Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Loses Money On Hardware In Q1
April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM may have a new president and CEO, but you would be hard-pressed to find any difference between the numbers turned in by Ginni Rometty in her first quarter at the helm of Big Blue and those of her predecessor, chairman Sam Palmisano, in his last quarter standing at the wheel in the fourth quarter of 2011. To many, this makes IBM almost boring in its predictability, but if you are counting on rising earnings driving a rising stock price as well as dividends, this is probably the kind of hum-drum thing you like.
In the first quarter ended in
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AWS/400: Amazon Builds An AS/400-oid Cloud
April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOK, there is no such thing as AWS/400, but conceptually speaking, the collection of 30 cloud services are the modern analog to the simplification and integration philosophies built into the AS/400 many years ago, all souped-up for a modern, Webby world. Or, at least that is what I kept thinking as I attended the AWS Summit in New York City last week. AWS is, of course, short for Amazon Web Services, and it is the cloud computing subsidiary of online retailing giant Amazon.
We have two main jobs here in the Four Hundred stack of newsletters. The first, of
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Admin Alert: Planning An i 6.1 Upgrade
April 18, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreAs of this writing, my staff and I are preparing to upgrade the first of three System i 550 partitions from i5/OS V5R4 to i 6.1 on April 14. In an earlier article, I discussed getting started with a 6.1 upgrade. As a case study, this issue I’ll go over the planning process for actually performing the upgrade by reviewing my planning process for an actual IBM i partition.
Completing The Pre-Upgrade Tasks
At this point, we’ve completed most of the heavy lifting needed to perform the upgrade. With our Applications group, we’ve gone through and corrected all system
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A Philosophically Engineered Approach to the Processing of Parameters
April 18, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Too often we humans give little thought to what we do or why we do it, even though taking an organized approach to an activity has its advantages. In this article, I present one approach to the handling of parameters in programs and tell why I consider this a good way to process parameters.
Parameters are data that are supplied to a program in order to affect the way it behaves. For example, the ability to supply file names, member names, and various options to the Copy File
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IBM Cuts Deals To Get IBM i, AIX Shops Back On Maintenance
April 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you let you the Software Maintenance, or SWMA (pronounced “swamma” in IBMese), lapse on your IBM i or AIX operating system licenses, you have to pay a big fee to get them back under support at IBM. IBM wants to cut customers a little slack, and recently modified a long-running deal from November 2008 that now allows them to finance the maintenance after-license fees.
If you extract the Software Maintenance fees from an IBM i license, then the software itself costs from $1,945 per core on a P05 machine to $53,000 per core on a P50 machine. The
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Some Carrots To Get i5/OS V5 Shops To Move Forward
April 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIT vendors generally use a carrot-and-stick approach to coax customers to move ahead with hardware and software technologies. They don’t do this because they like giving negative reinforcement–not any more than our parents did or we do as parents–but because this is how human beings are resistant to change and need some encouragement to act. IBM has been carrotting and sticking the i5/OS V5R4 customer base for years now, and it is dangling some more carrots.
The latest stick, of course, was two months ago when IBM announced that support on i5/OS V5R4, sometimes called IBM i 5.4 by Big
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A Closer Look At The Flex System Iron
April 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn the lead story in this issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through the basic structure and the high-level sales pitch for the new PureSystem family of converged platforms announced by IBM last Wednesday. That gives you the view from 30,000 feet with a couple of buzz dives down but still well above the tree tops. Now it is time to take a good hard look at the new iron. We’ll start with the Flex System chassis at the heart of the PureFlex and PureApplication machines and the three server nodes that slide into its bays.
But
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IBM Launches Hybrid, Flexible Systems Into The Data Center
April 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt takes a little time and a lot of money to roll out a new server architecture, and even a company as large as IBM can’t do it very often. The System/360 in 1964. The System/38 in 1979 and its follow-on, the AS/400, in 1988. The RS/6000 in 1990. The BladeCenter in 2002, and the Sequent-inspired clustered server nodes in the xSeries and pSeries in the mid-2000s. iDataplex in 2008. And now the PureSystem converged infrastructure launched last week, in 2012.
IBM started designing the BladeCenter blade server back in 1999, when some enterprise-class companies were pretty fed up with
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What Happened to My QFileSvr.400 Connection?
April 11, 2012 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI set up a QFileSvr.400 connection for accessing AS/400 Integrated File Systems (AS/400 IFS) objects on another IBM i machine. I use it several times a month to transfer files. All of a sudden, the connection stopped working and I have no clue why. Do you have any idea what could happened and how I can fix it?
–Bob
As I’ve written before, I love using QFileSvr.400 for accessing, modifying, and copying or moving files between two IBM i systems (Power i, System i, and iSeries). A QFileSvr.400 link is incredibly easy to set up. All you have to do
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Interpreted CL Members, Take 2
April 11, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreOnce again, the alert and astute readers of this august publication have proven true the old adage that multiple methods exist for removing the outer covering of a feline animal. Several of you wrote in response to my article, Interpreted CL Members, to share other methods of running CL commands in interpreted mode. Here are some of the comments I received.
I use REXX to handle scripting for CL commands. While I’m not an expert, I’ve found it useful for tasks that you do at a command line to set up something, do over and over, and forget the