Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Infor Readies ERP Applications for i 7.1
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe announcement in late June by application software powerhouse Infor that it was building a lot of its new applications for Microsoft‘s Windows Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server, doesn’t mean the Power Systems i platform is not still important to the company, and Infor is most definitely hard at work getting its apps up to speed on IBM‘s latest Power7-based machines and the i 7.1 operating system.
With around 15,000 customers worldwide running a variety of applications that were originally coded for OS/400, often in RPG but sometimes in Java or with Java extensions, privately held Infor
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Power7 Boxes Show Good Java Oomph Versus Other Iron
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSince the Power7-based machines were launched in February and March, The Four Hundred has been digging around for all of the performance information we can find on the new machines, particularly running the i 6.1 or i 7.1 operating system and filling in some gaps by making some estimates for online transaction processing on the Power7 blade servers. This week, I wanted to give you a sense of how the Power7-based machines stack up on Java application performance, in this case gauged by the SPECjbb2005 application serving test.
In March, in the wake of the launch of the midrange Power
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IBM’s Evolving Power Systems Rollout
July 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreShooting and hitting a moving target is never easy, but nailing a moving target when you are flying down a bumpy road trying to hit that target is another thing entirely. Which is why the server business is a bit like the chase scene in a thriller movie. The targets that vendors are aiming at are chip and system roadmaps, and the blood is red ink, but there is a certain kind of drama in it. Particularly if your company’s business, and perhaps your job, depends on the reliability, scalability, and availability of your primary server platforms.
I do plenty
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Admin Alert: High Availability Eliminates Disaster Recovery. . . Right?
June 30, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreImagine you’re a flea with one limitation. Whenever you want to go anywhere, you can only jump half the distance to your objective and no further. The second hop halves the remaining distance. The third halves that again, and so on. How long will it take to reach your goal? Administrators dealing with High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are a lot like that flea.
I thought of the jumping flea after we started revisiting our DR plan. I was feeling pretty smug about things. After all, I have an off-site HA setup for my production Power i machine,
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Oracle Pushes Sun Systems Biz Toward Profits, Fires More People
June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere are always a lot of ifs in life. Like, for instance, if the top brass of Sun Microsystems had made some of the changes that Oracle has done in the four months since acquiring Sun–but done them several years ago–then Sun would be positioned to ride up a recovery but would be still trying to figure out how to be a systems company. Oracle, as its most recent financial results show, may not succeed in the long run with its systems aspirations, but it has certainly made the most of Sun in a short time.
In Oracle’s fourth quarter
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Azul Readies X64-Based Java Virtual Appliance
June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt took Azul Systems three years to design and build its first Java acceleration appliance servers and bring them to market in 2005, and over those five years since, the company had had its ups and downs legally and presumably financially as it tried to get server makers to endorse a custom Java application offload engine that basically took food off their plates.
Now, Azul is ditching the hardware-based appliance approach and going more fluid with an virtual Java acceleration appliance that runs atop a server virtualization hypervisor on an X64 server. (Yes, I know that is many layers of
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A Possible AS/400 Emulation and Runtime Environment
June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI was poking around on the news wires on Friday, trying to find something interesting to write about on a pretty boring news day and stumbled across an announcement from a small software company in Geneva, Switzerland, called Stromasys that might be able to bring some alternatives to customers using vintage AS/400 iron if we can
contalk them into it.Here’s the deal. In the wake of the formerly independent Compaq’s acquisition in 1998 of the equally formerly independent Digital Equipment Corp (both of which were borged into Hewlett-Packard nearly a decade ago), a bunch of executives who ran
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IT Salaries Stop Falling, Hiring Picking Up, Says Janco
June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIT salary watcher Janco Associates has just finished up its mid-year 2010 IT salary survey and it looks like the IT jobs situation is improving a bit.
According to the latest survey, which was collected in June at over 300 companies that participate in the company’s data gathering, in the United States, hiring at IT shops is picking up in some sectors of the economy, average salaries have stopped falling, and in some positions in the data center salaries have actually gone up.
Victor Janulaitis, who is the chief number cruncher at Janco as well as the owner of the
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IBM Tweaks More Rebate Deals to Cut Power7 Prices
June 28, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAsk and ye shall receive. It doesn’t happen all the time, but sometimes it does–maybe just enough to make you believe there’s something in the universe that is listening for a good idea. In this case, that something is a somebody who works at IBM, which has finally gotten around to adding its new Power7-based blade servers announced in April to some existing (and too complicated in my opinion) trade-in deals. Last week, when going over how the Power 750, 770, and 780 servers that were launched in February were added to two existing trade-in deals, I complained that
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Developing for IBM i: Why Does It Need To Be So Hard?
June 28, 2010 Garry Taylor
… Read moreThere is something wonderful about being a computer programmer. Maybe it’s the ability to see a problem with our computing experience and be able to fix it, in the same way a mechanic can see a problem with his car and repair it. We can be dissatisfied with our computers and do something about it.
Growing up with computers as I did, programming them just seemed to be part of the experience, not a bolt on, not an addition. It was just what you did with a computer. At least it was for me and many of my friends. Computer