Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM i Technology Refreshes and PTFs: Be Careful
October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreStarting last year, IBM started doing what it calls Technology Rrefreshes for the IBM i operating system that provide support for new systems and peripherals as they come to market. These Technology Refreshes are numbered–TR3 came out on October 12 with the new Power Systems servers–so you can keep track of them. But it may not be entirely obvious how you should deal with them if you are used to patching your system with PTFs.
Doug Bidwell, who puts together the System i PTF Guide that is published at IT Jungle, offers some insight and advice:
The latest technology
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IT Spending Growth To Slow In 2012, Says Gartner
October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is very difficult for IT spending to grow faster than gross domestic product in any country or globally for very long. While the economies of the Western world are by and large still growing, at least at the crudest levels that we can measure with the economic tools we have, that growth is slowing. And consequently, the people who make a living calling the IT market are beginning to think that growth will slow a bit in 2012.
Gartner hosted its Symposium/ITxpo last week, and Peter Sondergaard, a senior vice president at Gartner and the head of its global
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Power Systems Carries That Weight In IBM’s Third Quarter
October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDespite the impending launch of new Power7-based machines that came out on October 12, the Power Systems business on which IBM i customers depend nonetheless booked another great 13 weeks in the third quarter of 2011. Even though IBM was short $103 million compared to what Wall Street expected it to do in terms of aggregate sales, profits were right on target and Big Blue was confident enough in the fourth quarter to raise its earnings guidance for the third time this year.
In the quarter, IBM’s sales rose by 7.8 percent, to $24.2 billion, with net income under a
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IBM Gooses Power Systems Storage and Networking
October 24, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we discussed in last week’s issue, on October 12 IBM rolled out some new entry and enterprise Power7-based systems with double the maximum memory capacity and with support for PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral cards, doubling up the bandwidth per slow. But there were a bunch of other enhancements to storage and networking adapters, too, and these are useful for all Power Systems shops on reasonably recent machinery.
The new SAS disk and flash drive controllers are the most interesting new devices that IBM put out in the October announcements. With solid state drives now coming into vogue to boost
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Admin Alert: Adding Redundancy to Power i SMS Monitoring
October 19, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIn an earlier column, I discussed how to use email addressing to send text message alerts to Power i administrators when a problem occurs. This week, I’ll discuss how to enhance that solution by providing redundancy for i OS text messaging, so that urgent messages can always be delivered regardless of whether or not your email system is running.
The Coverage Plan, Phase I
In my previous article, I outlined a monitoring plan for using cell phones, email, and text messages to alert administrators when critical iSeries, System i, and Power i events occur. This plan consisted of
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Dealing with Faulty Logic
October 19, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreSupposedly computer programming is a logical science. One would think, then, that computer programmers would be logical thinkers. It is not so. Let me provide a few examples of illogical thinking taken from real production programs. Then I will show a simple, low-tech way to deal with logical expressions so that they don’t end up illogical.
Let’s start with this example taken from fixed-format RPG specs. I suggest you find the bad logic yourself before reading my comments.
TYPE IFNE 'A' TYPE IFEQ 'S' XCODE CABNE 'S' CONTIN ENDIF TYPE IFEQ *BLANK XCODE CABEQ 'S' CONTIN ENDIF ENDIFThis code
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Return a User Profile Listing to a .NET Client
October 19, 2011 Hey, Mike
… Read moreI am a VB.NET programmer and am looking to retrieve a list of all users and their expiration dates on our AS/400 system. I stumbled across the cwbx library and have been able to connect to our system, but not much else from there.
Can you suggest how this info can be retrieved from VB.NET? Thanks.
–Elliot
Hi, Elliot:
The easiest way to retrieve this user info is to use the i/OS Display User Profile (DSPUSRPRF) command and dump the results to a table (also known as an outfile):
DSPUSRPRF USRPRF(*ALL) OUTPUT(*OUTFILE) OUTFILE(QTEMP/LSTUSRPRFP)
The above command (assuming you have the
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SAP Software Sales Spike 28 Percent In Q3
October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreGerman application software giant SAP is rolling in it again, just like rival Oracle has been since the Great Recession ended.
The “it” I am referring to is not legal issues, but rather money. And SAP has so much of it now it decided to release preliminary results for the third quarter ended in September.
In the quarter, SAP posted at 28 percent increase in software sales, to €841 million, and software and software-related services sales (is that a German language construct or what?) posted a 16 percent increase to €2.69 billion. Total revenues rose by 14 percent to €3.41
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IBM Promotes Easy SSD Tiering With DS8000 Deal
October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHierarchical storage management is not a new concept, but it sure does keep getting new names as the years roll by. IBM‘s high-end DS8800 disk arrays, announced a year ago, sport a hierarchical storage management feature called Easy Tier, which was used to move frequently used data from slower disks to faster ones in the array automatically to boost overall system throughput.
The DS8800, and other IBM systems and disk arrays as well, now sport solid state drives (SSDs) as well as disk drives, and IBM wants customers to take SSDs for a spin (er, well, not really I
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IBM Offers Rebates On CBU Edition-PowerHA Combo
October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM wants to sell the Capacity BackUp Editions on its earlier generation Power7-based servers–the ones not announced last week–and it is willing to give some instance cash rebates to customers to help grease the palms a little.
In announcement letter 311-148, the IBM i Capacity BackUp with PowerHA offering is giving customers who buy a Power 720, 740, 750, 770, 780, or 795 CBU Edition machine and a license for IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i Standard Edition rebates. Those buying the Power 720, 740, and 750 get $1,500 back, those buying the Power 770 and 780 get $2,000, and