Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Get With The Program
December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI spend a lot of time thinking about hardware and systems software because, quite frankly, that is what I get paid to do in addition to being something that I am personally interested in given the fact that systems quite literally run the world. But a system, that magical combination of processors, storage, and the code necessary to make it usable by business logic encoded in higher-level languages, is perfectly useless without applications.
It is not lost on any of you, I know full well, that the computer that this newsletter is dedicated to was launched as the Application System/400,
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Admin Alert: More Information on Semi-Restricted State, Vendor Profiles, and Storage Pools
December 7, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreAs we approach year end, I usually clear out my Admin Alert mailbox to see if there’s any good additional information about recent articles that I can pass along to you. Good thing, too, as some readers sent over workable ideas about getting into semi-restricted state and how to handle vendor profiles for auditors. Here’s what they said. I hope this information helps you.
On Semi-Restricted State TCP/IP, Suggestion #1
About my article on putting an IBM i system into semi-restricted state (where the system is down but TCP/IP is up), reader Richard Shearwood filled in some gaps about
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Juggling With jQuery
December 7, 2011 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Way back in May 2009, I wrote about some of my experiences with Javascript. Well, time has moved on and I, hopefully, have become a more experienced Javascript programmer. Part of that experience has been in coming to grips with the many Javascript libraries and frameworks that are available for download.
When it comes to Javascript, here is what has been happening to me. I came across a requirement for a feature on a Web page (e.g., a calendar to allow the selection of dates), so I did
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JDA Settles Lawsuit With Dillard’s Over i2 Software
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe acquisition of supply chain specialist i2 Technologies may have helped drive the revenues and profits of JDA Software in the past year, but the acquisition cost JDA perhaps more than it expected.
JDA tried to buy i2 back in August 2008, the belly of the Great Recession, for $346 million, but four months later, when it was unable to line up the financing, it called the deal off. Then in November 2009, when the economy had improved a bit, JDA took another run at i2, shelling out $396 million to acquire the company, adding it to its already-acquired set
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Disk Drive Shipments To Dive 30 Percent in Q4
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFears that the catastrophic flooding in Thailand that has killed hundreds of people and dislocated millions more would have a dramatic impact on the hard disk drive business are apparently going to be realized. The looming disk drive shortage is already driving up raw disk and PC prices and it won’t be long before server prices start rising, too.
This tragic situation, like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan back in March, demonstrates the need to diversify the IT supply chain and second- or third-source parts despite our tendency to want to ramp up volumes at a limited number of
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PCI-Express 4.0 Spec To Double Up Peripheral Bandwidth
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSystems using PCI-Express 3.0 peripherals are not yet on the market–unless you count Xeon E5-based machines shipping ahead of next year’s launch–and the basic feeds and speeds of the PCI-Express 4.0 spec have been hammered out by the PCI-Special Interest Group that controls the spec.
After about nine months of running simulations, PCI-SIG said that it would be able to push the bandwidth on the PCI-Express bus to 16 GT/sec (that’s gigatransfers per second), double the 8 GT/sec of the shiny new PCI-Express 3.0, and still remain on copper interconnects between adapter cards and peripheral slots on systems. This will
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Big Blue Sneaks Out Power Systems Price Changes
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere at The Four Hundred, we keep pretty religious track of IBM‘s weekly announcements, which historically have come out on Tuesday mornings around 9 a.m. Eastern. But over the years, Big Blue has been wandering from its traditional announcement days, launching things any old day and often not in conjunction with the actual announcement to the press for a new product. And, this year, IBM has put a new front end on its customer resource system that seems to have a mind of its own.
That’s the excuse we are using for why we didn’t see some Power
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IBM Tweaks Power Systems-IBM i Licensing Deal
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you were hoping to get a cheaper IBM i license for old Power6+ blade servers you have in your shop, you just missed the boat.
On November 22, while The Four Hundred was on hiatus for the Thanksgiving holiday, in announcement letter 311-171 IBM cut out the old JS23 and JS43 blade servers from the IBM i Licensing by User promotion.
This deal has been running since August 2010. It gives customers that have user-based pricing for the IBM i operating system–meaning Power 520-class systems, Power-based blade servers (old and new), and the new Power 710 and 720 machines–a
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Cooling Server Sales Reach Pre-Recession Levels
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like the data centers and data closets of the world, which have been eating servers like crazy in the second half of 2010 through now, are starting to get full. The appetite for system buying was starting to slow in the third quarter, according to statistics from Gartner, but was still pretty healthy nonetheless. The question now is whether the market can have a bumper fourth quarter and beat last year’s high, and while this is possible, it seems unlikely.
Gartner reckons that server makers sold $12.97 billion worth of machines in the third quarter ended in
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Small Biz To Boost IT Spending In 2012, Says Computer Economics
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSmall businesses are like birch trees: they are the first to wander out into a new field and turn it into a forest. And as such, small business spending can be thought of as a leading indicator for economic recovery, and perhaps more importantly, create new jobs and, even more importantly for IT vendors, they also tend to invest in computers, software, and other gadgets at a faster pace than larger organizations during economic downturns.
The prognosticators and pulse takers at Computer Economics just completed a survey of 157 organizations, most of them in the United States and Canada, to