Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Definite Article, No Doubt About It
March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePeople are hierarchical beings, and they definitely have patterns in their speech that are tell-tale signs of deference and respect. So here’s a funny question for the day: How many products can you think of where the name of the object has the definite article “the” in front of it? He isn’t just the Pope because there’s only one, and someday some general won’t grumble, “Get me the President,” just because she is the one who was elected and lives in the White House.
People called the first practical car the Model T, and in my family at least, its
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JDE Throwdown: IBM i Versus Oracle Stacks
March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast fall, I told you all about Oracle‘s database appliances and its desire to pitch its new Sparc T4 series of Solaris servers running its eponymous database against various IBM Power-based midrange gear. Oracle, as the owner of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne suites, is particularly interested in pitching the Sparc T4 machines against entry and midrange Power7 iron running IBM i. So how does Oracle stack up?
I promised that I would try to figure this out back in October, when Oracle launched the eight-core Sparc T4 processors and the servers that use them. The Sparc T4 machines come
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Four Simple Rules For IBM i PTF Management
March 21, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreTalking with an IBM Business Partner this week, the conversation turned to PTF management and the best ways for managing cumulative PTFs. Inspired by this talk, I came up with these four simple rules for a good PTF management strategy.
Rule 1: Don’t Let Your PTFs Age
A lot of shops only apply PTFs when they upgrade their hardware, but many (or most) shops are also frequently upgrading their application software. Frequent application changes can create new processing situations that test the limits of a partition’s Licensed Internal Code (LIC) and operating system fixes. In a rapidly changing applications environment,
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Sharing In V6
March 21, 2012 Jon Paris
… Read moreSome time ago I read Ted Holt’s Guru tip Sharing Simplifies Source Code in which he showed an approach to building reports in a modular programming environment. At the time I can remember thinking that it would be interesting to see how V6 RPG’s ability to pass files as parameters might offer an even simpler approach.
Simpler, that is, once you know how to pass files as parameters! Well, it has taken me almost a year, but I finally got round to working on it, and I confess I rather like the results.
Ted’s original approach required that a driver
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Disk Array Sales Keep Expanding Despite Drive Shortages
March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe relentless pace of disk capacity improvements and the impressive price/performance gains with every new generation of disk were more than offset by rapacious demand for storage to help the disk array business grow in the final quarter of 2011. And despite disk shortages due to the flooding in Thailand (where about a quarter of the world’s disks are made) and jittery economies in the United States and Western Europe.
According to the box counters at Gartner, sales of external disk arrays that make use of controllers (as distinct from internal disk arrays like those inside of many X86
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IBM Starts Refurbishing Power Systems Machines In China
March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM makes Power Systems machinery in China to sell to customers in certain parts of the globe, and now the company has opened up a refurbishing center that will be taking back machines in trade and refurbishing them for resale in the country.
IBM has opened up a server and PC refurbishing center near one of its factories in Shenzhen, China, which will be run by the company’s Global Asset Recovery Services division, part of its Global Financing group. The facility is starting out modestly and will only represent a tiny portion of the iron that Global Asset Recovery Services
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Townsend Security CEO John Earl Steps Down
March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week, security software vendor Townsend Security said that John Earl, the company’s president and CEO for nearly three years and a beloved and well-known OS/400 and IBM security expert, had to step down for health reasons from those positions.
Many of you know Earl from his years at PowerTech and all of the work he has done for COMMON and other local user groups over the years, and it goes without saying that Earl is one of the most important and influential people in our IBM i community. This is why he ended up running Townsend Security.
Patrick Townsend,
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What Is A Used 520-Class Machine Worth?
March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI must be getting old, there’s no doubt about that. And perhaps my memory is not as good as it used to be. But I thought something was funny when I looked on the IBM Global Financing’s refurbished equipment site to check out what second-hand Power Systems machines running earlier versions of the i5/OS V5R4 operating system cost. With i5/OS V5R4 being mothballed in September 2013, it seemed pretty relevant to see what Big Blue was charging for gear that ran V5R4 and that could also possibly run IBM i 6.1 or 7.1.
The used equipment market has always been
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Wanted: Power 745 M3 For IBM i SMBs
March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCall it a case of server envy. While I think IBM has the right server design for small and medium businesses that employ its workhorse IBM i operating system and database double whammy, it has unfortunately put the wrong processor in that machine. I am, of course, talking about Intel‘s long-awaited “Sandy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5-2600 processor, which debuted two weeks ago and started shipping in System x machines last Friday.
The Xeon E5-2600 processors, also known by their internal code-name “Jaketown,” are designed for two-socket servers in the same power class as the Power 740 machine in the Power
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SUSE Linux 11 SP2 Tuned For Power And System z
March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are a Linux user on IBM‘s Power Systems or System z mainframe servers, then you might want to take a gander at the latest Enterprise Server release from SUSE Linux, the commercial Linux distributor owned by software conglomerate Attachmate since last year.
SUSE Linux has puts out Service Pack 2 for its Enterprise Server 11 variant of Linux, basing it on the new Linux 3.0.10 kernel, as you can read in the release notes for SP2. The update to the new Linux kernel also includes updates to the key portions of the open source stack,