Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Great People With Good Tools
October 3, 2011 Martin Fincham
… Read moreI don’t think I’m the only one who tires of the constant drumming that comes from so-called mainstream IT media articles and Internet discussion threads that couch the future of RPG developers and the IBM i platform in simplistic black or white terms that belie the real issues and options.
In the black hat camp, we have the doomsayers who advocate “get the hell off the platform right now and get your hands dirty with something that has a future.” On the other side, the Big Blue proponents are tarred with being the “make do and mend” brigade, with a
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Velocity Buys JD Edwards App Hoster WTS
October 3, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreVelocity Technology Services, an application hosting provider with a specialty in Lawson M3 and S3 ERP suites and Kronos time keeping and employee management software, got together a bundle of cash earlier this year and is now using that money to expand its business. Last week, Velocity announced that it acquired WTS, an application hoster and disaster recovery provider that specializes in JD Edwards ERP suites and has more than a passing interest in the Power Systems-IBM i platform.
There are a couple of different Oracle connections in here. (We are not looking for Oracle news that is
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Oracle Takes The Midrange Fight To IBM
October 3, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI’ve said it before and I will say it again: IBM may come to rue the day in the spring of 2009 when it let the former Sun Microsystems slip from its hands and fall into the loving arms of Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison. The company owns JD Edwards, one of the biggest ERP suites still on the IBM i platform, and it now, with the Sparc T4 announced last week, has a decent processor for entry and midrange systems on which to run that software.
The Oracle Database Appliance that Oracle announced two weeks ago and that
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Checking Cache Battery Status Without STRSST
September 28, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreConcerning your article about debunking cache battery rumors, did you know that there’s another way to see cache battery information without going into System Service Tools (STRSST)? IBM is offering a new program called QSMBTTCC that allows you to display cache battery status from the command line. It’s enabled by PTFs.
–Steve
As a refresher, IBM uses batteries in its disk controllers to provide caching for its disk drives. The batteries have a useful life of about 2.75 to 3 years and the system will start sending warning messages to change your batteries when your controller cache batteries are
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A Better Way To Read a Job Log
September 28, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
A job log is a wonderful thing to have when you’re trying to figure out why a good program went bad. The problem with job logs is that the few messages that point out what went wrong are entombed within myriad irrelevant messages. And job logs can be long. Just recently I dealt with one that was over 400 pages. I wrote a utility to help me make sense of job logs. Maybe it will help you, too.
My utility, which I call Convert Job Log (CVTJOBLOG), reads
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Data Needed to Debug Authority Failures, Part 2
September 28, 2011 Patrick Botz
… Read moreIn the first article in this series, I introduced the concept of debugging authority failures and described how the operating system determines whether an executing job should be allowed to access an object. Armed with this information, the topic of this second article, data needed to debug authority failures, will make much more sense. In my third article, I will describe how and where to find this information.
Data needed for debugging authority failures can be classified into the following categories: Who, What, When, Which, and Why. Some of this information helps you find other pieces of data. All of
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Weather Report: Enterprise Email Partly Cloudy By 2020
September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCompanies are as addicted to their email as their end users are. But corporations are going to give serious consideration to moving their email out there on the cloud.
That is the word from on high from Gartner, who says that cloud-based email only makes up about 3 or 4 percent of the market (presumably counting seats) at enterprises with more than 5,000 seats, the company expects cloud email to be 20 percent of the market as 2016 comes to a close and 55 percent by the end of 2020. It is worth noting that Google currently has about
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Northern Europe Gets Power Systems Cash Back Deal
September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the economy a bit jumpy all over the globe, even in what seemed to be unstoppable China, IBM has to do what it can to calm down CIOs and CFOs and get them to spend on new Power Systems gear. Big Blue last week put out another deal aimed its Northern European customers.
In this one, detailed in announcement letter ZA11-1048, is a cashback program for customers who buy application software for either AIX or IBM i and are putting that software into their companies for the first time. If they buy from the approved list of applications
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So Long Then, QuickTransit Emulator
September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere were so many interesting possibilities for the QuickTransit emulator created by upstart Transitive, founded by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer science professor at the University of Manchester. But after being absorbed into IBM‘s Power Systems division nearly two years ago, little has been heard of the innovative emulation technology, which could have been put to many uses in the service of the Power Systems platform–particularly those of us who make a living with IBM i.
Transitive came out of stealth mode in 2004 after four years of serious development and five years before that of tooling around by grad
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Oracle Tries To Woo Midrange Shops With Database Appliance
September 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor the past two years, Oracle has been pitching its Exadata parallel database clusters and Exalogic parallel application server clusters to large enterprises, the kinds that normally buy big RISC, Itanium, or mainframe servers to run their back-end databases and applications. These machines, while interesting, are about as useful to an SMB as a Power 795 or zEnterprise 196. To go after small and medium businesses, Oracle needs to think smaller.
Thus, the company last week rushed out its announcement of the Oracle Database Appliance, a pretuned cluster of two X86-based rack servers designed to run the company’s 11g Enterprise