Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Rejiggers DS Array And EXP Enclosure Disk Prices
January 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe have been warning you that in the wake of the tragic flooding in Thailand, where about a quarter of the world’s disk drives and many of the components used in units made elsewhere are manufactured that you should expect price rises for disk drives due to shortages. Interestingly, IBM both raised and lowered disk prices in selected models of its DS series of external disk arrays last week.
As it turns out, as you can see in announcement letter 312-005, some of the price cuts are very deep and some of the price increases are fairly modest on
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IBM Chases Power Customers In EMEA With Partner Incentives
January 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs you know from listening to the news, the European economy is not exactly roaring at the moment, so Big Blue is kicking off 2012 by trying to scare up a little Power Systems business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa with a new cash incentive program that is over and above the deals the company currently has in place.
Under the 2012 Power ISV Solution Connection Program, in announcement letter ZA12-1004, business partners that work with ISVs to find and close Power Systems deals involving the IBM i, AIX, or Linux operating systems will get an additional
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Rocket Software Buys iCluster HA Biz From IBM
January 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe high availability software market in the IBM i space is getting off to an interesting start in 2012 now that Rocket Software has bought the iCluster software business from IBM. The deal was announced on January 4, but was actually closed by Rocket Software and IBM on December 31 for an undisclosed sum, and it puts iCluster logical replication software in the hands of a third party that plans to invest in the product and grow the business.
Rocket Software has been on an acquisition tear in the IBM space for the past couple of years, having snapped
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The World Is Not Going To End In 2012
January 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePeople are unlike computers in a lot of different ways, but one of the similarities is that both machines and members of the Homo sapiens species like to mark time. Computers need to mark time to function properly, and people, well, we do it to get in rhythm with and to push against our environments and, I sometimes think, just to give us a little drama in our lives. I don’t know about you, but I have had plenty of drama in the past decade and I would like to declare 2012 a No Drama Zone.
Such a declaration
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Admin Alert: Hidden Parameters of the Submit Job Command
December 14, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read morePower i operating system commands are like old friends. You think you know everything about them, then one day they surprise you by displaying a different side of themselves. This week, let’s look at a few hidden parameters available with the i OS Submit Job (SBMJOB) command. These parameters can help you perform some new tricks you may not have thought of.
Non-Obvious Candidates
Everyone knows the standard SBMJOB parameters such as Job Name (JOB), Job Description (JOBD), and Job Queue (JOBQ). But if you search the Additional Parameters section of the Submit Job command (available by pressing F10 from
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End-of-Year Odds and Ends
December 14, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreDear Colleagues:
It’s hard to believe that another year is coming to an end, but it’s happening yet again. Let’s wind up 2012 with some odds and ends. I hope you find something useful.
In response to Message Received, But Not Understood, Michael wrote:
I have used the CMPDTA parameter on the MONMSG command to provide this filter. See CPF2817.
Here is an illustration of Michael’s suggestion:
CPYF FROMFILE(&FRLIB/&FRFILE) + TOFILE(&TOLIB/&TOFILE) FROMMBR(&FRMBR) + TOMBR(&TOMBR) MBROPT(*REPLACE) CRTFILE(*NO) MONMSG MSGID(CPF2817) CMPDTA(CPF2861) EXEC(DO) /* to-file doesn't exist */ /* do something */ ENDDO MONMSG MSGID(CPF2817) CMPDTA(CPF2869) EXEC(DO) /* from-file is empty */ -
Windows, Linux Big Server Sellers In Q3
December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week, The Four Hundred reported on the quarterly server sales and shipments presented by Gartner, and this week we get a second opinion on the market from IDC, which looks at the system racket a little bit differently from its box counting peer.
Gartner measures server sales each quarter as they are peddled to users from either the vendors directly or their reseller channels, while IDC looks only at the factory revenue at the manufacturer level. And each presents, to the public at least, a slightly different set of dicing and slicing of products by operating system,
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Reader Feedback On Blade Servers Barely Nick IBM i Market
December 12, 2011 Hey, Dan
… Read moreGood article. I agree with the complexity from an i-perspective, and liked your detailed analysis. I would like to add another point. I think blades in general are at an awkward junction. I work at a large Intel shop right now, with a mix of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows 2008 server) as well as Red Hat Linux (4.X thru 6). Several years ago they started moving from a standard rack mount to blade configuration. A funny thing happened on the journey. It’s called virtualization. Long story short, VM’ing everything has minimalized the need for blades.
Instead, you
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Happy Holidays And the PM 2011 Edition Fruitcake Recipe
December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe strange brews have been concocted. The three dozen fruitcakes of various sizes have been baked, soaked in bourbon, wine, and cognac, and wrapped up in fondant, waiting to be shipped. Some of the Christmas shopping has been done, but there’s still more to go and not a lot of time. The holiday meal menu is being pondered and tweaked. And now is the time for the good people at IT Jungle to take a well-deserved break from the rat race that is the news business.
As it has been for several decades now, it is my great
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IBM Off To The Races With New Memory Tech
December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe chip heads at IBM‘s Research and Microelectronics divisions have had a busy week, showing off their new memory and computing toys at the IEEE’s International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington, D.C., last week. Some of the chip technology that Big Blue was showing off to its peers is far out into the future, but it could end up in systems sooner than you might think.
As you old AS/400 shops are well aware, IBM used to make its own memory chips and disk drives for its systems and that memory was designed and fabbed in the same Rochester,