Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Server Sales Hiccup Stalls Avnet In September Quarter, December Sobering Up
October 29, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSystem and component sales at master reseller Avnet took a pause in the fiscal quarter ended in September, catching the company’s top brass a bit unawares as the declines were larger than expected. You can blame the U.S. presidential election and the uncertainty surrounding that as well as the uncertainty in certain debt-laden countries in Europe, if that makes you feel better.
IBM had some software sales slip in the third quarter in its emerging markets that made its numbers worse than expected, as The Four Hundred previously reported, but at the same time Big Blue’s System x, Power
-
Thanks For The (Higher Priced) Memories?
October 29, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM likes to talk sometimes about the convergence of the System i product line (running what was then i5/OS) and the System p product line as a relatively recent development, and dates the official name change to Power Systems back in April 2008. But we have longer memories than that here at The Four Hundred and we know that the first converged server was actually a “Northstar” server that came out in 1997 and that the convergence plans date from before then.
I have nothing against convergence, even though I have been annoyed over the past decade and a half
-
IBM Offers PureFlex Power-X86 Deal Down Under
October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe rack is the new blade server chassis, in case you haven’t noticed. Big Blue launched the PureFlex systems in April, and it wants these machines to do battle against the converged systems stacks that Cisco Systems, Dell, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard have put into the field.
Some companies are so used to having multiple vendors providing servers, storage, and networking that the idea of buying them all from one vendor, and making such a commitment to a single platform, is a little bit scary. (Not so much for System/36, System/38, AS/400, and Power Systems shops, of course.)
-
Dell Hires Former STG CTO As It Launches Active System 800 Integrated Iron
October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA few months ago, I got a tip that Jai Menon, the chief technology officer for the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, had left Big Blue and was preparing to take a high-level job at Dell. People at the enterprise groups at both IBM and Dell refused to comment on it, and so did Menon when I tried to contact him over the Intertubes, and so I waited for the inevitable announcement. It came last week as Dell launched an integrated, converged system called the Active System 800.
Yes, the AS 800.
Dell has put together a
-
Tough Slogging In Q3 For IBM, Like Everyone Else
October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is always bragging about how good it is to have annuity-like businesses that pay out, month after month, and in discussing the company’s results for the third quarter last week, the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, reminded everyone that more than half of IBM’s sales and about 60 percent of its profits come from these areas, which include mainframe software licenses and services contracts. That other half of the revenue stream can be tough, and that other 40 percent of the profits is not a given, as the financial results for the quarter in September showed.
As happened
-
PowerVM, IBM i Enhancements Mean Better Power Systems Clouds
October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe’re still chewing through the October 3 Power Systems announcements from IBM, and this week we will drill down into some of the cloud-related tweaks that Big Blue made to the IBM i operating system with the Technology Refresh 5 update as well as in the PowerVM hypervisor and System Director VMControl tools that comprise the server virtualization underpinnings of a Power-based cloud–whether or not you use IBM’s SmartCloud Entry control freak to orchestrate that cloud.
We told you all about the update to SmartCloud Entry V2.4, which finally supports the IBM i operating system, in last week’s issue
-
Admin Alert: One Year Out–Preparing For Your Next IBM i Upgrade, Part 2
October 17, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreTwo years ago, I wrote an article on how to start planning for an IBM Power i upgrade a year in advance. In that piece, I covered business partner evaluation, extended maintenance, third-party software, and budgeting for performance. Today I’m revisiting the topic and adding other hardware upgrade issues that require longer term planning and may need almost a year to complete.
A Lot Of Ground To Cover
In no particular order, here are the Power i hardware upgrade items that you can start planning for a year in advance of a hardware upgrade.
- Business partner evaluation–Evaluating your relationship
-
Non-Equal (Theta) Joins
October 17, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreIn George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, all animals were declared to be equal. However, that was not the case. By the end of the book, some were “more equal than others.” You might think that all joins are equal, but you would be wrong. Unequal joins have their applications, too.
The equijoin is the norm in business. A customer number in a table (file) of invoices matches (equals) a customer number in a customer master table. But it is also possible to join on non-matching conditions such as not equal, greater than, less than, greater than or equal to,
-
What’s That Name?
October 17, 2012 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreThe basis for this article comes from a brief conversation I had over coffee, while recently presenting an Introduction to SQL course. It went along these lines:
Tom: “In Run SQL Scripts, how can I get a list of the fields in a file?”
Me: “You mean the columns in a table or view.”
Tom: “OK. In Run SQL Scripts, how can I get a list of the columns in a table or a view?”
Me: “Just do a SELECT * and the column names are shown at the top of the columns.”
Tom: “Nope. I took the option to
-
IBM Punts New PureFlex Racks, Offers PDU Deal
October 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe 19-inch rack hasn’t changed all that much in decades, and like Ethernet, anything that comes up against it with better technology finds itself smashed and absorbed. Or both. But, that said, even things like racks need to be tweaked to fit new server, storage, and networking designs, and so it is with a line of racks tailored for the PureFlex modular systems that IBM announced in April.
To fit all of the hairy cables coming out of the backend of the Flex System chassis, IBM has tweaked the PureFlex rack to be 10 percent deeper (1.1 meters instead of