Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Is Prepping Power7+ and Pondering Power8
May 2, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been more than a year since IBM got its first Power7-based machines out the door, and about six months since the chips were fully ramped across the Power Systems lineup. The server processor racket waits for no one, and a slow poke will quickly get left behind in the volume and midrange space. And so Big Blue has to continue to advance the Power chips if it wants to get all of those systems, software, and services revenues these chips drive.
IBM has not been exactly forthcoming about the future Power7+ and Power8 processors, but the company is
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Why is my i/OS Email Coming Back Undeliverable?
April 27, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreWe send a lot of emails from our i 6.1.1 partition using the operating system’s SMTP server and a third-party email application. We recently converted from paper to email invoices, which has resulted in a big spike in System i email. Now we’re also seeing more messages returned from our external SMTP relay as “undeliverable.” What’s going on and what can I do about it?
–Glen
Given the increased traffic, it looks like your external SMTP server is being overwhelmed with email demands and that is delaying delivery. The external server may simply be busy and not able to handle
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DDS Design with RD Power
April 27, 2011 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIn an earlier tip, I provided a peek at the DDS Designer integrated with RSE in the Rational Developer for Power Systems (a.k.a., RD Power). In this tip, I’m going to go into a few features that may not be easy to spot at first glance. But some of these things are among my favorite features of the tool.
In the last tip, I talked about how to easily see and edit the DDS source using the Source tab under the Design view. If you just want to have a peek at the source for a particular item
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Antitrusters Nod Attachmate’s Novell Buy, SLES 10 Gets Final Service Pack
April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNetWare and Linux distributor Novell has managed to get the approval of antitrust regulators in the United States and Germany to sell off 882 patents to a holding company that many in the IT industry regard with suspicion because it is backed by Microsoft, EMC, Oracle, and Apple. And that means the $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell by Attachmate can proceed.
Attachmate announced that it wanted to buy Novell last November, and under the acquisition deal it negotiated, the company said it would be selling off 882 unspecified patents to a company called CPTN Holdings, which
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More Servers Added to the IBM i License Transfer Deal
April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is letting some more of its i5/OS and IBM i software licenses slide from old machines to newer ones to cushion the blow of upgrading to more modern Power-based machinery.
If you drill down into announcement letter 211-108, which discussed a lot of the tweaks and changes Big Blue did for IBM i 6.1.1 and 7.1 in conjunction with the launch of fatter PS7XX blade servers and faster engines for the Power 750 midrange server, you will see that the Power 520 (both the 9405-520 and the 9406-520 machines) as well as the new PS703 and PS704 blade
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Some More Power Systems Features Going Bye-Bye
April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is cleaning its Power Systems house again, which stands to reason after the April 12 announcements. It is spring, after all.
As detailed in announcement letter 911-015, a bunch of Power Systems features will be ripped out of the Big Blue catalog later this year and early next, and IBM wants to give you fair warning so you can stock up now on parts you might need later.
The 288-port QLogic InfiniBand switch (product 7874-240) will probably not be missed by most OS/400 and i shops when it is withdrawn from marketing on July 29, but the various
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Power Systems Get Some I/O and Storage Enhancements
April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA fair argument can be made that innovation is progressing faster and is much more keenly needed in the storage arena than in processors and other elements of a system–with the possible exception of main memory technology, which is woefully lagging processor and flash/disk storage innovation. As part of the Power Systems blade and midrange systems update two weeks ago, IBM rolled out a bunch of subtle enhancements to the storage it sells with the Power-based server line.
Disk drives have not been replaced completely by flash memory, and given the relatively low cost of storage capacity, they won’t
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Power Systems Sales Jump 19 Percent in Q1
April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power Systems business is finally hitting on all five cylinders: blade servers, entry servers, midrange servers, enterprise servers, and the big bad box. It took IBM the better part of a year to get the entire Power7-based server lineup into the field, and the first quarter of 2011 was the first financial period when all of the new iron was available and, perhaps more importantly, when customers thought business conditions had stabilized enough for them to actually spend money.
In the first quarter ended in March, IBM posted revenues of $24.6 billion, an increase of 7.7 percent over the
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All Kinds of Goodies Added to IBM i 7.1
April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s no secret that I like hardware, but I am the first to admit that the endless progression of hardware improvements is merely there to make software run better, faster, or more reliably. The hardware is the easy part; the software is the hard part and it therefore moves a lot more slowly on the evolutionary scale than hardware. That said, companies like to roll out new software releases with new hardware releases to give customers twice as many reasons to think about spending some money.
And so it was with the Power Systems announcements on April 12. As The
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That Faster Power 750 Motor Is Made for IBM i Shops
April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen you pay for your operating system on a per-core basis, not a per socket basis, and that operating system includes a relational database and costs as much as Big Blue charges for the IBM i platform, there is one thing I can tell you for sure: you want the fastest processor that IBM can ship, and you don’t want to pay for extra cores you will never need, to get the best bang for the buck.
And lucky for OS/400 and i shops, IBM has added just such a processor to the Power 750 midrange machine.
As The Four