Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Legacy-Loving Attachmate Shells Out $2.2 Billion for Novell
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen the top brass at Novell hammered a For Sale sign on the piece of grass at its Waltham, Massachusetts, headquarters back in May after rejecting an unsolicited $2 billion takeover bid from private equity firm Elliott Associates in March, it was pretty clear that bits and pieces of Novell could end up hither and yon and other companies haggled over pieces of the complex software company.
Elliott Associates amassed an 8.5 percent stake in Novell before launching its bid in March, and still holds that stake today as a group of private equity firms familiar to the IBM midrange
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Whaaa? IBM Gets Stingier with Power Systems Deals
November 29, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe are in the heart of the fourth quarter with questionable stats in the Western economies and very good growth in the emerging markets in China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a handful of other countries. With Power Systems revenue on the decline year-on-year, and against a pretty easy compare mind you, I would expect that IBM would be out there wheeling and dealing to crank up Power Systems sales. But thus far, Big Blue is behaving like it thinks it has its pricing right–or perhaps like it was a bit too aggressive on the pricing with this year’s Power7 iron,
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Why Did Passphrase Activation Take Out My ODBC Connection?
November 17, 2010 Hey, Joe
… Read moreWe just activated passphrase support on our i5/OS V5R4M5 system. After activation, one of my Web server ODBC connections stopped working and I have no clue how to reset it. How can I get it working again?
–Keith
After getting this email, I contacted Keith and ran through a few scenarios. Here’s how we solved this issue as well as another issue that was hiding right behind it.
First, we found that Keith was using an embedded password for his ODBC connection, which resided on a Web server that was automatically updating i5/OS data. The password was set to “LETMEIN”
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Find Hidden IFS Files
November 17, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreEverybody knows that the Work with Links (WRKLNK) command lists all the files (including subdirectory entries) in an IFS directory, right? Well, to quote Ira Gershwin, it ain’t necessarily so. Your system may have IFS files that you don’t know about.
One of the UNIX conventions that the IFS has inherited is that files whose names begin with a period (“dot”) are considered to be hidden. By default, their names are omitted in directory listings. Hidden files are commonly used for system files, configuration files, and temporary files. But there’s nothing to stop other people from beginning file names with
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Large Subprocedure Return Values: V7 Brings Relief
November 17, 2010 Jon Paris
… Read moreIn Subprocedure Return Values–Food for Thought, I discussed the performance implications of returning large variables from subprocedures. With IBM i 7.1, IBM has added new RPG compiler features that improve performance when passing large parameters.
The conclusion of my previous tip was that you should use a conventional parameter–instead of returning a value–when large values such as result sets were involved. The downside of such a change of course is that you lose the ability to know exactly which field was changed by a procedure call. Seeing:
GetCustomers( state: customerList );
in the code just doesn’t make what is
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Red Hat Cranks Up Enterprise Linux To 6
November 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat rolled out its Enterprise Linux version 6 operating system, the first major update of the operating system known colloquially as RHEL since March 2007.
A lot of things in the server and operating system racket have changed in those 44 months between RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, including the advent of several generations of X64, Power, and System z mainframe engines. And, in the case of Red Hat, the plug is being pulled on Intel‘s Itanium processors. That’s right. RHEL 6 runs on Power-based systems and System z mainframes from IBM, but
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IBM Kills Off JS22 Blade Server in January, Old Disks in April
November 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf for some reason you want to buy IBM‘s old Power6-based JS22 blade servers for your Blade Center chassis, you’d better hurry up.
Big Blue says in announcement letter 910-198 that on January 7, 2011, it will cease peddling the JS22 blade. That machine, announced in November 2007, was a two-socket blade based on IBM’s dual-core Power6 processors running at 4 GHz. (Technically, it is product number 7998-61X in the IBM catalog.) The JS22 was over priced and not well matched to the needs of a lot of i5/OS and now IBM i shops, but that doesn’t mean that
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Big Blue Chops Power6 Activation Prices on Installed Gear
November 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI would have thought that IBM would have made this move months ago when it was clear that customers were hesitant to buy new servers in the face of a struggling recovery from the recession. But the company has finally gotten around to slashing prices on processor core activation fees on installed Power6 and Power6+ servers.
In announcement letter 310-285, which IBM snuck out on November 4 (a Thursday, not the traditional Tuesday announcement day, so I missed it), IBM said that between now and December 29, customers with latent processor capacity on System i 570 servers using 4.7
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Wake Up, America–And the Rest of You, Too
November 15, 2010 Doug Mewmaw
… Read moreOn a flight home after a recent business trip, I met a man who mentioned that he had left his previous company to start up a small business. During the conversation, I noticed how passionate he was when he talked about his old company. Since he raved about his past experiences, I had to know why he left. His answer didn’t surprise me. He said, “My company stopped being innovative.” When I asked him to elaborate, he said, “We spent more time in meetings and nothing ever got accomplished.”
He added, “I saw a lot of creative ideas that never
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IBM Adds Smaller Power 720 i Solution Edition
November 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt looks like IBM i shops and the dozens of independent software vendors that are certified to sell their wares on Power i Solution Edition bundles are balking about the relatively high-priced configurations that IBM made available in August when the entry Power7-based Power Systems machines debuted. The reason I say that is because last week Big Blue announced a new baby i Solution Edition that is based on the smallest Power 720 the company sells.
As you know from reading the past several months of price/performance analysis on the Power7 server lineup, the entry Power 720 server with only