Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Arrow And Avnet Ride System Upgrade Waves In Recent Quarter
February 20, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDespite some issues in the European economy and stalled shipments of disk drives due to the flooding in Thailand, the two biggest master resellers of IT gear–Arrow Electronics and Avnet–turned in improving profits in their most recent quarters. But the revenues were a bit choppy.
In the quarter ended December 31, Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) had just under $2 billion in revenues in the quarter, up 5.4 percent, and operating income hit $106.4 million, up a very tidy 19.5 percent. Arrow’s electronic components distribution business only grew 3 percent, to $3.4 billion, and the operating income for
-
20i2, A Year Of IBM i Un-i-ty
February 20, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTrevor Perry is one of the staunchest advocates of the IBM i platform out there, and if Big Blue had any, er, budget, they would hand him whatever piles of cash they have allocated to platform evangelization and just let him do what he does.
It’s a new year–welcome to 20i2–and one in which Perry 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 to that end, Perry has launched www.ibmi2.com, a site that
-
YouTube Follies: Windows On Power Systems-IBM i
February 20, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI don’t get out much, and I certainly don’t claim to know everything that everyone is doing out there on the Wild Wild West and Intertubes. And unlike my children, and probably your children or grandchildren, I don’t have a lot of free time to browse YouTube for interesting videos. But I ran across a couple of IBM i-related videos showing Windows and Excel running on an IBM i box and thought you would also be amused.
The videos–which show Microsoft‘s Windows XP and then the Excel spreadsheet program running on an i5/OS V5R4 (sometimes called IBM i 5.4)
-
Big Blue Pulls The Plug On IBM i Discount Deal
February 20, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM, like most retailers of capital goods, has to use a combination of carrots and sticks to encourage customers to spend money on new systems or upgrades, particularly when the economy is as dicey as the current ones in parts of North America and Europe still seem to be. Sometimes there’s a real stick–like the threat that an operating system will no longer be available–and sometimes there’s the withdrawal of the carrot, which feels like a stick when it hits you.
In the wake of IBM’s announcement last week of the sunsetting of the i5/OS V5R4 operating system release
-
IBM i Tech Refresh Coming This Spring
February 20, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf this were a normal and historical operating system update for OS/400 or i5/OS, this lead story in The Four Hundred would be talking about how AS/400 and iSeries shops would have to brace themselves for a new operating system version that is coming out. But as it turns out, IBM‘s new Technology Refresh approach to sliding in new features and hardware support for IBM i is a lot less dramatic.
That doesn’t mean Technology Refreshes, of which we have had three in the past year and a half or so, are unimportant. You can be important without being
-
Peripherals I Want For IBM i Boxes: Cheap SATA SSDs
February 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLet me make this as simple as I can: Any neat new storage or peripheral gadget I see being announced for System x rack or tower servers, I want to see available in Power Systems machines supporting the IBM i operating system. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Here’s a case in point. In announcement letter 112-013 last week, IBM announced new solid state disks based on multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory and sporting 6 Gb/sec SATA interfaces. These SSDs came in 128 GB and 256 GB capacities and in 2.5-inch form factors. They burn somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5
-
IBM RackSwitch 10 GE Switch Does Cheaper Copper Wiring
February 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe first 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches came out in 2002, and for many years they were just the high-speed backbones that service providers and network operators installed as trunk lines between gear. But here we are a decade later, and 2012 is expected to be a transition year for 10 GE networking, where ports first start appearing on system boards and switches get cheap enough for 10 GE gear to go mainstream.
The only problem, however, is that even as switches and server ports get cheaper, and the benefits of running converged server and storage traffic over a 10 GE
-
IBM Tweaks Power Systems Rebate Deals Once Again
February 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThose marketeers at IBM are at it again, jiggering and rejiggering their Power Systems deals.
Two on-again, off-again deals that Big Blue has been running for years were modified last week. The Power Systems First In Location rebate deal was modified in announcement letter 312-018. This deal was last tweaked in June last year, when IBM added and subtracted the machines that could be acquired as well as the ISV applications that could be acquired to be eligible for the deal. This time around, the Power7 Gen2 machines that have PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral slots–the entry and high-end machines that
-
Tech Spending Up 9 Percent In 2011, But Slowing In 2012
February 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere are a lot of prognostications and predictions this time of year about what the new year will hold in terms of IT spending and shifts of focus for the IT department as it copes with changes in the business environment. It is tough to get a complete picture sitting as you do at your desk, which is why we keep our eyes out for what the Wizards of IT say about the future.
The latest predictions are coming out of IDC, which has just updated its Worldwide Black Book, its mother-of-all reports that shows IT spending diced
-
IBM Sunsets i5/OS V5R4 Again–For Real This Time
February 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf any iteration of the OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i platform could be said to have lived long and prospered, it is i5/OS V5R4, often now called IBM i 5.4 although that was not its original name. This release, which was announced on April 10, 2007, has had a long life among the OS/400 family of operating systems not only because it was a good, solid OS, but because the msove to the more recent IBM i 6.1 and 7.1 required a program conversion process customers either couldn’t do or didn’t want to do.
But last week, in announcement letter 912-011, IBM