Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Best Options for Post-i 6.1.1 Upgrade Backups
April 20, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreWe’re performing an i/OS 6.1.1 upgrade this weekend. My boss wants to perform a full system backup after we get done. However, full system backups take six-hours to run in my shop. I have a very tight upgrade window, and the machine can only be down for 18 hours. What’s my best option for backing up a newly upgraded operating system?
–Wil
There are two overriding goals in tight operating system upgrade scenarios: 1) Protect your work so that you don’t have to perform an i 6.1.1 upgrade a second time if the machine crashes; and 2) Get the machine
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Stuff I Neglected to Mention on February 16, 2011
April 20, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreNo matter how hard I try, it seems that I often neglect to mention something important in an article. On February 16, Four Hundred Guru included two of my articles–one about commands, the other about output queues and print devices. In each one, I omitted a salient piece of information. Fortunately, readers of this august publication were quick to bring my shortcomings to my attention. Here are some representative comments.
Hey, Ted:
Another fan of commands here. I think you missed one of the best advantages of using commands instead of CALL–namely, that of managing change–in your article Commands: Underused
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Installing a PHP/MySQL Open Source Application on i
April 20, 2011 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreI have often used PHP/MySQL open source applications on my PC, but I have never had the opportunity, or need, to use one on the IBM i. That is, not until recently.
I was working on a project with three other developers, and we are located in Ireland, Canada, and the U.S. We needed some simple project management software that would work over the Web and did not require in degree in “Gant chart” mechanics. After a quick search I came across a PHP/MySQL open source package, ProjectPier, which seemed to suit our needs.
So, in this article, I
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IBM Offers Freebie Slices on Shiny New SmartCloud
April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week, IBM announced its first public cloud for running X64 applications, the Smart Business Cloud, or SmartCloud for short. The company also laid out its plans for fluffing up portions of the SmartCloud that would be based on Power Systems and support AIX or Linux applications and–eventually–IBM i workloads.
What Big Blue didn’t say as part of its announcements is that it had created a special promotion giving prospective customers slices of that cloud to play with for free.
In announcement letter 311-048, IBM launched the Smart Business Cloud Spring 2011 promotion, offering customers a piece of the
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IBM Offers Red Hat Linux on a Per-Server Basis on Power
April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat have come together to provide Enterprise Linux 6 on IBM’s Power Systems sold by Big Blue and with first- and second-level support provided by Big Blue.
That’s nothing new, of course. IBM has been a big OEM partner of Red Hat’s for years, and my back-of-the-envelope math is that RHEL drives somewhere on the order of $1.4 billion of IBM server hardware sales a year these days across X64, Power, and mainframe platforms.
What is new in announcement letter 211-114 is that IBM and Red Hat have cooked up a per-server license price
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Reader Feedback on As I See It: Shared Sacrifice
April 18, 2011 Hi Victor,
… Read moreYour April 11 article, As I See It: Shared Sacrifice, is mind boggling.
I’d love to send excerpts to my congressional delegation and governor. I don’t want to plagiarize, so what is the appropriate way to quote your article quoting others?
By the way, CVS is one of the few large corporations headquartered here in Rhode Island.
–Ed
Hi Ed,
The fair use provisions of the copyright law say you can quote a few items, but why not just email your politicians a paragraph of your own and then a link to Victor’s story?
–TPM
Victor:
I always enjoy
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IBM Replaces the HMC with New Systems Director Console
April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue is putting the Hypervisor Mangling Controller, er the Hardware Management Console for managing the PowerVM hypervisor for Power Systems out to pasture. The device, which was launched with the Power5-based servers way back in 2004, is a glorified and expensive PC or rack server that runs Linux and the microcode that controls PowerVM and other aspects of the hardware system.
The idea with the HMC is to get the management of the hypervisor off the machines that it manages. Earlier incarnations of logical partitioning for OS/400 were what is called a type 2 hypervisor, or a hosted one,
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Disk and Selected Memory Prices Chopped on Power Systems
April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the Power Systems server upgrades last week, which The Four Hundred discusses elsewhere in this issue, IBM cut prices on disk drive features used on the platforms. Memory features used on PS7XX blade servers and conversions of memory cards from the DDR2 type used in Power 570 and 595 servers, which are based on Power6 chips, to features used in Power 770 and 795 machines, which are based on Power7 chips and use DDR3 memory, were also reduced.
In announcement letter 311-047, IBM cut the price on the 139.5 GB disk features used on various Power
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IBM Doubles Up Power7 Blade Sockets, Cranks Power 750 Clocks
April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou were probably wondering like I was last year why IBM only announced Power Systems blade servers using the Power7 processors with single-sockets instead of also offering more dense configurations with two sockets per blade. Big Blue never explained this, but now, one day shy of a year later, the company has put two-socket blade servers into the field. The company has also cranked the clocks a little bit on the Power7 processors used in the four-socket Power 750 midrange workhorse servers.
According to Steve Silbey, who is director of product management for the Power Systems line at IBM, the
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Admin Alert: The Four Faces of Software Vendors During a Hardware Upgrade
April 13, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreFor an upcoming hardware upgrade, I recently contacted all of our third-party software vendors to determine if they were going to increase our fees for running their software on a different machine. My mission was to determine: 1) Whether each vendor would charge us for changing hardware; and 2) Would there be an increase in their yearly software maintenance fees? The results were intriguing and an interesting window on the i/OS software world.
The Other Costs of a Hardware Upgrade
Hardware upgrades aren’t just about a new box. You also must ensure that your existing software will run on that