Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Agilysys Narrows Losses on Uptick in Sales in Fiscal Q1
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBusiness continues to be tough for application and services provider Agilysys, but things are getting better.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended on June 30, the maker of software for retailers and hotels said that revenues were up 1.9 percent, to $132.4 million. Product sales were down a fraction of a percent, to $104.1 million, but services revenues rose by 10.7 percent, to $28.3 million. The company cut its operating loss almost in half, to $6.6 million, and after paying income taxes (it did not pay taxes on profits in the current quarter, but corrected a past
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Drunk and Disgruntled Employee Unloads Hot Lead into Server
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAdmit it. You have wanted to do the same thing, and probably more than once. Unless you grew up in the suburbs and didn’t grow up with guns. And if you did grow up with a shotgun, rifle, or pistol of some sort, you would know that what Joshua Lee Campbell, an employee at RANlife Home Loans, of Salt Lake City, Utah, did was pretty stupid and unsafe.
If you take the report in the Deseret Times and interleave it with another report from the Salt Lake Times, Campbell, who is a youthful 23, went to a concert
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IBM Pushes Power Envelope Down with Power7 Chips
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe IEEE hosted the Hot Chips 22 chip conference at Stanford University while The Four Hundred was on hiatus, and the chipheads who work on IBM‘s Power Systems were on hand to talk about the EnergyScale power-saving features of the new Power7 chip as well as the forthcoming Power7 IH supercomputing node that is part of the petaflops-class “Blue Waters” supercomputer being installed at the University of Illinois.
I already told you all that you need to know about the Power Systems IH supercomputer nodes last fall, which is that one of these monsters would have a tremendous
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IDC Raises Global IT Spending Projections for 2010
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSo here’s the three questions everyone in the IT sector wants to get an answer to: Is there going to be a double dip in the Great Recession, what is going to happen to IT spending in the second half of 2010, and how will this all affect my compensation? And if you are looking for answers, so are the economists and box counters over at IDC. But unlike you, they are paid to respond to questions like these instead of taking the bugs out of someone else’s code or going to meetings to defend the IBM i platform.
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The Server Racket Strengthens in Q2, But Will It Hold?
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust after The Four Hundred went on hiatus for the Labor Day holiday, the box counters at IDC and Gartner put out their dicing and slicing of the server space for the second quarter of 2010. The news was generally good, but not so much for the high-end systems at IBM and Hewlett-Packard that are undergoing product transitions. The Sparc and X64 servers at Oracle took some hit points, too, thanks to the uncertainty surrounding Oracle’s plans for its servers.
Gartner and IDC count up the market slightly differently and provide different sets of data for subsets of the server
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Prices Jacked on Power Systems Tape Drives and Expansion Drawers
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is offering pretty good bang for the buck on its new entry Power Systems machines based on Power7 chips, and ditto for the midrange boxes using the processors. And so, the money has to come from somewhere and it is always a good idea for it to come from somewhere that might not make it into a press release or a benchmark. Like peripherals. And maybe soon, hardware maintenance fees.
And so, in announcement letter 310-236, you will find that selected peripherals used across the Power Systems product line, whether you install IBM i, AIX, or Linux on
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Entry IBM i Server Deals Greased With License Discounts
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs this newsletter reported a month ago, IBM has been cutting deals with customers moving from older Power 550 and larger machines based on Power 5, Power5+, and Power6 processors to Power 550/750 machines based on Power6+ and Power7 processors. The deal allows IBM i software licenses bought above and beyond the base OS that is configured with the server to slide from the old to the new box for a modest fee. Now, Big Blue is cutting smaller IBM i shops a break, too.
The deal, called the IBM i License By User offering, is detailed in announcement
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Admin Alert: One Year Out–Preparing for Your Next Power IBM i Upgrade
August 25, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreRecently I wrote several articles about some IBM i upgrades my shop performed this year. Such is the way of things in i shops that I’m already planning for another set of upgrades next year, in July 2011. If you’re in the same situation where new Power i boxes are just over the horizon, here’s some tips to help you plan your upgrade.
Your BP and You
Before you do anything else on your upgrade, first evaluate your business partner (BP). This is a moot point for many people but you should ask yourself if you’re happy with your business
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An Introduction to Python on IBM i, Part 1
August 25, 2010 Garry Taylor
… Read moreNote: All of the files needed for this article are available for in one download here.
When we think of programming on IBM i, our minds usually turn to the venerable RPG, or maybe CL. Some of us will think of ILE C, and those who frequently entertain dinner guests from IBM will have the word “Java” seared into their brain, and mistakenly use “EGL” instead of friends’ names. However, ask a UNIX or Linux aficionado to name a scripting language, and they will probably come up with Perl, Ruby, or very likely, Python.
Python was created as an
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IBM Ships Fat Memory for Power 770 and 780 Systems Early
August 23, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen the Power 770 and 780 servers, which span up to 64 Power7 cores in a single system image, were announced back in February, one of the things that was necessary for these two boxes to be useful was a set of dense memory features that allowed the boxes to scale up to its full 2 TB.
That fat memory, which is known as feature 5602 and which is actually comprised of four 32 GB DDR3 memory modules running at 1.07 GHz, was expected to be delivered on November 19. That was pretty far put from the March 16 ship