Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IT Spending Higher Than Expected In 2012, And Will Accelerate In Years Ahead
April 1, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe prognosticators at Gartner have got out the soft cloth and polished up their crystal balls to gaze into the next two years of IT spending. And they have also rejiggered how much they think the companies of the world blew on IT and telecom hardware, software, and services now that earnings season for the fourth quarter financial results are over.
At the beginning of the year, as we previously reported, Gartner figured that aggregate IT spending globally would come in at $3,588 billion, up 1.2 percent compared to 2011. (We’ll speak in terms of billions because rounding up
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Oracle Takes On IBM Power With New Sparc T5 Systems
April 1, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLarry Ellison knows exactly who he wants to knock down in the midrange systems market, and he is not afraid to call out Big Blue by name when he makes a big processor and systems announcement, as Oracle‘s co-founder and CEO did last Tuesday. That was when Oracle launched its Sparc T5 and M5 processors and six new systems based on those homegrown chips. Ellison did not even mention Hewlett-Packard or Dell once during the launch.
And for good reason. Since 2001, the Unix server business of Sun Microsystems has been the whipping boy and revenue generator for Big
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Midrange Power7+ Servers: The More Oomph You Want, The More It Costs
April 1, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you though the pricing for various sized configurations of the new Power 750+ and Power 760+ midrange servers using IBM‘s dual-chip module (DCM) variant of the Power7+ processor. That just looked at the system hardware costs. This week, as I have done in the past, I want to walk you through how the raw computing, operating system, and Software Maintenance costs compare across each processor SKU and how those costs stack up with prior Power 750 machines.
As has been the case since there was an AS/400, customers
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Storage Sales Swell Despite Compression, Thin Provisioning, And Dedupe
March 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDespite the best efforts of storage array makers to make their gear less wasteful in terms of capacity, companies keep buying storage both inside their server skins and outside in external arrays like there is no tomorrow. And the amount of capacity that companies are consuming is growing at near historical levels before various kinds of technologies, such as thin provisioning, de-duplication, data compression, and other features were added to arrays to try to curb the appetite for gigabytes.
In the final quarter of the year, according to market research from IDC, worldwide disk capacity shipped in the quarter
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IBM Rejiggers V5 Rebate Deal, Includes PS Blades And Power7+ Entries
March 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the entry Power7+ systems shipping and the PS7XX series of blades using Power7 chips being the last of their line, it comes as no surprise that IBM has tweaked an on-again, off-again Power7 rebate deal.
The rebate deal aims to get customers using earlier generations of Power Systems iron with any of the releases in OS/400, i5/OS, IBM i V5 to move up to new Power7 iron and either IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. The last time this deal was updated was back in June 2012, when IBM put out a rule saying that with this rebate
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Midrange Power7+ Servers: Scaling Up Means Bring Your Checkbook
March 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe have spent several weeks walking you through the salient technical and economic characteristics of the new entry Power Systems machines using the new Power7+ processors from IBM. This week, it is time to take a run at those midrange Power 750+ and Power 760+ boxes that are based on the double-stuffed dual-chip modules, or DCMs, that are used to put more cores and threads in these boxes than Big Blue might otherwise not be able to deliver using regular single-chip module, or SCM, units that are used on the entry machines.
If you want to review the feeds
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Using Incremental IFS Backup To Speed Up Backup Time
March 20, 2013 Hey, Joe
… Read moreIs there a trick to speeding up AS/400 Integrated File System (IFS) nightly backups? My nightly backups run over 300 minutes and 120 of those minutes are tied to the IFS backup, so it runs into production hours. Here’s the Save (SAV) command I’m using to backup the IFS.
SAV DEV('/QSYS.LIB/TAP01.DEVD') OBJ(('/*') + ('/QSYS.LIB' *OMIT) ('/QDLS' *OMIT)) + SAVACT(*SYNC) ENDOPT(*UNLOAD) + UPDHST(*YES) DTACPR(*DEV)— C
To cut down on IFS backup times, you can modify your backups to perform a full IFS backup once a week and an incremental backup the other nights of the week. Here’s how this works.
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Using SQL Joins With Tree Structures
March 20, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
The reason tree structures are important to me is not that they are so numerous, but that I use them every day. I don’t write programs to process tree structures every day, but many of the programs I have written still run every day. For that reason, I must know fast ways to extract data from tree structures. One such method is the SQL join.
This article is a rewrite of the topic “Efficient Database Retrieval” from my article Recursion and the Alternatives, which I wrote eight
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Tips For Using RDP’s DDS Designer
March 20, 2013 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIn my Guru tip on the DDS Designer in Rational Developer for Power Systems, I showed you the basics of using the DDS Designer to create or maintain screens. A few changes have been made to the DDS Design tool in recent releases of RDP, and I’ve also had a bit more experience with it. So I decided it was time for an update on the topic.
The most obvious change that has happened in recent releases is that the DDS Design perspective can now automatically be opened on a double-click of a DSPF or PRTF source member. You
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IBM Lab To Show Off Software Goodies to CEOs, CMOs, And CFOs
March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIT vendors are always trying to impress CEOs and their CIO and CMO underlings because in the world of industrial giants, deals get done at the top-level, not at the bottom-level. Forget for a second that most revolutions in technology were either the wholesale creation of a new market, or came from grassroots movements that were never aimed at toppling incumbent technologies but ended up doing so for organic, rather than central planning, reasons.
And thus, IBM‘s own marketeers are still stuck in this old world, where having advertisements and story placements in the New York Times and the