Timothy Prickett Morgan
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PureSystems Sales Break Through The 1,000 Customer Barrier
November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreEvery market has its own psychological barrier, and for IBM systems, the magic number seems to be 1,000. As part of the tweaks to the PureSystems upgrade on November 13, Big Blue was bragging that it now has more than 1,000 unique customers worldwide using the new boxes.
IBM did not supply any numbers regarding the volume of server nodes or racks these first kilo-customers that it found for the modular systems, which consist of its Flex System chassis and Flex Power and x86 server nodes. These are stacked up in racks with switches and integrated storage to make the
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Reader Feedback On Where In The World Is Web Query?
November 26, 2012 Hey, Dan
… Read moreRegarding your recent Web Query article: I think one of the big impediments of the QU2 Web Query product is that it was not what a lot of customers were wanting. Most of the customers that I deal with are in small-to-medium shops that do not have a deep bench of IT people and skills. (One of the main selling points of IBM i is the ease of administration, of course). What they were really wanting was basically QU1 Query with a simple web interface to build queries and, more importantly, make basic web (well Intranet) reports and Excel tables.
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IBM Ponies Up $4 Billion In Financing For Partner Push
November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM spends billions and billions of dollars on dividends (which is fine) and stock buybacks (which I have a problem with on the scale that Big Blue does it). I spend a lot of time complaining that there are better things that IBM could do with the billions in cash it generates running its business, from investing in new businesses, competing more aggressively on price, or doing acquisitions. Another option, and one that IBM has been doing in the past year, is to help the partner channel and the IT shops it serves get the financing they need to do
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Surprise! Power7+ Chips Launched In Flex System p260 Servers
November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue was pretty clear that it was not going to roll out any more servers using its Power7+ processors when it launched the Power 770+ and Power 780+ enterprise-class boxes back on October 3, but somewhere along the way, someone either changed their minds inside of IBM or didn’t get the memo that the Flex System p260 server nodes would be upgraded with the Power7+ chips. Because that, in fact, is what happened on November 13, just before we took a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.
And those new p260 machines give IBM i and AIX shops one more
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IBM Mothballs QLogic InfiniBand Switches, Power Systems Drives
November 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor many years, IBM didn’t have its own network and storage switching business, and it OEMed or resold products from others, including gear from Cisco Systems, Brocade Communications, Voltaire (which was eaten by Mellanox Technologies two years ago), Juniper, and Blade Network Technologies. Since that time, Cisco has jumped into the server biz, IBM bought BNT, and Intel bought the InfiniBand biz from QLogic (among many other deals that did not directly affect Big Blue).
Now, IBM is paring back on its catalog a bit, and it looks like QLogic is being shown the door on Power
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Admin Alert: A Checklist For Performing IBM i Planned Maintenance
November 14, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreTaking down an IBM i system for planned system maintenance involves more than just performing the maintenance itself. To keep processing running without issue, you need to ensure that the machine ends cleanly before maintenance begins and that it restarts smoothly after maintenance completes. To that end, here’s a starter checklist for how to take down and restart an IBM i machine during planned system maintenance.
The Phases Of System Maintenance
When planning IBM i system maintenance, it’s helpful to divide the maintenance up into three sets of tasks that you must successfully complete. These task sets are:
- Pre-maintenance tasks
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Converting CASE in CL
November 14, 2012 Bob Cozzi
… Read moreWhen I write CL, I long for some of the ease-of-use features IBM added over the last 10 years to RPG IV. Simple things like %XLATE or %SCAN or %EDITC would be nice.
For example, a client of mine had a CL program that required several parameters, one of which was a user ID. However, the non-IBM i platform on which that information was entered did not automatically convert lowercase letters to all uppercase. When the program would try to verify the user profile, it would almost always fail.
Initially my client wanted to use one of the legacy APIs
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IBM Deals On PowerSC Security Wares, And IBM i Hooks In
November 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSometimes, it takes a while for something to sink into my thick skull. I have known for a while that IBM has a security software layer called PowerSC, short for security and compliance, and I figured that given all the built-in security in the IBM i platform as well as the several add-ons from third-party vendors, this was not something we need to worry about. But, of course, the PowerVM hypervisor and AIX partitions running on Power Systems machines at your site need to be locked down. And that is what PowerSC is all about.
PowerSC was launched back in
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IT Budgets Down In Europe, Up Slightly Globally In 2012
November 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThose of us who live and work in the United States can sometimes forget that other parts of the world are affected by what we do and we are affected by what they do. And so it is that we ponder IT spending in Europe, which is not doing great here in 2012, and for the world at large. Hope springs eternal, and according to the prognosticators at Gartner, IT spending will be on the upswing in 2013 in EMEA and the world over and carry on growing modestly through 2016.
“This year is a pessimistic year for IT
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Big Blue’s Power Systems Get Some Itanium Competition
November 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt hasn’t been an easy couple of years for IBM in the RISC/Unix midrange and enterprise server market. And it has just gotten a bit harder and stands to get even more difficult in the next year. Not only did Intel finally get its “Poulson” Itanium 9500 processors into the field, which will be picked up by Hewlett-Packard for its HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop systems, but it made a broader commitment to converge the high-end of the Xeon processor line with the Itanium line with the next generation “Kittson” processors.
And Oracle is working on its next-generation Sparc T5 processors