Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Take The 20i2, Year Of IBM i Un-i-ty, Survey
March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs The Four Hundred explained three weeks ago, Trevor Perry, IBM i advocate extraordinaire, is once again trying to shepherd the IBM i community for its own good, and is on a mission to understand how people talk about the platform formerly known as the AS/400. And he needs you to take a survey, so why don’t you help out?
Several weeks ago, Perry has launched www.ibmi2.com, a site that has a mission of building unity in the IBM i community.
Just like you and me, Perry wants to help the IBM i community, and he’s one of
-
The Abacus IBM i Test Drive Gains Renewed Relevance
March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCatching product transitions to conduct a little bit of new business is a tricky thing, and it is particularly difficult when the product transition that you are trying to take advantage of moves suddenly and unexpectedly. Just ask Abacus Solutions, which launched a virtual test drive service for IBM i 6.1 at the end of 2009 just as IBM was getting ready to stop selling i5/OS V5R4. And then Big Blue, at the request of customers facing the Great Recession, changed its mind and kept selling V5R4 a little longer.
The idea behind the test drive service was simple
-
Where Did The Midrange Go?
March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere’s not much of a midrange server business left, if the latest numbers from IDC are any indication. If you were thinking that the server business was shaped like a multi-layer cake, with each layer representing the revenues from small, midrange, and high-end machines, that is not the case any more. The midrange–or what we used to think of as the midrange–is being pulled apart by Moore’s Law.
By IDC’s definition, a midrange box is one that costs somewhere between $25,000 and $250,000, including a server with base memory and disk capacity and an operating system. In the fourth quarter,
-
IBM Does March Madness Rebate On Power 770s
March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like IBM is a bit eager to peddle some relatively big Power Systems iron to put the finishing touches on its first quarter. And it is no surprise, with a number of long-running promotions getting mothballed in recent weeks. If there is any rule of marketing, it is that you need to keep constantly changing things up to hit the hot buttons of different customers, so IBM is trying a rebate deal with an extremely short time window, and only on one machine: The Power 770.
There have been two generations of Power 770 boxes. The original ones
-
Admin Alert: Getting Started With An i 6.1 Upgrade
March 7, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreFor the second time in two years, my organization is participating in a multi-partition/multi-machine i5/OS V5R4 operating system upgrade to i 6.1. The second time around is interesting because I can build on lessons from last year’s upgrades. In the hope that it can help you with your V5R4 to 6.1 upgrades, here are some of my notes for planning the upgrades.
Deciding Between Upgrading To i 6.1 or i 7.1
With IBM dropping support for i5/OS V5R4 and the fact that Big Blue hasn’t released the i 8.x operating system yet, customers still have a choice whether to
-
Commenting Interactive Code
March 7, 2012 Ted Holt
… Read moreThe tips I regularly feature in this august publication deal with some aspect of source code syntax. Today I turn my attention to another part of the programming process. I want to talk about a work habit that you might find useful.
I would say that everyone who writes any type of source code at all knows the importance of comments, but that would be incorrect. I have followed (and written) too much code that was inadequately commented. Effective comments in source code serve as a great boon to the humans who must read or modify source code. As Ashley
-
Reader Feedback On Thinking Strategically About IT As A Service
March 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHi, Dan:
There’s too much talk about the dollars and cents equation. If all of IT is reduced to the budget equation, as CFOs can and often do, then the ability to use IT as a resource to gain and keep a competitive edge is lost.
Outsourcing, SaaS, cloud, GUI, web, and so on are all used as market buzz by vendors looking to sell. I especially tire of rags constantly quoting vendor staff when it’s obvious where the spin lies. Not all of IT can be reduced to an enterprise application solution or even a web-enabling green screen tool.
-
Reader Feedback On: The Application RISC Machine System/500
March 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreInteresting article. . . .
Your comment: “But so were the IBM Fort Knox and Future Systems projects, too.” They both failed big time. I’m not sure if younger readers know this.
I can’t address all the features you discussed. My hang-up has always centered around programmers and operators (in the loosest sense) who keep getting themselves in trouble and it takes too much time and money to pay a consultant to pull them out of a ditch. We (IBM) should have learned by now how to properly instrument, analyze, and recommend “fixes” before they become problems, not after the
-
Server Sales Slump A Little In Q4
March 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreConspiracy theorists think that PC and server makers are making a little too much about the impact of the flooding in Thailand, which led to disk shortages and therefore lower than expected shipments of both PCs and servers in the waning months of 2011. But according to the analysts at Gartner, a shortage of disk drives was one of the contributing factors in a fourth quarter that was a little bit weaker than it might otherwise have been.
Not that the situation was all that bad, particularly when measured up against the declines in server revenues and shipments during
-
Saddle Up, Pardner
March 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt was almost a foregone conclusion, given its application-centric nature, that among all the various systems and servers that Big Blue has sold over the decades that the AS/400 and its progeny would be the platform most dependent on the reseller and software vendor communities that sprang up around it to sell it and create application software for it. IBM does not provide statistics about its Power Systems-IBM i business any more, but these business partners are still a key component of the ecosystem. Even if their several thousand numbers are dwarfed by the overall 121,000 business partners that IBM