Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Disk Array Price Erosion Slows In Q1, Software Stalls
June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the hard disk drive shortage due to the flooding in Thailand more or less over, the reactive price rise for SATA and SAS disk drives over the past several months due to shortages has helped in part to prop up the worldwide disk storage market. The insatiable demand for hoarding data, which has only been aggravated by the hyper around big data, did its part to help push disk array sales, too.
In the first quarter, IDC reckons that disk array revenues were up 6.8 percent, to just under $8 billion, and total disk capacity shipped across internal arrays
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The SDMC Is Dead, Long Live The HMC
June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAh, Systems Director Management Console, we hardly knew ye.
Those of you in the Power Systems market who had been dreading the transition from the not-much-liked Hardware Management Console (HMC) to its kicker, announced a year ago and based on a souped-up version of IBM‘s Systems Director, don’t have a reason to dread because as part of PureSystems launch back in April, the SMDC was discontinued. So forget all that.
Systems Director, of course, was the management tool that IBM created for the BladeCenter blade servers and then eventually extended to cover Power Systems and System z iron. The
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IBM Beats Out Cisco For Modular Server Deal
June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s not a particularly large deal as these things go, but IBM has won a head-to-head competition pitting its new PureSystem platform against similar modular systems from Cisco Systems and come out with the sale.
As I explained when the Flex System modular servers were announced back in April, Big Blue is not expecting companies to rip out their existing IT infrastructure and replace it with the new X86 and Power system nodes, the Flex Manager management stack, and integrated switching and storage. But, in some cases, such as in this win against Cisco and its “California” Unified Computing
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IT Hiring Plans More Or Less Level In Q3
June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSome chief information officers are looking to hire people, and others are looking to fire people. That’s the latest result from surveys done by Robert Half Technology, the division of the headhunter by the same name that works in a number of different industries, including the IT sector. The news is not unexpected, given the uncertainty in the economy, and as we all know, it could be a lot worse. And it has been, in fact.
Robert Half has just finished up surveying 1,400 CIOs across the United States to take the pulse on the human side of the
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IBM i: A Brilliant Idea That Has Returned Again In PureSystems
June 18, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue, we presented the first part of an interview that Dan Burger and I did with Colin Parris, general manager of the Power Systems division at IBM, and Ian Jarman, the long-time IBM i product manager who in February was named analytics marketing manager for Power Systems and System z at IBM. In part two of the interview, we go a little deeper into synergies between the Power Systems-IBM i platform we have today and the new PureSystems platform, which inherits some of the attributes of the AS/400 and its progeny.
TPM: Let’s shift gears
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Admin Alert: Of Course, Everything I Know About NetServer Could Change
June 13, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIn my last column, I explained why people lose IBM i NetServer access, discussing some common ways to restore NetServer access to a user profile. Little did I realize that I had barely scratched the surface of this topic. Thanks to alert reader Tony Cusack, I learned some new NetServer tricks I didn’t even know existed. Here’s what Tony taught me and how it can help you better manage your NetServer configuration.
In Our Last Episode. . .
Last time, I provided the following information on managing IBM i NetServer user profile access.
- A user’s NetServer access can be
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The New Basics
June 13, 2012 Jon Paris
… Read moreEvery time I teach some of the more recent additions to RPG, such as XML parsing or Open Access, I find that I need to include some “remedial” education on some of the D-spec enhancements that have been made to the language over recent releases.
Most of these enhancements came into the language many years ago, but if you had no immediate need for them, they may have passed you by. After all, even the most avid reader of this newsletter has probably forgotten most of what they read here 10 years ago if they didn’t use it. And yes,
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NetApp Shoots By IBM For Number Two Spot Behind EMC In Disk Arrays
June 11, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDifficulties in obtaining disk drives of specific type and capacity are still affecting the PC, server, and disk array businesses, but the problem is much less severe than it was a year ago, and the external controller-based disk array business seems to have largely recovered.
According to the latest statistics from Gartner, file-based and block-based external storage array sales combined for $5.44 billion in sales in the first quarter, and 8 percent increase over the sales level in the first quarter of 2011, when the disk shortages, caused by the flooding in Thailand, where about a quarter of the
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Exiting Hardware Business, Agilysys Positions For Future Profits
June 11, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThis time last year, Agilysys, known mostly for its application suites for managing hotels and casinos, sold off its Technology Solutions Group hardware reseller business for $64 million in cash to OnX Enterprise Solutions, bidding good riddance to the low-margin iron services business and allowing it to focus on its software business. Agilysys has just closed out its fourth fiscal fourth quarter and is still writing down intangibles and taking restructuring charges from its hardware and services exit, but the company says it is positioning itself to be profitable in the future.
Agilysys ends its fiscal year in
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CIOs Tenures Shorten, IT Salaries Flatten, Says Janco
June 11, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou might think that being a chief information officer gives you the best job security in the IT department, but research from Janco Associates suggests otherwise.
Janco, which monitors the job market and other compensation and worker issues in the IT sector, is putting together its mid-year IT salary survey, which comes out at the end of June, and did a survey of 438 companies in the United States, Europe, and South America to gauge the length of employment and salary levels of IT personnel. Janco put out a little teaser of information regarding CIOs to pique the interest of