Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Last Chance to Take the 2011 Top i Concerns Survey
June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe AS/400 turns 23 this week, as we point out elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, and this is your platform as much as anyone else’s. That is why you should take a few moments and participate in the Top i Concerns survey, which is one of the few ways that the joes and janes of the IBM midrange have a chance to send some input more or less directly to Big Blue.
The Top i Concerns survey is being conducted by COMMON Europe, which had hoped to have a representative number of participants ahead of
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DB2 for i: The Beating Heart of the IBM i Platform
June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOne of the things I like about Steve Will, the new chief IBM i architect, is that he likes data as much as the rest of us do. When he gives a presentation about the IBM i platform and the Power Systems servers that it runs upon, he isn’t afraid to give you arts and charts and actual information to make a point. And so it is in a recent series of presentations that Will has been giving to the AS/400 faithful regarding IBM i roadmaps and other things.
We’ve gone through the roadmaps and the new process for updating
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You’re Only As Old As The Programs You Run With
June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHow does a venerable computer system act its age? Cleverly, I think, and only when asked to. The AS/400, which has had more names than James Garner in The Rockford Files, is still the AS/400 or “the 400” to most of us despite all the pressure of political correctness to adopt the IBM i name for the operating system and to not talk about the hardware platform as anything but a Power Systems platform. As if any old operating system is as good as any other.
The truly wonderful thing about that AS/400, which celebrates its 8,400th day as
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IBM Re-Plugs Pulled Plug On, Er, Power Systems Modem Plugs
June 13, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is hard to believe that people still care about modems in this broadband world, but fax/modems still matter to a lot of IT operations. When IBM was busy swinging its axe to chop things out of the Power Systems catalog back in January, it looks like it got tangled up in some modem cables and cut itself.
The chop came down in announcement letter 911-010, when IBM killed off the last remaining Power6 and Power6+ systems from the catalog, warning customers that the BladeCenter JS23 and JS43 blade servers would not be available after April 29, that the
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IBM Tweaks Power Systems Trade-In Deal, Yet Again
June 13, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in February, IBM yanked a whole bunch of different trade-in deals it had in place for its Power Systems server lineup. But a long-running trade-in deal is aimed at getting old iSeries, System i, pSeries, and System p servers unplugged–as well as machines from its Unix and proprietary systems competitors–and replaced with modern Power gear.
The last time this particular Power Systems trade-in deal was resurrected was in announcement letter 311-078 on March 22. IBM gave trade-in credit ranging from $250 to $8,000 on vintage and more recent entry iSeries and System i machines. Multiple machines could be consolidated
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Reader Feedback on Still Wanted: A Cheap–or Free–IBM i Development Workstation
June 13, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHi, Tim:
Could IBM not offer this as a cloud solution? I’m thinking that they have some huge server farms, stick a few System i boxes online, have some sort of registration process, and then allow programmers to play with RPG and etcetera online? Doesn’t take a lot and there is the cheap development environment carried over the Internet???
–Pete
Hi, Pete:
I did suggest that a cloudy option might be a possibility for a cheap development workstation at the end of my story. It is a question of economics.
The problem is that a Power6 or Power7 chip is
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Gartner: Fatter Servers Drive Revenues in Q1
June 13, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I went over what the box counters at IDC reckoned happened in the server market in the first quarter. IDC looks at the market at the vendor factory level and gives a certain dicing and slicing. The box counters over at Gartner look at sales by vendor type including the reseller channel and direct sales from the vendors with a slightly different angle.
By Gartner’s count, customers shelled out $12.67 billion for servers in the first quarter, an increase of 17.3 percent compared to the year-ago period. The number of boxes
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Is Perception the Reality?
June 13, 2011 Doug Mewmaw
… Read moreOn a recent training engagement, I visited a very popular American company. This company fit the profile of ones that I have visited before. In this case, the customer had a Power System 570; i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1; and had CPU running redline at 100 percent of utilization, using shared resources between LPARs. Support consisted of a help desk (Level 1 support) and a systems analyst (Level 2 or 3), and the entire IT support staff for the IBM i environment was four system admins.
During the week-long class, we talk about best practice performance guidelines and teach
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The Power Systems-IBM i Road Ahead
June 13, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Four Hundred has spent the past several weeks going over what the top brass and head techies at Big Blue say about how the IBM i platform running atop Power Systems iron is doing both economically and technically. This week, we close out this series of articles with a discussion with Steve Will, the IBM i chief architect, concerning the near-term future of the platform, by which IBM means the time between now and the end of 2013.
Will went over a lot of this material at his IBM i: Today, Tomorrow & Beyond presentation at the COMMON tradeshow
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Admin Alert: Things I Learned from My Latest Power i Upgrade
June 8, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreOver Memorial Day weekend in the U.S.A., we finished completing two Power i 720 hardware upgrades for a regular client. While the machine installation was relatively easy, I thought it would be helpful to discuss some of the problems, opportunities, and general time wasters that accompanied our migration to the latest Power i hardware, hoping that my experience will help others with their own hardware upgrades.
Cutting Hardware and Acquisition Costs
Before you buy your machines, make sure you’re not leaving any money on the table. Check if you are eligible for migration assistance from IBM. For many System