Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Has A Fire Sale on BNT Rack Switches
July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI guess that IBM has a bunch of Gigabit Ethernet switches sitting in the barn and it wants to get rid of them real bad before the end of the year without having to make any sales calls to get the job done.
Last week, in announcement letter 311-101, Big Blue, which is now a network equipment maker thanks to last year’s acquisition of Blade Network Technologies for an estimated $400 million, slashed the price on one of its top-of-rack switches. Specifically, IBM chopped the price on the RackSwitch G8052, a 1U rack-based switch with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports
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IBM i 7.1 Leads OS Shipments, Pushes Entry Sales
July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe second quarter was not just a good one for IBM‘s Power Systems server sales. It was a good one for the latest-greatest incarnation of the OS/400 operating system and database platform, known as IBM i 7.1.
Back in May, when the editorial team at IT Jungle–Dan Burger, Alex Woodie, and myself–attended the COMMON midrange conference in Minneapolis, we met with the top brass in the Power Systems organization. They told us that in the first quarter of the year, there were a few companies making the jump from i5/OS V5R4 directly to IBM i 7.1, but that
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IBM Powers Through The Second Quarter
July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe comparisons are getting a little bit harder as 2011 rolls along, but the Power Systems business at IBM pulled its weight and then some in the second quarter ended in June. Big Blue’s mainframe business is enjoying the best upgrade cycle it has had in five years, raking in the bucks as companies in emerging markets buy mainframes for the first time and established companies in the financial services and insurance industries do long-overdue upgrades to their big iron.
IBM’s overall revenues in the second quarter were up 12.4 percent, to $26.7 billion, while net income rose by 8.2
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Top Concern for i Shops: Making Users Happy
July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDespite all of the legitimate complaining that many of us in the IBM midrange community do, it looks like the IT staff, business partners, and IBMers have their eye on the ball and are focused on satisfying the needs of customers. That is the message from the preliminary results of the 2011 edition of the COMMON Europe Top Concerns survey of the OS/400 and i installed base.
Despite being managed by COMMON Europe, the Top Concerns survey of OS/400 and i shops is a global survey that seeks to take the pulse of IBM midrange customers and ultimately, in conjunction
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Admin Alert: Porting an Image Catalog Between Power i Boxes using FTP
July 20, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIn a recent article about creating and using image catalogs in lieu of CDs and DVDs for i operating system installations and upgrades, I didn’t discuss how to move image catalogs between different i/OS partitions that can be located many miles or time zones apart. To plug that hole, this issue I present two simple programs that enable you to move pre-loaded image catalogs between systems.
Why Move Image Catalogs?
For many organizations, their iSeries, System i, and Power i partitions may reside in different cities, states, or even countries. The production system frequently resides in one location while its
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Emulate RPG’s Pessimistic Locking in SQL
July 20, 2011 Hey, Mike
… Read moreI’m writing a Java program to replace several RPG programs that access unjournaled database files. The current programs all use the same logic: obtain a lock on a record, allow the user to make zero or more changes on various “screens,” then save the changes (potentially not changing anything). I need to make my Java program behave like the original RPG programs.
I have always been able to use SQL, but no transactions, due to the lack of journaling. I thought I found a solution today, but it didn’t work as I implemented it. I tried setting the isolation level
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INSERT to Overlay Positions in a Character String
July 20, 2011 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreIn V5R3, IBM simplified the manipulation of character stings with the implementation of the INSERT and REPLACE functions in SQL. INSERT allows the positional insertion of one or more characters into a string and REPLACE scans for all occurrences of a target string and overlays or replaces the target string with a replace string. This article will discuss INSERT, and a future article will discuss REPLACE.
Prior to the implementation of INSERT in V5R3, the positional insertion or update of one or more characters (alpha or numeric) in a character string was a challenge. You had to create a compound
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SAP Wants Oracle’s TomorrowNow Award Cut Way Down
July 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe TomorrowNow saga continued dragging on last week and looked no closer to being a closed matter than it did last November when a jury at trial awarded Oracle a $1.3 billion settlement from SAP for the theft of software patches and other intellectual property relating to third-party support of Oracle’s applications by TomorrowNow.
That small company, which SAP shut down in 2008 in the wake of the lawsuit launched by Oracle saying that TomorrowNow was using illegally its own software and documents to provide support to customers, has caused a big headache for SAP, which clearly bought TomorrowNow to
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Microsoft Spends Big Big Bucks On Partner Channel
July 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe old adage that it “takes money to make money” is not any less true in the Internet Age, and those shelling out the biggest bucks to their partner channels seem to be benefiting the most these days. That said, partner programs have to be adopted to the Cloud Epoch, and that is precisely what Microsoft did at its Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 event in Las Vegas last week.
The amount of money Microsoft is throwing at its channel is truly astounding: $5.8 billion in its fiscal 2012 year, which started in July. Granted, that money is going to be
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Sundry Summer Power Systems Announcements
July 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s July and that generally means some sort of Power Systems I/O enhancements or tweaks, and IBM kept to its pattern even if the announcements were not monumental in nature.
Back in April, as The Four Hundred previously reported, the high-end Power 795 servers and feature 5803 12X PCI-Express I/O drawer that plugs into it was given a new 177 GB enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) solid state drive in a small form factor SAS package. In announcement letter 111-132, IBM says this SSD unit, which crams 2.5 times the capacity into a 2.5-inch SAS bay as the 69