Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Reader Feedback on IBM Adds New SSD and Fat SFF Disk to Power Systems
September 20, 2010 Hey, TPM
… Read moreWe are in the process of configuring a Power 720 to replace an aging Power 520, and need to increase both CPW and I/O. It turns out that two mirrored 2054/1996 features will give us about 20K IOPS, versus about 3K IOPS for a traditional disk setup. And both end up costing about the same amount.
The disk setup requires a feature code 5615 GX++ card, 30 feature 3677 139 GB hard disk drives, one feature 5796 12X expansion drawer with a feature 6446 interface, three feature 5886 12S disk drawers drawers, and a feature 5908 1.5 GB caching RAID
-
IBM Gives Schools Discounts on Power Systems Iron
September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen any server maker gets its systems installed at educational institutions to run their back office operations, there are secondary and potentially huge effects that come from that school using those machines. For one thing, if the school partitions some of the machine to have it be used as a resource for students who are taking computer science or engineering courses, as was the case at my alma mater, Penn State, then a new breed of potential customers learns on your box. And that helps grease a sale down the road.
This was one of the reasons why the Penn
-
Mad Dog 21/21: Seismically Active Storage
September 20, 2010 Hesh Weiner
… Read moreDuring the early 1970s, the iconic large computer was the System/370-158 mainframe from IBM. It ran at and defined 1 MIPS. Its magnetic core memory technology was boosted by virtualization. But during the lifecycle of the 158, IBM fell behind.
Intel and others made solid-state memory that eclipsed core memory. Several companies made IBM-compatible disks, among them StorageTek, now part of Oracle. StorageTek, for awhile at least, became so good that IBM had to enlist it as a supplier. Now another earthquake is coming. This could be the big one. It could wipe out IBM’s remaining significance
-
Big Sam Is Worried About Oracle–And For Good Reason
September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe rivalry between IBM and Oracle, which could define the way enterprise computing gets done at a lot of IT shops, is shaping up nicely. Last week, at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal, IBM’s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, spoke for more than an hour, ranging over a number of topics, including its rivalries with Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. Oracle also posted its financials for its first quarter of fiscal 2011 and laid out its goals for creating “engineered systems.”
The entire interview that Palmisano gave at the WSJ event was not
-
The More Things Change
September 20, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreDo you sometimes think that the part of IBM‘s brain related to the AS/400 and its successor platforms has been put in stasis so it is still, in some way, in 1988? That perhaps the people who do marketing for the IBM i platform are not located in Somers, New York, but rather in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the Groundhog Day just keeps looping and looping, like in that fabulous 1993 film by the same name? Maybe it is just me, but despite all of the technology changes and name changes, the Power Systems-IBM i combo does not seem to
-
Admin Alert: Getting Started with i/OS Security Auditing, Part 1
September 15, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreSometimes you need more information about what’s happening on your system. Who changed their password? Have any system values been changed recently? Who added an entry to the System Reply list? For company security and auditor information, sometimes you need to gather information about system events. That’s where i/OS security auditing comes in.
Security Auditing in Two Paragraphs
IBM i/OS security auditing allows you to collect information about system events that can affect system security and integrity. To implement auditing, a user configures his system and specifies what types of information he wants to collect. After turning auditing on, he
-
Basing Pointer Variables in RPG: The Basics
September 15, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreWhen I began pursuit of my computer science degree eons ago, the only programming experience I had was business programming. Jumping from System/34 RPG II to Pascal was a shock, but learning Pascal was one of the best things that ever happened to me professionally. Learning Pascal introduced me to programming constructs that I had not seen before, including pointer variables, the topic of this article. If you’ve not mastered pointers, continue reading. Do it for your own edification.
RPG has two types of pointer variables: basing pointers, and procedure pointers. Both types of pointers hold memory addresses. Both types
-
Get Thee to the Web, Part 2
September 15, 2010 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreIn this second article of three, we will continue our exploration of moving to the Web by having a look at the rest of the common components of Web applications.
Tiered Design
This is probably the most important part of designing any Web application. It is essential that the application is tiered in such a way that the interface is separate from the database is separate from the business logic.
The basic concept is that you should be able to change any of the components without affecting the other components.
Although this has always been a good principle of any
-
Document Management Cuts Paper and Saves Money at Top Ranked City
September 14, 2010 Robert Gast
… Read moreWhile the virtues associated with living in an environmentally conscientious way are as abundant as wavy shafts of tan prairie grass in mid-summer, one motive that exerts considerable gravity in the heated conservation debate is that of money. Naperville, Illinois, a city with muscular environmental policies, is setting an example for other cities by further paring back the inefficient use of resources and lessening its impact on the environment while making better use of funds.
Naperville, a city of approximately 145,000 people located about 28 miles west of Chicago, has been consistently ranked as one of the nation’s top five
-
IBM Delivers Yet Another Hardware Management Console
September 13, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHow many different types of Linux-based PCs does it take to screw in a PowerVM hypervisor? Apparently more than one. And apparently IBM still thinks it is fine to charge an outrageous price for the Hardware Management Console (HMC), which is little more than a low-end X64-based server running a control console for PowerVM as it runs on Power5 and higher systems.
This week, IBM will roll out another in a long line of HMCs that I cannot see as anything other than a profit center for Big Blue. In announcement letter 110-146, the details of the 7402-CR6 iteration