Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Business Is IBM’s Middle Name
July 11, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM did not for one second like being criticized for not doing enough for its midmarket independent software vendors, resellers, and other partners to help them peddle hardware, software, and services to midrange shops. But Andy Monshaw, who is general manager for the cross-group Midmarket Division at Big Blue, which sits inside of its Sales and Distribution organization, has been at the company for 27 years and he knows how to handle such a situation.
Monshaw picked up the phone and talked to The Four Hundred to explain what IBM is, in fact, doing for the midmarket and how it
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IBM Adds Disaster Recovery, Archiving to SmartClouds
June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe independent software vendors making backup, recovery, and high availability software and their service providers who are moving out onto the Internet to offer remote disaster recovery and arching services to SMB data centers just got some pretty tough competition: IBM.
IBM launched its SmartCloud public infrastructure cloud back in April, based on X64 servers and VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor. IBM’s earlier test and development SmartCloud was based on Red Hat‘s KVM hypervisor, and Red Hat sources tell me that the SmartCloud public cloud will also support KVM at some point. The fact that IBM’s SmartCloud public
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iFoundation Grant Application Deadline is June 30
June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhat is better than free money? (Keep it clean here, people. This is a family newsletter.) Very few things, and one of them is free speech and the other is free beer; I even like free puppies. But few things beat free money, and high availability software maker Maxava is giving away $50,000 in grants to the IBM i community. But you only have until June 30 to submit a grant application, so hop to it.
Maxava launched the iFoundation effort back in late March to help carry the cost of local and national user group meetings, education and training,
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Reader Feedback On The Power Systems-IBM i Road Ahead
June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHello, Timothy:
I have always liked your articles.
For large shops doing MSHA using replication, we would love partition mobility, but the high volume of I/O our internal storage performance gives us seems to also preclude any chance at the mobility we need. Note: IBM SANs could not provide the performance required when we tried the shift way back in 2003 and to this date nobody wants to risk SAN performance–even with EMC technologies.
If I could have SAN replication functions (and clustering functions) with internal storage (and its great performance) without having to implement iASPs, then we would be
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Old Gear Gets The Ax In More Power Systems Trade-In Deals
June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you were thinking that you might be able to combine some of IBM‘s trade-in deals to get your hands on older Power Systems machines, think again. IBM is continuing to sift through its deal books and removing just about everything that doesn’t have a Power7 chip embedded in it.
I say just about because the Power6-based high-end Power 595 server seems to be, for the moment, immune from the scissors, as was the case in the modified deal I told you about two weeks ago. But all the other Power6 and Power6+ based gear in the deal
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Building a Legacy
June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe IBM i platform and its bigger brother, the System z mainframe, take a lot of guff for being a legacy platform. But guess what? Solaris is turning 30 next year, as is HP-UX the year after that. AIX will be 25 this year, Windows server variants are almost 20 years old (remember Windows for Workgroups 3.1?), and Linux pretty much freeze-dried after a hectic 20 years of development. OS/400, of course, just turned 23 last week, but has deeper roots back into CPFon the System/38 in 1978 and SSP on the System/36 in 1983. They are all legacy environments
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Admin Alert: Things to Think About in a Power i Development Environment
June 22, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWorking in both public and private companies during my career, I’ve been subjected to my share of IT audits. My impression is that while auditors are usually very savvy about your production environment, there are other issues that maybe they should be looking at but don’t. If your production environment is in tip-top shape, audit-wise, here are some other things you might consider looking at to avoid trouble.
Why Aren’t Auditors More Interested in Development Environment Infrastructure?
Not to give anyone ideas, but I’ve always wondered why auditors don’t investigate development environments as seriously as they audit production environments. After
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Forcing Keyword Parameters
June 22, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreProgramming languages use two conventions for passing arguments (commonly referred to as parameters) to a called routine. Some languages use positional parameters. That is, the parameters must be passed to the routine in a certain order. The other (and less error-prone) method is to password parameters in keyword format. IBM i allows you to force callers to use keyword format–to a point–when they use your CL commands. Here’s how.
But first, let’s review the two major problems inherent in positional parameters. First, it is easy to get a parameter value into the wrong position. Take the following OCL command for
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SQL Implicit Cast of Character Strings and Numeric Values
June 22, 2011 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreAwhile back I was teaching an SQL class in Fargo, North Dakota. During one of the afternoon lab sessions, one of the students asked if he could use the CONCAT function on two numbers, or two numeric columns, without first casting them to character values.
I knew the answer was “No”, and that the numeric values had to be cast to character first before the student concatenated them together. Instead of just giving the student the answer, I played good teacher and I told the student to try it and let me know how it worked.
Imaging my surprise when
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Outboard Disk Array Sales Keep Pace With Servers in Q1
June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe server market did alright in the first quarter thanks to a rebound in spending on RISC and mainframe servers (including Power Systems machines from IBM running its quasi-eponymous IBM i operating system) and a desire by companies to install fatter boxes across the architectural board to support virtualization. Sales of companion external disk arrays, not surprisingly, also did well as companies continue to suffer from information constipation.
Storage arrays are not always refreshed at the same time as servers, but at this point in the evolution of servers, storage, and networks, it probably makes sense to get all the