Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Beefs Up The Power7+ Midrange With Double-Whammy Sockets
February 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhile the entry part of the Power Systems market has been awaiting its Power7+ refresh, putting new processors and fatter memory and disk drives into essentially the same enclosures that were refreshed at the end of 2011, the midrange of the Power Systems line has been getting a little long in the tooth and was perhaps more in need of some re-engineering. And luckily for customers using midrange Power iron, that is precisely what IBM has done as part of the February 5 announcements.
Not only is the Power 750+ getting a complete revamp while holding the core count steady,
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Invader II: New Power7+ Machines Take On Entry X86 Iron
February 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been a long, long time since IBM both understood and did something dramatic about the competitive pressure that X86-based servers have put on its RISC-based systems. The last time I can remember Big Blue really going after X86 boxes was back when the AS/400 Model 170 “Invader” servers came out in February 1998. Although, to be fair, the Power 520 M15 and M25 models that came out a decade later were no slouches, either. This time around, we don’t have to wait a decade for IBM to get serious. With the entry Power7+ machines announced last Tuesday, it
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Admin Alert: When Was The Last Time That Library Got Backed Up And More
February 6, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreThis week, I’ll cover some new information about IBM i library backups, tell you how to specify which TCP/IP servers start whenever TCP/IP is started, and demonstrate a second technique for preventing unauthorized FTP access to your server. Let’s get started.
Determining The Last Time A User Library Was Backed Up
Checking the last time a user library was backed up is easy. You can check it from the green-screen by running the following Display Library Backup List (DSPBCKUP) command.
DSPBCKUPL BCKUPL(*LIB)
This command will display a screen that looks something like this.
(Click graphic to enlarge.)
This
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What’s That Name, Again?
February 6, 2013 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreOne of the great things about writing articles and tips is that people will drop you a note to ask a question or tell you how much they liked (or disliked) what you wrote. But even better is when someone drops you a line to let you know they have taken what you wrote and extended it.
Such was the case with my last tip, What’s That Name?, which described how to go about getting a “record layout” in Run SQL Scripts. I received an email from Lynne Noll, who said she had just written 128 stored procedures, and
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Looks Like IBM Has Some PureSystems Announcements Coming
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe know, as The Four Hundred reported last week that IBM is getting set to launch new Power Systems based on the Power7+ processors on February 5. And it looks like Big Blue is going to be making some PureSystems announcements a week later.
See for yourself:
I have no idea what the announcement is about, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the two-socket Flex p260+ server node for the PureSystems family was given a Power7+ processor back in November then it stands to reason that IBM will put the Power7+ processor soon into the
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The Supply Chain Is Good To Manhattan Associates In Q4
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSupply chain and warehouse management software maker Manhattan Associates continues to do well in a cut-throat market, and to do so with organic growth and good, old-fashioned software development.
In the fourth quarter ended in December, the company’s revenues were $95.4 million, up 14.2 percent compared to the year-ago period, with net income rising an even faster 18.5 percent to $12.5 million. That’s a very respectable 13 percent of revenue dropping from the top to the bottom line.
During Q4, software license sales at Manhattan Associates actually fell by 13.9 percent to $14.4 million, but services revenues more than compensated
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IBM Sells First Power 770+ In Europe, And It Runs IBM i
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue has announced its first big sale for the new Power 770+ servers announced last October in Europe, and the deal was done at SLIB, a software maker and service provider that specializes in for securities order, clearing, settlement, and risk analysis, among other things.
SLIB, which is based on Paris and which was founded 25 years ago, has over 100 employees and creates software it sells to broker-dealers and a back-end system to run its securities trading platform as a service. Interestingly enough, its securities trading platform, which processed some 15 million stock orders in 2012 for
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Pondering Possibilities With More Power7+ Machines Impending
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith new Power Systems and PureSystems machinery in the works and hopefully set to shake up the market and chase some of those server dollars that Intel is already counting on, now is a good time to stop and have a good THINK. Just like Tom Watson admonished us all to do soon after taking over what became International Business Machines nearly a century ago. If we were sitting in a bar together, we might even think and drink at the same time, as Watson himself did as a young man before he became a teetotaler.
Here’s a funny story,
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Pure Systems Customer Count Breaks 2,300 While Power Takeouts Continue
January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAnything that makes Power Systems–and now PureSystems–stronger makes the IBM i platform that more viable for that more time because IBM’s interesting in any technology is precisely proportional to the amount of profits it can consistently extract from that technology.
And so it was good news to the IBM i platform when Mark Loughridge, chief financial officer, during his conference call last week with Wall Street analysts going over the fourth quarter and full year financial results, dropped a statistic that Big Blue now had more than 2,300 PureSystems in over 70 countries who had bought its PureSystems modular, converged
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Avnet Saw IT Budget Flush Spending As 2012 Came To A Close
January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNot everybody saw IT spending tick upward as last year came to a close, but IT and electronics component distributor Avnet did.
In its second quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in December, Avnet said that its overall sales were only up one-tenth of a point to just a hair under $6.7 billion, with net income dropping 6.5 percent to $137.5 million. But you can’t blame the Technology Solutions side of Avnet, which is a master distributor of server, storage, and networking gear as well as software and services for the data center.
“Our overall Q2 results reflect a stronger than