Timothy Prickett Morgan
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More Details on the Entry Power7 Rollout
July 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI told you last week that five new Power7-based systems–four small ones and the big iron Power 795 boxes–were coming out on August 17. It didn’t take long for people to start helping me put together a little more of the launch plans for the remainder of the Power7 rollout for 2010. It was kinda funny how the veil kept lifting a bit higher and higher as the week went on.
We already knew that there were four machines plus the Power 795. I had been guessing there would be an entry box, the Power 705 in a 1U chassis,
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Admin Alert: The Poor Manager’s 5250 Single Sign-On
July 21, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreProperly implemented, single sign-on (SSO) is a blessing for i/OS shops. With it, users log on to their desktops once and then access all their servers without entering several different passwords. But it’s always been problematic enabling SSO for Power i machines, causing some administrators to skip the process all together. This week, I’ll present a workaround for making PC5250 sessions act like single sign-on participants without configuring SSO.
Same as Single Sign-On, Only Different
In earlier articles, I outlined how to set up an i/OS system for single sign-on. (See Related Stories below.) A true SSO environment provides access
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It’s My (De)fault That You’re a Zero
July 21, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreUnless you say otherwise, numeric database fields have a value of zero and character fields are blank, right? Not necessarily. There’s more to default field values than some i Gurus realize.
A field’s default value is the value the system assigns to the field when an application does not specify a value. Default values come into play in several situations.
- A record (row) is added to (inserted into) a physical file (table) by means of a logical file or SQL view that does not contain one or more fields.
- RPG O specs list the fields of an externally described file,
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AAA Secures IBM i Server
July 21, 2010 Pi Guang Ming
… Read moreThe IBM HTTP Server for i, powered by Apache, has three distinct ways to handle whether a particular request for a resource will result in that resource actually being returned. These three techniques are access control, authentication, and authorization, or AAA.
In this article, I’ll share how AAA works within IBM HTTP Server for i.
First A: Access Control
Access control refers to any means of controlling access to any resource. This A is distinct from authentication and authorization.
IBM HTTP Server for i uses Allow and Deny directives to implement the criteria of access control. The Order directive
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IT Vendors Optimistic About the Second Half of 2010
July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor as long as I have been watching this IT racket, whenever there is a recession, there is always optimism in the second half of the year, no matter how bad things are. And despite some uncertainty in the global economy, with certain areas (like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and Spain) still having their own baby meltdowns, the IT vendors are being chipper about how 2010 will end.
According to the 306 IT vendors who participated in an online survey by CompTIA, the IT Industry Business Confidence Index is going to swing up 5.4 points in the next six
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Gartner Gives IT Spending Projections for 2010 a Haircut
July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe economic turmoil in Europe that is causing the decline of the euro against other currencies–namely the U.S. dollar where a lot of IT spending ultimately gets booked–have forced the analysts at Gartner to go back to the whiteboard and scribble some new numbers on it.
In its most recent projection from the first quarter of this year, Gartner said it expected IT spending to grow by 5.3 percent globally when reckoned in U.S. dollars, to just under $3.4 trillion. But now, thanks to the deflation of the Europe and the U.S. dollar strengthening, global IT spending is only set
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Maxava Says Business Doubled in the June Quarter
July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith so many privately held companies in the OS/400 and i ecosystem, it is hard to get a grasp of what business conditions are out there in AS/400 Land. But occasionally, to do a little bragging and to get a little free press, a hardware or software company gives us some insight into how biz is going.
High availability software has been one of the key drivers of the iSeries, System i, and Power Systems market for the better part of two decades, and this has not changed even as the cost of both the systems and HA software have
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Lawson Boosts Sales, But Costs Cut Profits in Fiscal Q4
July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMidrange enterprise application provider Lawson Software, which has come under the harsh gaze of activist investor Carl Icahn in recent months, probably didn’t make Icahn any happier when the company closed out its fiscal 2010.
In the fourth quarter ended May 31, Lawson’s revenues were up by 6 percent, to $197 million, with software license fees rising 13 percent to $38 million. Software maintenance services revenues were up 10 percent in the quarter, to $93.3 million, while consulting revenues fell by 3 percent, to $65.7 million in the quarter. Software maintenance, sales, marketing, and research and development costs
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IBM Trims the Power Systems Catalog Some More
July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell, you can tell that the Power7 generation of Power Systems machines will soon be in full swing because IBM has taken the scissors to the i-related product catalog again.
In announcement letter 910-151, IBM said last week that it would be withdrawing its Power 560 (a midrange machine that scaled from four to 16 Power6 cores) and Power 570 (which ranged from two to 32 cores, either Power6 or Power6+, in a one to four chassis setup). As of January 7, 2011, IBM will no longer sell these two machines.
A slew of features for various Power-based servers
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Microsoft Azure: An AS/400 for Private and Public Clouds
July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI may be a whippersnapper compared to many of you dyed-in-the-wool System/38, System/36, and AS/400 old-timers, but I have been around long enough to see the irony of things with a certain amount of good humor and healthy detachment. And so I got a good chuckle last week when I saw that Microsoft was taking its Azure public cloud computing platform private, and perhaps to many more masses than it would have gotten through a public-only cloud.
People are making a big deal about cloud computing–what I still like to call utility computing–not just because we need something new to