Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Taps Software Exec For Power Systems Marketing
August 22, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s summer and that is the traditional time that IBM makes changes in its executive lineup. At the end of July last year, Big Blue merged its Systems and Technology Group and Software Group into one giant behemoth under general manager Steve Mills while also gluing back together two halves of the Global Services giant that were artificially separated a few years back. This year, the changes in the Power Systems division are a little less dramatic, but important nonetheless.
Jeff Howard, VP of System x marketing
When IBM converged its System i and System p Power-based server units
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More Details Emerge on Future Power7+ and Power8 Chips
August 22, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in early May, I gave you what little information I had been able to gather up on the impending Power7+ and future Power8 processor designs and their possible announcement dates in Power Systems machines. The data was a little thin, and intentionally so on the part of Big Blue. But with Oracle kicking up a big fuss over Intel‘s Itanium processor roadmap, which the software giant is saying is a dead end, it looks like IBM decided it was time to be a more specific.
Not terribly more specific, mind you. Server makers and chip makers don’t
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JDA Software App License Sales Stall In Q2
August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAt the end of July, before the debt crisis and renewed worries about the economy had taken hold last week, retail and supply chain application software vendor JDA Software reported its second quarter financial results and was pretty optimistic about the rest of the year despite disappointing sales in Q2. It is important to remember that correlation is not causation, but the timing with the swoon on Wall Street in the wake of U.S. government credit getting a downgrade by Standard and Poors is spooky.
And not necessarily meaningful except in hindsight several quarters from now if business doesn’t pan
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IBM Paints X64-Based BladeCenters Sky Blue With Clouds
August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSometimes I wonder if IBM really wants Power Systems machinery to compete with X64-based servers–be they its own System x and BladeCenter machines or those of its competitors.
Last week, IBM announced some preconfigured bundles of BladeCenter blade servers called Foundation for Clouds. I am getting the feeling that Big Blue’s marketeers are falling under the same hypnotic spell as all of the cloud vendors that sell hypervisors and their cloudy management extensions on X64-based machinery. That is, cloud has become synonymous with X64-based machinery. If it ain’t on X64, then it ain’t a cloud.
This is, of course, perfectly
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Reader Feedback on Lean Mean Green Screens
August 15, 2011 Hey, TPM
… Read moreI really enjoyed your latest posting about the Lean Mean Green Screen. It took me back to the days when I was doing a lot of development for these and really strove to provide the best and easiest interface possible to the users I supported.
Your article made me wonder if the green screen or other similar interfaces weren’t the best thing for the most productivity. Web and Windows interfaces are certainly pretty, but too many times the developers clutter the screens with a lot of pretty little trinkets that only serve to distract the user and slow down
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Resurrect Dead Blue Waters Power7 Supercomputer As IBM iCloud
August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou need a supercomputer to predict the future, and unfortunately when you are trying to predict the kind of supercomputer you might need to build the supercomputer to predict that future, you can’t have as much knowledge of the future to easily make the predictions. And therefore, sometimes a supercomputer project backed by governments and key IT players gets taken out behind the barn and given the Old Yeller treatment.
Such is the case with the technically impressive “Blue Waters” massively parallel machine that was to be built this year by IBM for the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA)
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Proprietary Machines Prop Up Avnet, Arrow Server Sales
August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe hardware refresh cycle in the wake of the Great Recession and acquisitions have been good for the two master resellers of IT gear, Avnet and Arrow Electronics. Both companies did well in their most recent quarters, but also expressed some concern about downstream customers made jumpy and cautious about a jittery global economy.
Avnet finished up its fiscal 2011 year in the first week of July, and in the fourth quarter the company had $6.91 billion in sales, up 32.6 percent compared to the year ago period, and brought $238.8 million to the bottom line, an increase of
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The IBM PC Turns 30
August 15, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe data center started getting diverse in the late 1970s and has been increasingly heterogeneous for decades. And as the IBM PC turns 30, it is not just ironic, but expected, that the proliferation of processors of all types fronted by pretty little screens and wireless communication chips have not only made our personal computers more numerous, they have put the desktop back in its place: in the office or home office. Toss in compute and storage clouds and we can say that we have finally entered the era of personal computing.
For those of you in the System/3X and
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Admin Alert: An Alternate Way to Port Image Catalogs Between Systems: QFileSrv.400
August 10, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIn a recent article, I presented a technique for porting image catalog files between Power i systems. Afterward, a reader contacted me with an equally valid ways of moving image catalogs around that may even work better than my technique. This week, I’ll look at his suggestion and see how it can make life easier when porting optical media to remote systems.
My Solution
My original solution to porting an image catalog and its associated files from a source to a target machine consisted of the following steps:
- Create a virtual optical device that can be used to read
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ILE: Decisions, Decisions, Part 2
August 10, 2011 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIn an earlier tip, I explored questions I often hear about binding directories. In this tip, I’ll explore another commonly asked ILE question and give you my perspective.
Question: How many service programs should I have and how big should they be?
Answer: It depends.
Don’t you hate that answer? But in this case, I do think it is completely application dependent. Often when I am asked this question, the emphasis seems to be related to performance. But I don’t think the decision on the “what” or “how much” to put into a service program should be made based