Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Power7+ Machines Added To IBM i Capacity BackUp Deal
January 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are thinking about getting a Capacity BackUp (CBU) variant of the Power Systems-IBM i platform to use in a high availability cluster, you can now use a few of the new Power7+ machines as your secondary box.
The CBU machines first debuted way back in September 2003, when IBM wanted customers to embrace high availability clustering for OS/400 applications and when it realized it would have to cushion the blow to make secondary machines that were being replicated to less costly than production machines that were doing useful work. Prior to that, if you wanted to run HA
-
IBM Tweaks Flex System And PowerLinux Prices
January 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is difficult to tell what any IT vendor is thinking as a year comes to an end, much less a year with the kind of economic uncertainties that we all were facing as 2012 came to a close. But after The Four Hundred went on hiatus and before the new year got rolling, IBM did a few nips and tucks and tweaks to pricing for its latest servers that indicates it is not happy with its competitive position. The changes were made to price lists in the United States and Canada, and the products not affected by changes are
-
What The Future Holds For IBM i Platforms In 2013
January 7, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe future is never wide open, but rather is a sphere radiating out from this moment at precisely the speed of light. Everything that can and will happen will occur within that sphere, events moving out from the point where you sit and events moving in from outside, from all directions and as if they are pre-coordinated from the past outside of you to affect you precisely, right here, right now, from the edge of that sphere inwards. When you think about it that way, the orchestration of all of our presence is all the more remarkable. Outside of that
-
Admin Alert: Auditing Your IBM i Software Maintenance Bills
December 12, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreDealing with IBM i third-party maintenance can be a pain. You buy a software package once, but wind up paying yearly maintenance bills for the life of the application, paying 15 percent or more of the original purchase price per year. And the vendor may increase the cost on a yearly basis. This week, I’ll discuss software maintenance fees and give you some tips on keeping your maintenance costs down.
Basic IBM i Maintenance
Third-party software maintenance is a necessary but expensive proposition for IBM i vendors. Software vendors need to charge yearly maintenance to provide cash flow for creating
-
BASS: Build A Spreadsheet
December 12, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. This code was updated on 12/22/14.
Everybody needs a project–something to putter with in order to relieve stress and deal with the vicissitudes of life. I would like to tell you about a project that I’ve been working on for the past few months. I only wrote it for the fun of it, but it has already come in handy.
It seems that not a week goes by without someone asking me to stop providing them a report as a PDF and give it to them in Excel
-
End-Of-Year Odds And Ends
December 12, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreDear Esteemed Colleagues:
We made it through another year! Thanks to you, along with our writers and advertisers, this august publication is 11 years old! Who’da thunk it? Let’s wind up 2012 with various and sundry items that you sent my way.
–Ted
Hey, Ted:
I am using SQL to query an index, similar to what I do for a logical file. The system is responding with error SQL7011 (SOMEINDEX in SOMELIB not table, view, or physical file.) Could you please shed some light on why it is happening?
–Jabir
What you’re trying to do makes sense from
-
IT Shops Buy 7.1 Exabytes Of Disk Array Capacity In Q3
December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you want to break into the disk array business, you better have a strong stomach and a steel spine. It takes more and more capacity to make a little more money, and it is the most competitive part of the IT sector these days.
According to the box counters at IDC, disk array sales were up 3.7 percent to $7.87 billion in the third quarter, but to get that revenue, vendors had to push 7,104 petabytes–that’s more than 7 exabytes–of new disk capacity. This is the first time that quarter disk array sales have broken through 7 exabytes,
-
IBM Canada Sweetens Education And Training Deal
December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue’s subsidiary in the Great White North not only wants you to build your IT skills, it wants to make a little dough helping you do it. But sometimes, if you want to get a little, you have to give a little.
And so IBM Canada is offering customers who pre-pay for training slightly higher discounts if they pony up bigger wads of cash–enumerated in loonies, not greenbacks–over the next several months. In announcement letter ENUS312-137, IBM is offering customers who spend between $25,000 or more on Education Packs a 15 percent discount off that training. Under the
-
Proprietary Servers Take Their Lumps, Linux Servers Float On Cloud 9
December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you want to understand the server racket and you don’t have thousands of dollars to blow, you have to rely on the publicly available information available from Gartner and IDC to try to get a sense of what is going on out there. The market statistics do not map perfectly between the two companies, but you get a better picture than you can from either alone.
What the two companies certainly agree on is that the server market is under pressure, and particularly in the non-X86 portions of the market as most midrange and high-end server makers are in
-
Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You
December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell, thank heavens, we made it. The holiday season is upon us and it could not have come a moment later as far as I am concerned. Every year has its challenges, and here’s to hoping that 2013 is better and a bit easier for us all.
I am thankful that I will be able push my keyboard aside and walk away from the desk for a bit. After a year of writing, I have a pretty acute case of word poisoning, as anyone copy editing me, reading my stories in the past few months, and my family and friends