Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Netezza Needs IBM, But Why Does IBM Need Netezza?
September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSometimes it is easier to buy off a competitive threat and figure out how to make best use of it later than to worry about making complex justifications about an acquisition at the front end. That’s what IBM did when it shelled out $810 million to buy NUMA-based server maker Sequent Computer Systems in the summer of 1999, and that is what is going on now with Big Blue’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza last week.
The Sequent deal was every bit as much about blunting a future attack of Windows-based NUMA servers that offered the kind of scalability that
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IBM Does A Little Power Systems Marketing After All
September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s been a full business week since IBM started shipping the four new entry Power Systems machines and the i Solution Edition variants of the boxes specifically tailored to IBM i customers to cut them a break, and now apparently a little marketing is going to begin in the midrange.
Apropos of nothing last week, IBM put out a statement about the new entry machines with the requisite “we love the midrange” gushing. For instance, take this:
“We continue to develop and deploy the powerful technologies that growing businesses need to improve efficiency, innovate and scale for future growth,” said
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iManifest U.S. Looking for a New Spearhead
September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s not easy doing IBM‘s marketing job for it while also trying to make a living, as many of us out there in AS/400 Land know full well. When a United States arm of the iManifest movement needed a spearhead, Jeff Olen, who is the chief operating officer at the IBM i consultancy that bears his name, Olen Business Consulting, volunteered. But Olen can no longer be the leader for iManifest U.S., and so, he needs one of you to step in and do the job.
Olen posted the following message on the LinkedIn group for iManifest U.S:
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Oracle Gets Systems Design, and Starts Proving It
September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOracle is ratcheting up its so-called “engineered systems” to run its operating system, middleware, and application stack, and is beginning to give people the impression that it is dead serious about being in the hardware business. Oracle did not come easily to hardware, being a software vendor, but thinks it can get hardware gross margins up to 60 percent and double system revenues to around $2 billion a quarter over the next couple of years. And completely engineered systems, from chip to app, are the key.
Last week at its OpenWorld extravaganza in San Francisco, the top brass at the
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IBM Offers Sun, HP Shops Generous Leases–What About iSeries Shops?
September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNot to sound like a broken record or anything, but how come IBM is always giving shops using Unix gear from rivals Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Fujitsu a good deal? How come Big Blue takes a long time to get around to giving a similar deal to its own iSeries shops, if at all? Don’t they need a little financial help as encouragement to move up to more modern Power Systems machines, too?
Here’s the deal, which doesn’t exactly apply to you unless you can do a whole lot of sweet-talking with your IBM sales rep or business partner.
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Power 720: Same Entry Price, But More Room to Grow at Less Cost
September 27, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs is usually the case with an IBM Power Systems announcement, there is no one simple way to characterize the price/performance of the new entry Power7-based machines that made their debut in August and that started shipping on September 17. But I can tell you this much after an initial analysis of the entry Power 720 boxes that are the most likely choice of platform for IBM i shops: If you plan to grow, this box is a lot better than its predecessors.
This is true for two reasons. First, with anywhere from four to six cores in a single
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Changing i/OS Password Expiration Settings
September 22, 2010 Hey, Joe
… Read moreWe found a number of user profiles on our i/OS box that have password expiration intervals of *NOMAX, meaning that their passwords will never expire. We’re changing their expiration interval to *SYSVAL, so that each user profile takes its password expiration interval from the global system value. How long after I make this change will the users be required to change their passwords? I’m on i/OS V5R4M5.
–Joe
Before I get to the solution, it’s worth reviewing how the password expiration interval is calculated for an IBM iSeries, System i, or Power i user on an i/OS V5R4Mx partition.
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Get Thee to the Web, Part 3
September 22, 2010 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreIn this final article, we will compare and contrast the scripting solutions available with CGIDEV2, PHP, and Java. Here are a few questions to keep in mind when considering which scripting language to use:
- How well does it integrate with HTML/CSS/Javascript?
- How well does it integrate with database?
- How well does it integrate with host language calls?
- How easy is it to learn?
- What educational resources are available?
- Is it well supported?
- What frameworks are available? (Frameworks allow for very rapid development of interfaces.)
- Is scalability an issue? (How many people will be using your application.)
CGIDEV2
CGIDEV2 is a
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Lab Services and Training Available for Power Systems Shops
September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYou want to adopt IBM‘s latest server technologies to replace your aging systems, but you are not too sure where to start? You want to talk to some techies with real-world implementation services instead of a salesperson itching to make a sale? Well, Big Blue has a deal for you called Systems Lab Services and Training.
In announcement letter 610-042, the somewhat bizarrely named service is aimed at companies that want to deploy specific Power Systems technologies on Power7 servers and who just want to get some help getting together a plan to stand up these products without
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Former IBM Server Chief and Potential Heir Gets Six Months in Prison
September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week in U.S. District Court in New York, Judge Deborah Batts sentenced Robert Moffat, formerly the senior vice president in charge of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group and once in the line to succeed Sam Palmisano to run Big Blue, to six months in prison for his part in the Galleon-New Castle insider trading scam that erupted last October.
The scam centered around Raj Rajaratnam, the (formerly) billionaire founder of the $7 billion Galleon Group hedge fund, and Danielle Chiesi, an employee of hedge fund New Castle Partners, and the information they allegedly gathered on high-tech companies and