Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Why Are My Batch Jobs Running at Priority 20?
November 30, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI’m looking at my work management setup on one of my System i boxes. I noticed that all the jobs in my QBATCH subsystem are executing at run priority 20, the same priority as my interactive jobs. What’s going on, here, and how do I reset my batch jobs to run priority 50 where they belong?
–Henry
In three steps, here’s what I think is happening and how you can change your batch run priorities.
Step 1: Your job and its routing data
Each submitted job has its own routing data. Job routing data can easily be viewed through the
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Another IFS Interface
November 30, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreThe Work with Links (WRKLNK) command is underwhelming. If it were my software, I would add a lot of options to it. But since it isn’t my software, I’ll content myself by using an alternate green-screen interface that has features that are missing from WRKLNK.
The alternate interface to IFS directories is the Edit File (EDTF) command. If you specify a single file name in the FILE parameter, EDTF opens the file in the editor. However, if you specify a directory name or a wildcarded name, EDTF presents a directory listing. (The Display File (DSPF) command works the same way.)
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Read Once, Update Many
November 30, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreUsing SQL rather than native I/O to query and manipulate the database is more than replacing one syntactical regulation with another. It requires a different way of thinking. Nevertheless, corresponding features do differ, and today I show one way that the SQL update differs from a native update.
Consider the following scenario from a project in which I was recently involved.
I needed to read a database table (physical file) from top to bottom. After I retrieve each row (record), I called one or both of two high-level language programs, using parameters to pass data values from the table and
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IBM Fights Performance Anxiety on Power Systems
November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you currently use the Performance Management iSeries service, IBM is replacing it with a new set of performance monitoring services that span both IBM i and AIX platforms.
In announcement letter 611-050 from November 15, just after we went on Thanksgiving holiday hiatus at The Four Hundred, IBM replaced the different iSeries and pSeries services with a single, unified Performance Management for Power Systems service. The older Performance Management iSeries service, which was part of IBM’s umbrella Operational Support Services, are withdrawn immediately. IBM will support you with the new combined service until your existing contract term comes
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Mainline Buys KgW For IBM, VMware Expertise
November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM system reseller Mainline Information Systems is expanding its reach in the United States with the acquisition of KgW & Company.
Mainline, based in Tallahassee, Florida, is one of the largest resellers of IBM mainframes, Power Systems, and System x machines in the United States, and it also has a tidy business peddling Hewlett-Packard‘s X86-based ProLiant and Itanium-based Integrity and Superdome systems. Mainline was founded in 1989 by Rick Kearney in the wake of the AS/400 launch and was initially focused on IBM’s proprietary midrange platform. In the 1990s, Mainline became one of the largest resellers of IBM
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Tape Areal Density Growth To Outpace Disks and Flash?
November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA lot of people want tapes and disks to die and flash to take over, but it looks like tape technology is not about to go gently into that night. And it is not just a matter of cost per gigabyte, but the density of the three different types of storage devices.
Roger Luethy, a storage specialist at IBM Switzerland, posted a paper that storage techies Robert Fontana, Steven Hetzler, and Gary Decad of the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, published some time earlier this year that shows that maybe the 40 percent annual growth rate in areal
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Warren Buffett Amasses a $10.7 Billion Stake in Big Blue
November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you didn’t think that IBM was really a financial services company as much as an IT provider, now that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company has purchased a whopping $10.7 billion stake in the company, you might just change your mind.
During a wide-ranging interview on CNBC on November 14 after The Four Hundred went on Thanksgiving hiatus, Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said he had been accumulating shares in IBM since March and kept right on buying into the fourth quarter. He has stopped buying shares, which is why the Oracle of Omaha is
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Where Are Those eXFlash SSDs For Power Systems-IBM i?
November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou only see what you are looking at, and like the rest of you in IBM i Land, I have paid close attention to the flash-based solid state drives in 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors that Big Blue has offered specifically for the Power Systems lineup. But IBM’s System x and BladeCenter blade servers have even smaller and less costly SSDs that, at least according to the IBM literature, are perfectly fine for I/O intensive database workloads and that are not available on the Power Systems machines.
A recent deal for System x customers brought these smaller SATA drives to
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More On That Dreamy And Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine
November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOnce again, many thanks to the intrepid and helpful reader of The Four Hundred who gave us some insight into the equipment purchasing alternatives facing anyone who buys Power 720-class servers from IBM and the forward-looking direction the company cutting the check for the new system took. (Notice the lack of his or her in that sentence? I had to bend it pretty far to do that.) To make the situation a little clearer, that helpful reader gave us some more insight.
To recap: The Dreamy and Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine is one with no disks and no expansion
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Feeling Like A Heel
November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCorrelation is not causation. That’s one of the first things you learn as an engineer or scientist. But as human beings that are genetically predisposed to find connections between disparate phenomenon, we just can’t help ourselves. We are, in the final analysis, pattern recognition machines that are wired for small tribes and that have a tendency toward gluttony with fatty, sweet, or salty foods. (Which is why Chubby Hubby ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s should be outlawed, right after I finish this here pint.)
We may be designed to live in small tribes and do hunting and gathering, knowing