Timothy Prickett Morgan
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We Need A Baby PureSystems Running IBM i
December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is the holiday season, the time of giving. And, not coincidentally, the time of asking. I figured out a long time ago that you never get what you want if you don’t ask for it, although I must admit that at least in my life, asking has certainly been no guarantee of receiving. But asking is the first step. So here goes. What I want in 2013, aside from world peace, a pony, a little red wagon, and a sailboat, is an entry PureSystems machine that is actually suitable as the main data processing engine for the vast majority
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Going Mobile With Power Systems Feeds And Speeds
December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you want to get your hands on the slots and watts and feeds and speeds of the Power Systems line, it turns out that there’s an app for that. And it doesn’t run on just Apple smartphones, either.
It is called the Power Systems Quick Reference mobile app, and it was created by Velti, a mobile marketing company founded in 2000 in Greece.
The Power Systems quick reference app comes in three versions: One for the Blackberry, one for the Apple iOS smartphone, and one for Android smartphones. I downloaded the app from the Google Play app catalog
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IBM Extends And Tweaks Power Systems Deal In Europe
December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue has made a number of tweaks to a long-running deal that has been effect on Power Systems iron in Europe. Actually, it made a bunch of tweaks in the past several months, but they were just not obvious to us here at The Four Hundred up here in the Big Apple. (That would be me alone. Ah-hem.)
In announcement letter ENUSZA12-1003, you can see all of the changes in the 2012 Power Trade In Program, which was extended to run until December 31 of this year back in July when the PowerLinux 7R2 machine was added
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IBM To Charge For Lapsed Hardware Maintenance
December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor many years now, IBM has charged a maintenance after license fee if you have a bit of its software that you have let fall off Software Maintenance. This after license fee is basically back maintenance that IBM thinks it is entitled to because you didn’t help pay for the support costs for a period of time, but now you want all of the cumulative benefits of Software Maintenance again.
Now, IBM is going to do a similar thing with hardware maintenance, and it is called a “reestablishment fee,” hyphen not included. As you can see in announcement letter 612-042
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Excepting X86 Iron, Server Sales Continue To Slip In Q3
December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt might be better for all parties concerned in the server racket if they didn’t stagger their new processor releases over the course of a year. But server processors are an increasingly complex thing to develop, the fabrication plants that make them are increasingly more expensive, and vendors have to slow down, get it right, and milk each chip generation for all it is worth. When the economy is running a little cool and chip makers are all in the middle of processor transitions, it is generally not going to cause server sales to go up.
The late summer and
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Power Systems Cloud Builders Get Huge Discounts
December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is good news for Power Systems shops who are looking to move some of their IBM i and AIX applications out to the cloud or use cloudy capacity managed by a third party for disaster recovery. First, Big Blue is licensing both IBM i and AIX under special terms to managed service providers, or MSPs as they are called. And second, IBM has just launched a special utility pricing deal for MSPs that gives them deep discounts as they build out their initial Power-based clouds.
Both moves will go a long way toward lowering the initial capital expenditures that
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Admin Alert: Strategically Using Power Systems’ Processor Trial Capacity On Demand
November 28, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIBM Power system customers usually buy more capacity than they need. A customer may buy an eight processor Power 720 machine but only activate five processors, leaving the additional processors for future growth. Because it’s expensive to activate Power system processors, IBM offers a program called Trial Capacity on Demand (TCoD) that allows you to test whether additional processors will alleviate system bottlenecks before you purchase.
What Is TCoD?
Trial Capacity on Demand (TCoD) is an IBM program that allows you to activate already existing system processors for 30 days at no charge. The intent is to allow users to
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Write Your Own SCANRPL Built-In Function
November 28, 2012 Bob Cozzi
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Until IBM i v7.1 has made a pervasive appearance on virtually all IBM systems, the cool new v7.1 updates to RPG IV are out of reach for many RPG developers. Fortunately, with IBM i v7.1, IBM has finally stopped “point release” updates to the RPG compiler, giving us the ability to use anything implemented on (for example) technology refresh 5 all the way back to TR1. Life is good for RPG developers today.
If you’re a software developer or, like me, consulting with clients that have everything from
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LANSA Takes Your Company’s iPulse
November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe U.S. presidential election might be over, but the polling is not. Application modernization tool maker LANSA doesn’t care a bit about your politics, but it does care very much about the political environment in which the IBM i platform lives inside your company.
To that end, LANSA has opened up its third annual iPulse Survey, which aims to assess the threat level to the IBM i platform in your organization, your future plans for IBM i applications, and what your budget for software development is for the coming 2013 year. In addition, LANSA is polling customers to figure out
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Flex System Gets New Control Freak, Switches, And Inside V7000 Array
November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe November 13 Flex System mini-announcement didn’t just feature some new Power7+ p260 server nodes and configurations of the PureFlex infrastructure stacks sporting all of the various server nodes instead of the x240 Xeon E5 node. IBM made a few other announcements in systems management, switching, and storage related to the platform.
In announcement letter 212-475, you will see that the Flex System Manager, the control freak for the entire server-storage-network mashup that is PureSystems, has been upgraded to V1.2. And in that update, the software not only speaks to the new Power7+ nodes reported on elsewhere in this