Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Put Your Data Center Feeds Into The Flex System TCO Tool
September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTrying to figure out the pros and cons of moving to a new server, on both the technical and economic fronts, is difficult enough. Trying to assess the cost and benefits of moving to a new system architecture is even more complex. But that is what IBM wants customers to do in making the leap from Power Systems and System x boxes to “Project Troy” Pure Systems modular machines.
That’s why IBM has gone back to partner Alinean to gin up a return-on-investment and first-pass capacity planning tool to help you figure out how to convert your Power and X86
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Reader Feedback On Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1
September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHi, Tim:
Looking at the iSeries 515 option you mentioned in Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1, And Do It Well? Don’t forget that unless it has V7R1 with it, you have an after-license fee and a year’s Software Maintenance to buy to get it to V7R1. The existing system can be used as a donor to transfer across licensed programs, but if it has Software Maintenance then it can get to V7R1 for just the hardware cost. If the maintenance is about to expire then order the upgrade before it does!
–Richard
P.S. 515s are good boxes;
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Power7+ Systems Due To Launch October 3
September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLadies and gentlemen, start your checkbooks. We’ve been telling you all about the impending Power7+ processors and speculating on the related servers for so long you probably think they are already here and can’t figure out why they aren’t available from IBM‘s business partner channel. It looks like we won’t have to wait much longer to see what Big Blue is going to do to ratchet up its assault on Oracle and Hewlett-Packard in the RISC/Unix racket while preserving its IBM i platform and keeping the X86 legions at bay.
It’s a delicate bit of maneuvering that IBM has
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Admin Alert: Eternal Users: A Common Problem With IBM i Batch Jobs
September 19, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreMany IBM i shops have problems with eternal users. Eternal users are user profiles previously used by former IBM i power users that are still on the system. Although these users have left your organization, you can’t delete their user profiles, because the profiles are used in IBM i functions used to run batch jobs. This week, let’s look at eternal users and how to weed them out of your system.
How The Gotcha Gets Ya
Eternal users happen when administrators use their own or other power user profiles for submitting batch work to the system. Batch jobs are frequently
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OSHA Changes To IBM Battery Handling Affect Cache Battery Replacement
September 19, 2012 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI’m scheduling cache battery replacement for my production machine. Since this machine is never off-line, do you have any best practices or recommendations for how to change these batteries while production is running?
–Ben
Due to a recent United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) change, changing the cache batteries on your IBM i partitions isn’t as easy as it used to be, especially on a production machine. Here’s what happened.
IBM uses batteries in its disk controllers to provide disk drive caching. The batteries have a useful life of about 2.75 to 3 years and the system will
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The New Basics: Indicators
September 19, 2012 Jon Paris
… Read moreThe history of indicators pre-dates even the earliest versions of RPG and takes us all the way back to the old tabulating machines, perhaps even earlier depending on how broad a definition one uses. What is without doubt, though, is that indicators in the sense of *INnn and *INLR were introduced to the RPG language as a vehicle for translating those old tabulator board programs.
RPG has grown a lot since those early days, and yet many people still write code using the old-style numbered indicators. LR? Well, we’re kind of stuck with that, but there hasn’t been a need
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IBM Redbook Helps Out With PowerVM
September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHot off the presses! If you are trying to get your brain wrapped around the PowerVM hypervisor for dicing and slicing IBM late last week just published a new authoritative Redbook on the virty beast.
You can see a draft of the Redbook, called IBM PowerVM Best Practices, which was put out on September 14 and which is due to be finalized in November of this year. Presumably with updates for the new versions of the hypervisor with tweaks to support the new Power7+ systems that are due in the next couple of weeks if my server-sense is correct.
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IT Industry Leads Job Cutting In The U.S.
September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNot only does automation help companies reduce their payrolls, the relentless competition among IT and telecom equipment and service suppliers and the drive to ever-higher profit levels is causing them to shed workers instead of adding them.
So says the head-hunters and employment analysts at Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. In its most recent report, Challenger said that employers in the United States who actually make their job cuts known (as required when they hit a certain level in states that require filings) said they were going to shed 32,239 workers in August, the most recent data available. The level
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IBM Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is On Storwize Data Compression
September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Storwize V7000 disk arrays are at the heart of the new Flex System modular systems announced by IBM back in April, featuring converged Power and X86 server nodes, integrated versions of the V7000 arrays, and integrated switching. The arrays can also be attached to plain vanilla Power Systems boxes running IBM i, AIX, or Linux and are the important midrange of IBM’s storage lineup. So when IBM says Storwize arrays can compress files like crazy and thereby save IT shops money, customers want to believe it.
To demonstrate its commitment to its compression algorithms (or rather, the ones it
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Storage Arrays Keep Selling Despite Server Slowdown In Q2
September 17, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe need for more storage capacity in the data center is continuing to outpace the need for capacity, at least in terms of growth, according to the latest data from IDC. As The Four Hundred previously reported, the company reckons that the world consumed 2 million servers in the second quarter (down 3.6 percent) and drove $12.6 billion in revenues (down 4.8 percent). Disk arrays, by contrast, drive $8.1 billion in sales over the same three months, up 8 percent from the year-ago period, and total disk capacity shipped in those disk arrays hit an aggregate of 6,667