Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM To Start Charging For Power Systems Shipping And Handling
May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you have been shopping for stuff online in the past several years, you know that the cost of shipping things has gone through the roof. And IBM is well aware of this too, and is not about to absorb the shipping costs on Power Systems gear when its peers in the server racket charge for shipping and handling.
To that end, in announcement letter 112-066 and in a further clarification in announcement letter 212-239, IBM explained that staring on July 10, it will be adding shipping and handling features to selected Power Systems equipment.
The shipping and handling
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Big Blue Boosts Trade-Ins For Power 770 Deal
May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBoy, IBM sure seems hot to move its almost-top-end Power 770 servers these days. The company has two deals in the works, and it last week jacked up the trade-in credits on one deal while it at the same time backed off a little bit on the sweetener for another deal that went dormant at the end of March but which was revived two weeks ago.
IBM has been offering trade-in credits to customers who move from older Power-based servers or competitive Unix or proprietary machines made by Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Fujitsu to new Power7-based machines for so
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Maxava Sees Big Bump In HA Sales To New Customers–Again
May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHigh availability software maker Maxava says that more and more IBM i shops are getting savvy about protecting their critical application and data assets, and this is boosting the company’s sales as well as sales of new Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system. This is good for the IBM i ecosystem and is a reflection of the fact that high availability cluster has always been one of the dominant drivers of server sales in the IBM midrange.
Maxava says that new customer business–as opposed to maintenance and licensing from its existing customer base–was up 30 percent in
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IBM i And AIX Shops Pay A Hefty Premium Over PowerLinux Buyers
May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs anyone who has a past experience with multiple long-term relationships or more than one child will tell you, comparisons are odious. But when we are shopping for infrastructure or searching for a mate or figuring out which kid is going to get what when you finally shuffle off the mortal coil, you can’t help but make comparisons. And even after you’ve made your choice, you keep looking to make sure you are getting a good deal. If you are a Power Systems shop running either IBM i or AIX, you are just not getting as good of a deal
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Preventing Your System from Restarting After a Full System Backup
May 16, 2012 Hey, Joe
… Read moreGood article on the secrets of the IBM i IPL parameters. Is there a way to stop the system from restarting after my full system backups complete (GO SAVE, option 21)? There are times that it would be great for the system to stay in restricted state after a backup, but the startup CL program always runs. How do I stop it from running?
–Doug
Here’s the drill for changing your System i and Power i partitions so that they don’t kick off their system startup programs after a GO SAVE, option 21, full system backup.
First, realize that
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Generic Processing, Continued
May 16, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreImagine needing to delete a large number–50, 100, 1,000–device descriptions, all of which begin with the same group of characters, from your system. Now imagine the Delete Device Description (DLTDEVD) command not accepting a generic device name. That got ugly quickly, didn’t it? And yet that sort of thing is what programmers often force end users to do. Maybe we need to add generic processing to our applications.
I have written about generic names before. (See Related Stories at the end of this article.) But I have not written about using generic values in the context of application development.
Suppose
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Boolean Variables: Underused and Unappreciated
May 16, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreBoolean variables can have only two values: true and false. In CL, they are known as logical variables. In RPG, they’re called indicator variables. They’re not essential; I got by without them for years. But they are useful. Let’s take a closer look at Boolean variables.
Let me share a story with you. Some years ago, a certain factory started faxing requirements reports to their suppliers. The suppliers liked the reports, but some of them asked if they might receive the requirements electronically in a spreadsheet format. The IT department added a one-digit code to the database.
- 1=send by
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Avnet Components And Technology Solutions Businesses Both Slip
May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMaster reseller Avnet had a somewhat different quarter from rival Arrow Electronics in its most recent quarter, its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended in March. Both its components and systems groups took a hit.
In the quarter, Avnet’s Technology Solutions group, which buys systems, storage, software, and services from IT vendors and distributes them through channel partners worldwide, had an 8.1 percent revenue decline, to $2.52 billion. Sales in the Americas region for Technology Solutions fell 9.1 percent to $1.37 billion, and in EMEA they dropped 12.1 percent to $744.8 million; in Asia, sales were up 4 percent to $409.3
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System Biz Growth Can’t Offset Component Slump At Arrow
May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWeakening macroeconomic conditions in Europe and Asia made for a rougher than usual first quarter for Arrow Electronics, one of the two big master resellers in the world for systems and electronic components. However, the systems business was up and the components business was down, which is a better sign than you might otherwise think.
During the first quarter ended in March, Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Systems group posted sales of $1.54 billion, up 15.2 percent compared to the year ago period and posted an operating income of $55.5 million, up 42 percent. But the Arrow components biz shrank by
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Reader Feedback On: Apps And IBM i Evangelism
May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThis message continues to be delivered to the wrong audience. Most companies that use IBM i in their infrastructure are not in the business of software development. They build apps that are based on the database of third-party solutions or extend apps they have purchased from third-party vendors–such as JDE, Infinium, Lawson, PKMS, PRMS, PRISM, and so forth. Some of these have been screen scraped, but they still utilize the same old RPG III code under the covers, sometimes converted to RPG IV.
Software companies need to build modern apps for IBM i. I don’t see that happening. It doesn’t