Timothy Prickett Morgan
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That Perplexing Power7+ Processor
October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLike you, I only jump to the wrong conclusion when I come to a cliff and generally only if I believe I am going to make it to the other side. There was a lot of circumstantial and graphical evidence that IBM was going to launch a Power7+ kicker to the current Power7 processor, and as we all found out last week, that didn’t happen. As we report elsewhere in this issue, IBM put out new systems with denser memory and new PCI-Express I/O peripheral slots, but with the same or essentially the same Power7 processor features.
I hear a
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IBM i 7.1 Tweaked To Be More ISV Friendly
October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the October 12 Power Systems announcements, the IBM i 7.1 operating system-database combo was tweaked with Technology Refresh 3, the second update this year and the third such refresh since IBM moved toward a regular update cycle that was more akin to (but still distinct from) the way AIX gets updated. The Technology Refresh focuses on new functions and I/O support that is meant to be installed with the current operating system release and be less disruptive.
Steve Will, the chief IBM i architect at IBM, explained this Technology Refresh approach to readers of The Four Hundred
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I/O, Memory Boosted On Entry, Enterprise Power Systems
October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI can sum up IBM‘s entry Power Systems announcements on October 12, which are not being formally announced until sometime this week, in a way that will flash you back to either your own or your parents’ childhood. This is the refrain of the theme song from The Power Systems Show: “They’re servers, nearly identical servers: They look alike, they cost alike, at times they even compute alike–you can lose your mind when computers are two of a kind.”
Aren’t you glad I didn’t sing that? Be grateful that I think a newsletter should be printed and not
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Skipping Robot/SCHEDULE Runs on AS/400-Class Machines
October 12, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreOn our System i 550, we use Robot/SCHEDULE for batch processing. Every so often, we have a programming issue where we have to skip running a job in the middle of a long job stream. The skipped job sometimes has reactive jobs hanging off it. We still want to run the reactive jobs, even when we don’t run their prerequisite job. Got any ideas?
–Keith
Like many other shops, we also use Robot/SCHEDULE for running batch job streams on our System i and Power i machines. Like you, we’ve encountered the same issue where we want to skip running one
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Add Outfile Support to Your Applications
October 12, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
When I compare IBM i to other operating systems, I am amazed. This well-designed, well-built operating system has numerous features that are foreign concepts to other operating systems. One of those features is that of “outfiles”, files that are built by display-type and work-type commands. If you haven’t done so, consider that it may be advantageous to write your own commands with outfile support.
In general, programs that write to database files always write to certain database files, and that’s as it should be. A file maintenance program
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IBM Offers Tech Support Try-and-Buy Services
October 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM‘s Global Services unit down in Australia and New Zealand is trying to coax customers who have been off maintenance to come back in to the Big Blue fold.
In announcement letter ZA11-1049, IBM is offering customers who have been off Enhanced Technology Support contracts since October 2010 a chance to come back, and is willing to give them three-months of service under a try-and-buy program if they sign up between October 6 and December 31. The tech support contract is administered through tier 1 and tier 2 channel partners and can be canceled at any time during
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Future Tivoli Tools Extend SSO To Clouds, Analyze Services
October 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePassword management and the security issues (mostly human) that surround it continue to be a bone in the throat of IT departments. Having established standards like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID to control how users access applications within the network and behind the firewall, now app-crazed employees want to roam outside the firewall and use the same single sign-on (SSO) tools that they have for enterprise apps to get them access to the cloudy apps. The good news is this is exactly what IT departments want to have happen, too.
So IBM is starting to tell customers about
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IBM’s Wheels And Deals On 10 Gigabit BNT Switches
October 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is a relative re-newcomer to the switch market, and it is trying to pump up sales of its Blade Network Technologies top-of-rack switches.
Back in July, in announcement letter 311-101, IBM gave a 38.5 percent discount on the RackSwitch G8052, a 48-port Gigabit Ethernet switch with four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports (commonly used for uplinks but also available for 10GE connectivity). IBM cut the tags on this switch from $8,949 to $5,500, a 38.5 percent slash, if customers bought them from the IBM web store. (You would think this would annoy the heck out of IBM’s channel partners,
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Infor Wants You, Channel Partner
October 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMaking good on its promise earlier this year, enterprise software supplier and midrange specialist Infor is ramping up its effort to recruit channel partners and build its business as well as theirs.
Infor announced the Infor Partner Network back in June as a keystone in its plan to double its sales through the channel. Having gotten its existing partners up to speed on IPN and rebranded its myriad applications, including the recently acquired Lawson suites, under the common Infor10 brand, Infor has now put out the call to all channel partners around the world to join up.
“Our commitment
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Oracle Has Built A Modern, Cloudy AS/400
October 10, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI just spent a week off and on with Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief executive officer at Oracle. I wasn’t playing against him and tennis buddy and former Hewlett-Packard CEO, Mark Hurd, at the Pacific Athletic club, laughing about how the rest of the world lives. No, I was attending Oracle’s OpenWorld customer conference, which besieged San Francisco last week with 45,000 attendees, and a bunch of announcements that preceded it. Luckily, I was attending these events through YouTube, from the comfort of my very own office.
For the past several weeks ahead of the OpenWorld extravaganza, the top