Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Sales and Profits Up for Kronos in Fiscal Second Quarter
May 16, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCompanies may not be hiring as much as we would like, but they do appear to be spending more money on keeping track of their employees.
Kronos, a provider of workforce management products that grew through acquisitions early in the last decade and that was taken private through a $1.8 billion acquisition by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners (H&F), in early 2007, doesn’t have to report its financial results. But to keep its name out there–and perhaps to lure potential suitors or to prepare for an initial public offering some day–the company has released some financial
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EMC To Jump Into Solid State Drive Biz For Servers
May 16, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreEMC has entered the fray for server-side flash storage. So if you were hoping for another source for solid state drives (SSDs) for your Power Systems server, you may be able to go to disk array EMC by the end of the year or early next year to get PCI-based flash and put a little technical and economic pressure on IBM.
Last week at its EMC World storage extravaganza in Las Vegas, the venerable storage array maker and owner of server virtualization juggernaut VMware said that it had a little something called “Project Lightning” under development. With Project Lightning,
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COMMON Europe Needs Your Input on Top i Concerns
May 16, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust as the COMMON midrange conference and expo was winding down, the organization’s European counterpart, COMMON Europe started the process of soliciting input from the OS/400 and i community about what their Top Concerns are regarding the platform.
This is the sixth global Top Concerns survey that COMMON Europe has put together on behalf of the entire OS/400 and i community–and participation is not just limited to people who work at midrange shops in Europe. Ranga Deshpande, vice president of and events manager at COMMON Europe and the Top Concerns project lead, tells The Four Hundred that the survey the
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Arrow: Proprietary Server Sales Up 22 Percent in Q1
May 16, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreServer makers, including IBM and thankfully including Power Systems machines supporting the IBM i operating system, saw an uptick in server sales in the first quarter. So it will come as little surprise that master distributor Arrow Electronics, which pulls from the big server makers and pushes down through its vast global reseller channel, is seeing business improve a bit, too.
In its first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended April 2, Arrow posted $5.22 billion in revenues, up 23.3 percent over last year. Sales in its electronic components group were up 23.4 percent, to $3.89 billion, while its Enterprise
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DR Plans Keep Bad Things from Happening to Good Companies
May 16, 2011 Richard Dolewski
… Read moreSee a graphic overview of Richard’s Phased Approach to Disaster Recovery Planning here.
Some take it for granted that a disaster will never strike their organization. Rather than developing proactive solutions for such an event, their focus usually falls on other corporate IT deliverables. How about you? Does your company have a comprehensive IBM iSeries disaster recovery plan that would allow your business to function in the event of a disaster?
Disasters Galore
You can’t surf the Web or turn on the evening news without hearing about turbulent weather-related events. The dramatic events FEMA has declared of the past
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Q&A With Power Systems Top Brass, Part Two
May 16, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreQ&A With Power Systems Top Brass, Part Two
The editorial team from The Four Hundred had a pow-wow with the top brass in the Power and z Systems division within IBM‘s converged Systems and Software Group at the COMMON midrange user group meeting in Minneapolis. Last week we gave you the first half of the meeting, where all kinds of things were discussed, and this week you get the second half, with more things jawboned and bandied about.
Tom Rosamilia, who was tapped to run both the Power and mainframe lines at IBM last August, had been running the
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Admin Alert: Critical Information That Every i Administrator Should Have Handy
May 11, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreSimilar to other hardware systems, crises can happen whenever you administer iSeries, System i, and Power i equipment in a data center. However, being a good administrator means knowing what to do and having the appropriate information available when you’re handling a crisis. This week, I’ll look at four key lists you should have handy to restore functionality after a system issue or disaster occurs.
The Big Four Lists
Generally, you’ll need the following information at your fingertips when a critical issue occurs that eliminates some or all i operating system functionality in your shop.
- IP addresses, critical profile names,
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Sharing Simplifies Source Code
May 11, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreI hate huge programs. For one thing, I’m not smart enough to wrap my mind around a big program. And it seems that modifying one part of the program invariably causes something to go amiss elsewhere. Dividing a program into subprocedures, modules, and multiple programs is a good way to manage large tasks. But what do you do when you’ve divided a program into two or more modules and/or programs, and more than one of them needs to contribute to a single report? You share.
Suppose you have a program that builds a report of accounts receivable. It’s a manageable
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Retrieve Column Descriptions in your ADO Client/Server Applications
May 11, 2011 Hey, Mike
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Using the IBMDASQL provider, I want to find the field/column description/label for fields in a record set. However, all my scenarios return null. I am using IBM iSeries Access for Windows V5R3M0 service level SI30707.
–Andy
Here is the Excel VBA code snippet that Andy sent in.
Sub testit() Dim con, com, rs Set con = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") con.Open "provider=IBMDASQL;data source=AS400;", "", "" Set rs = CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset") Set com = CreateObject("ADODB.Command") Set com.ActiveConnection = con com.CommandText = "select * from QIWS.QCUSTCDT for read only" Set rs = com.Execute() Debug.Print -
Will Red Hat Cloudware Come to Power-Based IBM i Clouds?
May 9, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCalling Red Hat a commercial Linux distributor, as I commonly do, is no longer a sufficient title for the Linux operating system giant. With the acquisition of JBoss and Qumranet, Red Hat has really become a systems software supplier, giving companies everything they need to build a software stack on X64, Power, or mainframe systems excepting a database. Starting later this year, that will also include cloud management tools as well as features to manage the deployment of applications.
At its Red Hat Summit last week, the company announced two new products: CloudForms and OpenShift. The former is a set