Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Wanted: Cloud-i i-nfrastructure
March 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like IBM is finally getting around to adding features to the Power Systems-IBM i combination to make it more amenable to so-called cloud computing. It is not clear when these features, such as live migration of logical partitions, will be available, but hopefully it will be soon. Once these updated features are available in the next release of the operating system, it will be truly possible for IBM, hosting companies, or maybe brand new start-ups to offer cloudy i infrastructure.
As The Four Hundred reported three weeks ago, Colin Parris, the new IBM vice president in charge
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Data Centers Love Flash Storage
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you haven’t thought about adding flash storage to your Power Systems-IBM i box, perhaps now is a good time to start thinking about it, despite the high cost of this very fast storage that sits somewhere in speed between disk drives and main memory. Your peers sure are buying this stuff.
SandForce, which makes controllers for the NAND-based solid state drives (SSDs) that IBM has been selling with its Power7-based servers since last year, said last month that it has shipped over one million SSD processors, the company’s name for its flash drive controllers, since they debuted earlier
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Plug Gets Pulled on System i 570 and 595 CPU Card Sales
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs The Four Hundred previously reported, IBM has scheduled to withdraw the remaining Power6 and Power6+ machines that it had been selling from its catalog throughout the remainder of this year, with machines getting the axe in late April, May, or July, depending on the box. Now, some important features for these machines are also getting the chop.
The machines that IBM killed off in late January were the Power 520, Power 550, and Power 595, which should come as no surprise to anyone. The BladeCenter JS23 and JS43 blades servers also got taken out behind the woodshed. You
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IBM Kills Off a Bunch of Power Trade-In Deals
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you were hoping to use some of the long-running and often-modified Power Systems trade-in deals to make your acquisition of a new Power7 server a little more palatable to the bean counters, forget it.
In late February, IBM ceased three different trade-in programs aimed at Power Systems shoppers.
The first one, last modified in announcement letter 310-290 and nuked on February 22 in announcement letter 311-022, gave customers buying specific Power6, Power6+, or Power7 systems trade-in credits on IBM and non-IBM gear if they turned over that gear to Big Blue. The credits were never that great–ranging from
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US Adds Jobs in February, and at IT Companies, Too
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA snowy January put hiring in the United States on ice, but it looks like things thawed out a bit in February.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the arm of the U.S. Department of Labor that counts the employed, the unemployed, and that little known third category of people who are neither, said last Friday that the U.S. economy added a net new 192,000 jobs in the non-farm sector during February. In the past 13 months, the economy has added 1.3 million net new jobs, the BLS says in its latest jobs report, which you can read here.
The
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Servers in the Others Category Do Well in Q4
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you want to get a three-dimensional view of the server racket each quarter, you need to look at the publicly available information from both Gartner and IDC. Actually, to get the correct 3D image of the market you need all of the internal information, too, plus whatever data the vendors themselves have and anything else you can nick from Forrester Research and others that count boxes and labels.
But you can’t have that unless you shell out some big bucks, and this newsletter is free as is the analysis and the advice. You’ll have to make do with
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Global Financing Offers Power5/5+ Takeouts to Power6/6+ Buyers
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDoes IBM want to sell you a shiny new Power7 to replace your old Power5 or Power5+ server and get you to move up to IBM i 7.1, or does it want to sell you a Power6 or Power6+ box instead because these machines support i5/OS V5R4? The answer, as it turns out, is exactly what you would expect from Big Blue or any other IT supplier. IBM wants to sell you whatever you will pay to buy for whatever reason you think you have.
As The Four Hundred has been reporting for the past several weeks, IBM is offering
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Some Insight Into the iASP and ISV Issue
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I made a logical leap about the problem with supporting independent auxiliary storage pools, or iASPs, that has caused the AS/400 Large User Group to issue a call to arms to compel independent software vendors to support this decades-old feature of the OS/400 and IBM i operating system. While the logical leap I made concerning the root cause of the issue was incorrect, I stand by my assertion that IBM should have made iASP technology transparent to ISV applications and therefore inherently supported.
The AS/400 LUG, in case you don’t know,
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Admin Alert: Corralling i/OS Storage Hogs, Part 1
March 2, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLast year, I wrote an article on finding and expelling i/OS storage hogs. Since then, I’ve pinpointed some other items that illustrate how Power i system storage fills up unnecessarily, leaving you contemplating buying additional disk drives when all you really need is a good housecleaning. This week and next, I’ll expand on my storage hog list to help you keep your storage problems under control.
The Big Seven Storage Hogs
When looking for ways to reclaim disk storage, I usually focus my attention on the big seven culprits of unnecessary storage consumption.
- Excessive spooled files and other system
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Odds and Ends: The Reader is the Guru
March 2, 2011 Dear Professional
… Read moreThe emails I get from you provide a sterling illustration that the readers of this august publication are the true gurus in the world of IBM i. Here are a few contributions that I hope may prove useful to some of you.
-Ted
Hey, Ted:
I’d like to add an important point when renaming the local database. IBM’s own jobs rely on this local database name entry existing. They don’t care if you have deleted it. They will recreate it pretty quickly if it does not have a name entered, so the commands to delete the old and add