Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Abacus Puts The i In VIOS With Screaming Power 720 Setup
May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo things were made abundantly clear to me as I walked around the COMMON conference and expo last week, attending sessions and talking with people and listening to their complaints. The first is that just about everyone, even die-hard techies, are annoyed with the AIX-derived Virtual I/O Server that is used to virtualize disk and network drivers on Power Systems. The second thing was that we all better get used to it, because VIOS is here to stay.
If you don’t want to cope with setting up VIOS on an IBM i or hybrid IBM i-AIX box with maybe a
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IBM Revives Power 770 Discount Deal For Spring Push
May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in March, when IBM was hot to sell some of its fairly large Power 770 servers to close out a good first quarter, the company whipped out a quick rebate scheme for the processing capacity on the machines that I dubbed March Madness. It is not clear how effective this deal was, but it has come and gone and now IBM has a similar rebate to push some more Power 770 iron here in the second quarter.
The original March Madness deal in announcement letter 312-038 gave the same discounts on two generations of Power 770 machines with
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Admin Alert: Prepping For And Responding To An Unheard Of IBM i #FAIL
May 9, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIn the past six months, I’ve had three occasions where two of the six IBM i partitions I manage have needed emergency IPLs to restart their systems. This is unusual for an IBM i installation and it got me thinking what could have been done to avoid the issue and how I could have reacted better after the issue occurred. This article summarizes what I’ve learned from these experiences.
This Ain’t Windows, You Know
These emergency situations occurred on a Power 720 i 6.1 partition (one emergency) and a Power 6 550 partition (two emergencies). While it’s not as unusual
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The Proper Way To Deallocate A Pointer
May 9, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreJerry Clower used to tell a story about attending a rattlesnake roundup. He said that people from the humane society were on hand to be sure that the rattlesnakes were killed properly. Mr. Clower remarked that he didn’t know that there was an improper way to kill a rattlesnake. Pointers can be like rattlesnakes, biting you when you don’t expect it. Do you know the proper way to kill a pointer?
Use the %ALLOC function to allocate memory to a program. The system copies the address of the memory into a pointer variable.
D SomePointer s D SomeData s 256a
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Oracle Wants To Send SAP A $776.7 Million TomorrowNow Bill
May 7, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSoftware giant Oracle, which is seeking a retrial of the lawsuit against defunct third-party ERP maintainer TomorrowNow and its parent, rival SAP, told the U.S. District Court that is hearing the retrial that it will seek $776.7 million in damages against SAP.
Considering how puny the TomorrowNow business actually was, this is still a very large amount of money to ask for damages. But it is far less than the $1.3 billion that a jury awarded Oracle in the first trial against TomorrowNow and SAP, even if it is a lot more than the $272 million that U.S.
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Parris Named Power Systems GM, Rosamilia Moves Up
May 7, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere are more executive changes at IBM and some familiar faces in the IBM i community have been promoted to new positions within Big Blue.
When IBM launched the new X86-priced PowerLinux systems two weeks ago, I didn’t see it at first, but way at the bottom of the press release there’s a quote from Colin Parris, who is referred to as general manager of Power Systems at IBM.
Tom Rosamilia, who ran the System z mainframe business for a stint, took over the combined Power Systems and System z business back in August 2010, appointing Parris the
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Two Ask TPM Questions: Real IBM i Clouds And Apple Buying IBM i
May 7, 2012 Hey, TPM
… Read moreIn AWS/400: Amazon Builds An AS/400-oid Cloud, you wrote:
I really do wish IBM would realize that IBM i is already a platform cloud of sorts, just waiting for it to be deployed on its SmartCloud so customers can get access to it and use it on a pay-per-use basis. If not, maybe we can get Amazon to roll in a few thousand Power System nodes and make use of DB2 Multisystem and other features to have Amazon build a truly scalable DB2 for i database service and build EC2-like images that work as RPG and COBOL compute engines
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Abacus Solutions Puffs Up An IBM i Cloud
May 7, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou can find a million places that offer you cloudy instances of Windows or Linux operating systems on X86 servers running out there on the Internet, but finding similarly cloudy slices of Power-based machinery sporting the OS/400 or IBM i operating systems can be a challenge. Especially if you don’t want to make long-term commitments and only want to buy a relatively small slice of a machine. But this week at the COMMON midrange trade show, Abacus Solutions is throwing its data center in the ring with its i in the Cloud offering.
Yeah, it would be better if they
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Admin Alert: Secrets Of The IBM i IPL Parameters
May 2, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIBM i operating systems contain a number of attributes that are used to control IPL processing when you start or restart a partition. Some attributes (such as Start To Restricted State) are well-known, while others are seldom looked at. This week, let’s take a look at your system’s IPL attributes and how they can help you perform specific functions on your system.
Viewing And Changing Your IPL Parameters
You can view and change your IPL parameters by typing in the Change IPL Attributes (CHGIPLA) command from a 5250 green screen and pressing the F4 key. When you do this, you’ll
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CL Error-Handling With APIs
May 2, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
I had the great pleasure of meeting Brian Rusch in Milwaukee last month, when I spoke to the Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professionals Association (WMCPA). Brian told me about the method his shop uses to handle CL program exceptions. I’d like to share it with you.
IBM has established an architecture for exception handling. When a program exception occurs, the system may send one or more diagnostic messages that give information about the error. The system does send an escape message, which summarizes the problem and cancels the program.