Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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
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The Rest of the Power7 Lineup Is Coming August 17
July 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are in the middle of negotiating a deal on a low-end Power 520, a midrange Power 550 or 750, or a high-end Power 595 server at the moment, you might want to put those negotiations on hold. It looks like IBM is getting ready to complete the rollout of the Power7-based Power Systems servers, and as I suggested in the lead story from last week’s issue, the four entry machines (including the Power 720 and three other new variants added more recently) and the high-end Power 795 are moving up from their original October launch date.
Of
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Admin Alert: Keep Your Data Synced Up During an HA Switch Over
July 14, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWhen performing high availability (HA) switch exercises where production processing is temporarily switched from a live system to an HA system and back again, there is one essential procedure that must be followed or you risk screwing up your databases and losing data. Here’s the issue and how to avoid it.
Rule #1: Don’t Do This!!!
In my humble opinion, this is the cardinal rule for an HA switch over:
Don’t update your production data without replication running.
It’s a good simple rule to follow, but it’s also an easy rule to mess up. Whenever you switch processing from a
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Who’s the Scoundrel That Corrupted My Database?
July 14, 2010 Dear Guru
… Read moreYes, I’m talking to you. You who read this newsletter are gurus. Devoted and profoundly resourceful reader Sarah showed me a tip that I’ve got to share with you. Her technique makes it easy to find out who’s doing what with the database.
Sometimes a user asks Sarah to determine who changed something in a file. The journal tells all. The problem is that journals are not easy to read. The data is stored in one big long field, called entry-specific data. However, Sarah has a way to break down the entry-specific data as it is defined in the database.
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Heads Up! Additional Configuration Required for Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2
July 14, 2010 Patrick Botz
… Read moreIf you have a Windows 7 workstation or you are running Windows Server 2008 R2, there is an extra configuration step to enable Kerberos authentication with i5/OS. In these releases, Microsoft no longer enables the DES cipher suites (DES-CBC-MD5 and DES-CBC-CRC) for Kerberos by default. Unfortunately, Kerberos on i5/OS does not support the new default suites used by Microsoft.
A few details about the Kerberos protocol will explain why this change requires additional configuration. The Kerberos protocol negotiates the cipher suites used to build Kerberos tickets. When a client requests a Kerberos ticket, it includes a list of cipher suites
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Avnet Expands in Latin America, Promotes COO to President
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are chasing growth, as all companies along the IT supply and distribution chain are, then Latin America is one of the goals you are running toward. Which is why master distributor Avnet has acquired Tallard Technologies, a value-added distributor located in Miami, Florida, that has presence in all of the important Latin American countries.
The Tallard business was a division of Itautec S.A.-Grupo Itautec, which at $1 billion is one of the largest private companies in Brazil. Itautec is a supplier of computers and software aimed at the banking and financial services industry, as well as its
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Arrow ECS Launches Cloud Services, Expands in Germany
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Enterprise Computing Solutions IT distribution unit of IT and electronics master distributor Arrow Electronics has been building up its professional services portfolio since last fall and has relaunched its services unit in North America as Arrow Fusion, sporting a slew of cloud services for IT shops.
Arrow’s resellers are used to peddling boxes and software licenses to make their bread every day, and in a cloudy infrastructure world, where some shops are going to put at least some of their workloads on someone else’s computers, resellers are naturally wondering where their slice of the action is going to come
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Cloudy IT Is Big Business, Say Gartner and IDC
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is a lot of talk about cloudy IT infrastructure these days, and it just makes me laugh. The shift from virtualized, utility-priced server and storage capacity is transformational and important, no doubt, but no more so than many of the other transitions in the systems business in the past 45 years. Cloudy infrastructure will ultimately just be infrastructure, the way it was evolving to be all along.
But in the meantime, everybody is excited by change, and I can’t really blame them–the news business being based on change, after all. What people are mostly excited about are new
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Take Power Systems Training for a Test Drive on IBM’s Nickel
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s not every day I see IBM give away anything for free, much less see it two times in the same week. As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere in this issue, Big Blue has a try-and-buy program where it is letting companies and individuals tool around with a Power 520 server for two months. The company has also announced via its Web site (but not a formal announcement letter) some free Power Systems training courses.
IBM is offering seven of its online, instructor-led training courses for Power Systems shops for free, and some of them actually have something to
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IBM Does a Try-and-Buy for the Power 520
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe idea helped Sun Microsystems have something for its top brass to talk about aside from its flagging sales for several years before it was sucked into the gaping maw (surely I meant to say loving embrace?) of Oracle, and maybe it will work better for Big Blue.
Am I talking about an open source version of OS/400? Perhaps porting the platform to X64 iron? Maybe Sam Palmisano growing a ponytail and speaking like a calm guru of IT wisdom? No. I am talking about a try-and-buy program for the Power Systems line. For the Power6-based Power 520,