Timothy Prickett Morgan
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What Could IBM Do Instead Of Spending $12.2 Billion On Shares?
October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust ahead of naming Ginni Rometty the president and chief executive officer of IBM effective January 1, the board of directors of the company got down to a little traditional business, hiring a new board member and allocating funds for Big Blue to keep trotting down to Wall Street to buy back billions of dollars of its shares.
The new board member is David Farr, who is chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric, a manufacturer of air conditioners and commercial power and cooling systems, among other things, that also happens to be a big player in the data center racket
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IBM Launches 40 Gigabit Ethernet Rack Switch
October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has been wheeling and dealing to try to peddle its Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches from its Blade Network RackSwitch lineup for the past several months, and now it has the launched a new 40 Gigabit Ethernet switch if your network backbones are getting a bit skinny for the traffic load.
The RackSwitch G8316 is a 1U top-of-racker that has 16 40GE ports using QSFP+ cabling. The switch has a chip that can handle 1.28 Tb/sec of switching bandwidth, and it can handle 960 million packets per second of message passing. The switch ports have under one microsecond
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Disk Drive Shortage Coming Due To Thailand Flooding?
October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM i shops might be wishing soon that Big Blue was making its own disk drives in the Rochester, Minnesota, factory like it used to two decades ago soon. The flooding in Thailand, which is causing much tragedy and strife at the moment, is having a secondary effect of limiting supplies of disk drives.
The monsoons in Thailand have been particularly brutal this year, and dozens of companies that make components for disk drives, as well as the disk drives themselves, relocated to Thailand many years ago to take advantage of inexpensive labor. Seagate Technology and Hitachi are presumably the
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European Slowdown Puts The Profit Squeeze On Avnet
October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe uncertainty in the European economies and the after effects of some acquisitions in the region pushed down profits for master IT distributor Avnet in the first quarter of its fiscal 2012, which ended in September. That’s the bad news, which is not bad relative to the political and economic uncertainty we’re all facing. The good news is that the IT side of Avnet still showed very impressive year-on-year growth in a quarter that is not generally the strongest one for the company.
In the quarter ended October 1, Avnet posted sales of $6.43 billion, up 3.9 percent from the
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Palmisano Hands The IBM Reins To Rometty
October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe drama is over, and Ginni Rometty, who has spent the past three decades at IBM, is going to be the next president and chief executive officer at the company. Rometty, who is 54, beat out her colleagues Mike Daniels, who is 56 and who runs Global Services, and Steve Mills, who is 60 and who runs Systems and Software Group, for the job. Sam Palmisano, who has held the president position since 2000, the CEO job since 2002, and the chairman job since 2003, will remain chairman of the board at the request of Rometty and the board.
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Bang For The Buck on Power7 Gen 2 Servers
October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen the second generation Power7 servers were launched back on October 12, IBM said that it wanted to bring faster peripherals and doubled-up main memory to the Gen 2 machines, but it also wanted to keep the prices for the machines on the entry Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 machines the same as it was for the Gen 1 machines in terms of processor cards, processor core activations, and software. The new Power 770 and Power 780 Gen 2 machines also were supposed to be in the same pricing brackets.
As readers of The Four Hundred know, I like
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Limiting How Much Memory a Storage Pool Can Allocate
October 26, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI want to run the i OS Performance Adjuster to automatically allocate system memory to my subsystems. But when I turn it on, most of the memory goes to the *INTERACT storage pool used by the QINTER subsystem. I want to take care of interactive users, but I also want some memory left over for other subsystems. How do I limit *INTERACT from using too much memory?
–Jens
This sometimes happens with using the i operating system automatic performance adjustment feature. By default in the i 6.1 operating system, the Performance Adjustment (QPFRADJ) system value is set to “2”. This
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10 Facts You Should Know about Special Values
October 26, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreImagine not being allowed to code *FIRST in the MBR parameter of the Override with Database File (OVRDBF) command. Horrible thought, isn’t it? Special values make commands more sensible and easy to use. Here are 10 facts every IBM i developer should know in order to effectively use special values in his own commands.
1. Special values are character strings that are incompatible with validity checking rules. In this example, BATCH requires a three-digit number, and *ALL does not fit that description.
PARM KWD(BATCH) + TYPE(*DEC) LEN(3 0) + DFT(*ALL) + REL(*GT 0) + SPCVAL((*ALL -1)) + PROMPT('Batch number')</all>2.
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On ‘GTFM’ and a Place for Experts
October 25, 2011 Richard Shearwood
… Read moreIT Jungle‘s executive managing editor Dan Burger last week wrote: “But if all the manuals are Web-based, what will I do with all that space on my book shelves?” More importantly, what will you do when you are trying to work out why your Internet is down? Or, as often happens to me, working on a server in a DC screened for mobile signals and with no Internet access at the machine?
Even more importantly: have you USED the IBM support portal? Unusable results and a clunky interface mean that even IBMers use Google to find stuff. It has
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CUoD Processor Activation Prices Cut In Half for Big Power7 Iron
October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, the high-end of the new Power7-based Power Systems line did particularly well on the growth front in the third quarter (albeit against some easy compares), and IBM wants more in the fourth quarter.
Late last week, in announcement number 311-155, Big Blue snuck out a Power7 Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD) discount promotion that offers customers with Power 770, 780, and 795 machines that were installed as of October 1. Under the deal, IBM is cutting the price of activating cores on certain processor cards used in