power Systems customers and the economy not doing so great in parts of Europe, I would have expected to see more wheeling and dealing for the Power7+ machines to get customers buying.
Rather than come up with a new deal, Big Blue has instead just extended and slightly tweaked an existing trade-in rebate deal for customers moving from old Power-based systems to new Power7+ machinery. In announcement letter ENUSZA13-1003, which was updated on April 4, IBM dropped the Power7 models that were on the eligible list and now, through
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Reader Feedback On Oracle Takes On IBM Power With New Sparc T5 Systems
April 8, 2013 Hey, TPM
… Read moreI won’t say “Is this a joke?” although it is very tempting.
I enjoy reading your articles, even though I had only a light period with managing any OS/400 (V4R2 days). My focus is AIX and Unix, since 1979 actually.
When you test these systems look closely at the specs for transfer between chips and cores. My experience with AIX and Power is that customers do not like doing the planning required to get the most out of the box. NUMA is “boring,” and planning your workloads to work with it is a headache for some; not doing the planning
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IBM Lets MSPs Have Utility-Priced IBM i 6.1 For Clouds
April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you want to build a cloud and charge utility style pricing, it is very tough to come up with the capital ahead of time to get the hardware and software to build that cloud and then wait patiently as you find customers to pay monthly fees to use that infrastructure. IBM Global Financing has always offered financing on new machines at fairly attractive prices, but to go after managed service providers and help them build cloudy infrastructure based on IBM i, Big Blue has been giving deep discounts to MSPs for specific hardware and also providing utility pricing on
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Midrange Power7+ Servers: The IBM Sales Pitch
April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI have spent the past several weeks analyzing the price/performance of the hardware, software, and maintenance for the new Power7+ midrange machines, the Power 750+ and Power 760+. And this week, after looking at prices for various hardware configurations and for raw computing capacity set up with IBM i and Software Maintenance, we take a look at the sales pitch that IBM is giving to business partners and resellers to help them peddle the new iron to existing IBM i shops and against competitive products out there in the midrange.
Just to keep it all clear in your head how
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Admin Alert: A Checklist For Monitoring Your IBM i Environment
April 3, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIBM i administration has elements of old-time system operations and real-time monitoring. You need to ensure that everything is working correctly and that problems aren’t silently developing that can: a) interfere with customer processing; and b) violate customer service-level agreement (SLA) requirements or create audit violations. This week, let’s flesh out a checklist of items to help IBM i admins achieve these goals.
The Essential Piece
In order to catch trouble before it occurs, I highly recommend that you set up an IBM i monitoring system to catch developing situations and alert you via email or text when a problem
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Updating Through A Join With SQL, Take Three
April 3, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreAs I was looking for something in the DB2 for i SQL reference, my eyes happened to see MERGE in the list of statements, and I realized that I had been doing something the hard way. I realized that I was about to abandon the method I had been using to update values in one database table (physical file) from data in another one.
Once in a while, someone requests that I use a list of values, which are usually stored in a spreadsheet, to mass update the database on the big computer. Fortunately, several years ago I learned how