Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Should Buy Mellanox Before HP Or Cisco Does
July 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMaybe IBM should have bought Mellanox Technologies as well as Blade Network Technologies back in the fall of 2010. Or perhaps just after Mellanox ate rival-partner Voltaire that November and positioned itself to be a player in both Ethernet and InfiniBand switches and adapter cards.
Intel is certainly hot to trot to own chip designers who make network switch and router chips as well as silicon and full adapters for servers that allow them to link to switches, and IBM would do well to get more serious about networking than just buying up Ethernet switch maker Blade Network, itself a
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Big Blue Cranks Up The Profit Engine In Q2
July 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou have to hand it to IBM. The major economies that used to lead the global economic engine are having a bit of trouble with the growth markets coming on, and being that International is in fact the company’s first name and Business is its middle name, you would expect for Big Blue to not worry about where it makes its sales or even if sales grow so long as profits do. And that is exactly what the company has focused on and accomplished in the second quarter.
In the quarter ended in June, IBM’s revenues took a $1
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IBM Gives Killer Power System Deals Down Under
July 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are looking to buy a Power 720 or 750 server based on the current Power7 processors and your company happens to be located in either Australia or New Zealand, then IBM has a deal that you are probably going to want to take a look at and maybe not even refuse. Maybe IBM will start wheeling and dealing up here in the Northern Hemisphere soon, too, ahead of the Power7+ launch.
As you all know, the vast majority of customers who run IBM i on modern Power Systems machines find that a single-socket Power 720 is sufficient for
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Ultrium Tape Drive Makers Ready LTO 6 Units
July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Linear Tape Out (LTO) Consortium managed by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum started selling LTO 6 licenses last June, and now the first tape drives based on the spec are about to hit the market.
According to a statement put out by the consortium, the first LTO 6 drives will hit the market in August, with the ability to store up to 6.25 TB of compressed data on a cartridge, double of the LTO 5 cartridge, with data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/sec on compressed data, a 42.9 per cent boost over LTO 5. If you
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IBM Launches Single-Socket PowerLinux Server, Tweaks Power Systems I/O
July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue is fleshing out its PowerLinux line of Linux-only servers, and last week put out a variant of the Power 730 box with a single socket and a lower price tag than the current two-socket boxes that were announced back in April along with a PowerLinux version of a two-socket Flex System node.
Last week, in announcement letter 112-119, you will see that the PowerLinux 7R1 is a single-socket server in a 2U rack-mounted server chassis. You get precisely one processor option: an eight-core Power7 chip running at 3.55 GHz with all of its cores activated to accept
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One More Power Systems Roadmap For The Road
July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through some Power processor and systems roadmaps that I was able to find out there on the Intertubes, as well as some specifics about the forthcoming Power7+ processors, which are due to come to market between now and the end of the year. I accidentally left one of the roadmaps I stumbled upon out of last week’s story. And it is an important one.
So this week, I will show it to you. Check it out:
For Power Systems shops, the fact that there is Power8 and Power9
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Windows On The (2012 And Cloudy) World
July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIncumbents in any business, whether it is in the technology sector or not, are usually pretty good at seeing an opportunity off on the horizon and at looking around in their immediate vicinity and identifying and dealing with direct competition. What kills them, in the long run, is their inability to see an indirect threat that can morph into a something quite deadly indeed, and even if they should see the threat, they are unable to stop doing what they are doing, selling their products, and come up with an alternative strategy.
This has certainly been the case in the
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Admin Alert: Making Run the Same Run the Same On IBM i Access 7.1 On Windows 7
July 11, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreOne of my clients is working on a new build for their Windows 7 computers. They are deploying IBM i Access for Windows 7.1 (IBM i Access) on Windows 7 for the first time, and I’ve been evaluating using the product on that platform. Here are some issues and observations I’ve seen with the Personal Communications (Pcom) product that comes with version 7.1.
Run The Same May Not Run The Same In IBM i 7.1
Like IBM i Access for Windows’ predecessors such as Client Access Express for Windows, iSeries Access for Windows, etc., IBM i Access ships with a
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RPG Subprocedure Error-Handling with APIs
July 11, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreIn the May 2, 2012, edition of this august publication, I shared how Brian Rusch’s shop uses an API to forward escape messages up the call stack in CL programs. The Resend Escape Message (QMHRSNEM) API works just as well in RPG subprocedures. Here’s how it’s easily done.
First, you need a prototype for QMHRSNEM, and you must define the first two parameters.
D ResendEscapeMsg... D pr extpgm('QMHRSNEM') D MessageKey 4a const D ErrorCode 10i 0 constYou can define the remaining parameters if you want, but make sure you mark them OPTIONS(*NOPASS). If you like, place the prototype in
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IT Spending Creeps Up A Tiny Bit In North America
July 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe good news is that IT budgets are on the rise in the United States and Canada, according to a recent poll of IT shops performed by Computer Economics. The bad news is that the growth is not very much and is only a tiny bit more than was seen in 2011.
Computer Economics just finished up talking to more than 200 IT departments in North America for its IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks 2012/2013 study, which was just released and which is based on the twice yearly survey that the company does across small, midrange, and large enterprises.