Timothy Prickett Morgan
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AS/400 LUG Shares Chief i Architect’s “Why i?” Arguments
May 24, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack when I started in this AS/400 racket as a newbie reporter who would never dream of asking a mean question of anyone and did not have much of a sense of the business world or how it truly used computers to get work done, I heard something that seemed like a timeless truth even in the late 1980s: No one ever got fired for buying IBM. And no one back then had to justify buying an AS/400. The back-end apps you wanted ran on it, it had an IBM label and a sophisticated, easy to use database and programming
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Transitions Push Systems and Technology Group into the Red
May 24, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs previously reported a month ago in The Four Hundred, IBM had a pretty good first quarter to start out 2010. Big Blue’s overall sales rose by 5 percent to $22.9 billion, and net income increased by 13 percent to $2.6 billion. The Systems and Technology Group, which makes and sells IBM’s chips, servers, and storage arrays, managed 4.9 percent growth, to $3.38 billion. But if you drill down into the numbers, as I did, you’ll see that the Power7 transition and the wait for the System z11 mainframes have pushed STG into the red.
As I do each
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Power7 Blades Plus i Versus X64 Blades Plus Windows
May 24, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe price/performance saga continues, and in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we pit the new Power7-based Power Systems 700, 701, and 702 servers against their rough equivalents in the X64 blade server world. Two weeks ago, when I fixed an error I had discovered with the PS701 blade configurations, I showed you that the Power7 blades were a mixed bag, with the entry i blades able to hold their own against IBM‘s AIX on the same hardware and configured with the Oracle 11g R2 Standard Edition One entry database.
As I moved up to the PS701
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Admin Alert: CBU Product License Keys Can and Will Suddenly Expire
May 19, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreOne of my Power i Capacity BackUp (CBU) systems hit the wall last week. All of a sudden, none of our administrators could start a PC5250 green-screen session on the CBU. Each time they clicked on a PC5250 session icon, the user received an obscure CWBLM0020 error and they couldn’t get to the system. Here’s what happened and how it can affect any shop with an i/OS CBU system.
The Symptoms
When one of our administrators went to start a PC5250 session on our CBU, the session refused to start and she received the following error.
CWBLM0020 - Failure--Licensing Failure
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Low Risk Authority Changes
May 19, 2010 Patrick Botz
… Read moreFor years, many people, including me, have harangued you to “get rid of PUBLIC” authority. Despite all of the pleading, however, there remains a large number of customers that still have PUBLIC authority set to *USE or higher. I suspect at least part of the reason is because many of us are afraid to monkey with PUBLIC authority for fear of breaking something major. This fear is understandable. Many administrators are responsible for applications that were written before they joined the workforce.
A fairly trivial technique that I call “alternative PUBLIC authority” takes the fear–and the risk–out of changing PUBLIC
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SAP Buys Database Maker Sybase for $5.8 Billion
May 17, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe balkanization and stackification of the IT industry continued a-pace last week as German software giant SAP weaved when I said, only last week that it should bob and buy database maker Software AG and instead said it would pay $5.8 billion to acquire database maker Sybase.
Sybase needs a sugar daddy and SAP needs a database besides the MaxDB database it co-developed with MySQL, which is now part of archrival Oracle and which never took off as the database of choice for SAP application software. Sybase has some very good complex event processing (CEP) algorithms built into its
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IT Shops Worried About Brain Drain, Says CareerBuilder
May 17, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe economy must be on the mend. According to a recent survey of IT shops performed by CareerBuilder, IT managers are shifting gears from cutting costs to worrying about how to retain their top talent.
Respondents to the survey, which was conducted on behalf of CareerBuilder by Harris International, included 203 IT managers and 245 IT employees between February 10 and March 2 in the United States. Nearly half of those sitting on the employer side of the bargaining table–45 percent–said they are worried about losing some of their top talent in the current second quarter (which was in
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Middleware Rides Out the Economic Storms of 2009
May 17, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhile the server and storage business certainly took it on the chin in 2009 as the world’s economies coped with a severe slowdown and IT budgets for these items were curtailed if not frozen, the appetite for the glue that connects IT back-ends to Web front-ends–what is commonly called application infrastructure and middleware–continued to grow last year.
According to the latest market statistics from Gartner, worldwide sales of application infrastructure and middleware software grew by 7.1 percent in 2008, to reach $15.5 billion in sales, and continued to grow at a 2.8 percent pace in 2009 to $15.9 billion.
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Transitive Converted to Power Systems Software Lab
May 17, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreRemember Transitive? That funky upstart company that had created a clever emulator called QuickTransit that could potentially upset a lot of balances of power in the server racket just before IBM showed foresight and bought it? Well, nothing much has happened with Transitive since IBM acquired it for an undisclosed amount in November 2008, but now the formerly independent company is the foundation of a new Power Systems development laboratory located in Manchester, England.
As you will recall, Transitive was founded in 2000 by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer science professor at the University of Manchester who had spent the prior
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Reader Feedback on Let’s Take Another Stab at Power7 Blade Bang for the Buck
May 17, 2010 Hey, TPM
… Read moreYour untangling of the obscured IBM pricing is depressing. I listened carefully to IBM at COMMON, and asked a few questions myself.
They are 100 percent committed to the proposition that the i/OS eliminates need for as many IT personnel and that you will pay them instead of the personnel. It is built into everything they do and say, with code word “simplified” (as in their pricing–not). It is a serious mistake they will take the AS/400 down with until they change their ways, which will assuredly be too late.
I can’t imagine a person other than