Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Systems: The Foundation for Glass Skyscrapers
May 17, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAlthough IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, did not utter the words server, mainframe, or Power Systems once in his presentation to Wall Street investors last week as he outlined the next five-year plan for revenue and profit growth for Big Blue, fear not. Systems remain at the very core of what IBM does today and what it will do in the future. But don’t be confused. Systems are the foundation, they are not the house, and that house will have many more stories of software and services atop it than we are used
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Palmisano Says IBM Will Double Up Profits By 2015
May 17, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAround this time every year, the top brass at IBM take what I presume are their limousines and head south from Upstate New York and chi-chi Western Connecticut down to Wall Street to explain themselves to investors. Well, more precisely, the IBMers gather to talk to Wall Street analysts; the several hundred people on the globe that influence a stock as much as (and perhaps more than) the Brownian investment motions of millions of shareholders sweating their 401(k) retirement funds.
Every couple of years, IBM goes a bit out on a limb and makes some big predictions about how the
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Admin Alert: Diary of a Production System Upgrade, Part 2
May 12, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLast issue, I began discussing a Power i/Power 6 upgrade that was recently completed in my shop. This review served as a case study for discussing some techniques and pitfalls in bringing up new hardware. I’m offering this examination to document some lessons I learned while upgrading in order to help other i/OS administrators who are installing new hardware. This week, let’s continue the story.
I previously documented how we started swapping out an existing production System i/Power 5 machine for an upgraded model 8204 IBM i Power 6 box with 96 Gb of memory and 4 processors. Over
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Two Ways to Prevent Division by Zero in SQL
May 12, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreEverybody above the age of 8 knows that division by zero is a no-no, or at least they should. Everybody who’s used SQL for any amount of time knows that we can use a CASE expression to prevent division by zero. But do you know the other way to prevent division by zero in SQL?
Assume a database file called SomeTable, with fields called Quantity and Amount. Let’s divide Amount by Quantity. First, here’s the usual case statement.
select itnbr, Amount, Quantity, case when Quantity <> 0 then Amount / Quantity else 0 end from SomeTableIf Quantity is not
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Development Environments
May 12, 2010 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreIt happens at every conference I speak at. Over a cup of coffee (or other liquid refreshment) someone will ask me about my development environment.
- How many libraries do you use?
- Where do you keep source–especially for service programs?
- How do you manage binder language?
So, if for no other reason than allowing me to answer with: “you can read about it at IT Jungle,” here is a description of my current development environment for a little System i Developer application I’m working on.
But First
Of course, your development environment may well be dictated by a change management system.
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SandForce SSDs Help Push TPC-C Performance for Power 780
May 10, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has put its big midrange Power7 box, the Power Systems 780 server, through the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark paces, and to goose the performance while at the same time avoiding the high cost of disk drives needed to meet the strict requirements of the TPC-C test, Big Blue equipped the system with fat solid state disks made by SandForce.
Unlike many enterprise-class SSDs, which are based on single-level cell (SLC) flash memory technology, the SandForce SF-1500 SSD units (which it calls processors for some silly reason) are based on the cheaper multi-level cell (MLC) flash technology we
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Zend PHP Gets More Native with i 7.1
May 10, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe i in iSeries, System i, and i 6.1/7.1 is supposed to stand for integration. And as IT Jungle reported with the launch of Zend Server concurrent with the i 7.1 launch on April 13, the new Zend Server, which replaces Zend Core for i, is a more native implementation of the Zend Engine for running PHP applications. A welcome change and one that should make it easier for PHP applications to be administered on Power Systems i boxes.
The change seems minor, but it means that OS/400 and i shops will not have to be mucking around with two
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IBM: Not Planning to Crowdsource Most of Its Employees–Yet
May 10, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn the long run, I guess we are not only all dead, but temp workers in this fluid form of short-term thinking global capitalism that has evolved on Earth. Some people understand that, like Tim Ringo, who is a vice president in IBM’s human capital management consulting business. Others, like the rest of us who like our jobs and think we are contributing hard work in exchange for a commitment from our employers to be allowed to continue to evolve and change with them because life can’t be all uncertainty and discontinuity, apparently don’t.
Having done my fair share of
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IBM Buys Integration Appliance Maker Cast Iron
May 10, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCloud, cloud, cloud. If you say it a hundred more times, will that make a product any more interesting or useful? No. But vendors, journalists, analysts, and other IT observers are addicted to the word cloud, so every move or product a vendor makes has to be cloudy, even if it really isn’t. Or even if cloud is just the fulfillment of the promise of flexible distributed computing Unix and then X64 server vendors sold us two decades ago. And so it is with IBM‘s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems last week.
Cast Iron is a venture-backed,
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Let’s Take Another Stab at Power7 Blade Bang for the Buck
May 10, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I created a slew of configured Power7-based blade systems, loading up i 7.1 and AIX 6.1 with two relational databases, and I said that the premium that IBM was charging was small enough to be a sign of progress. Surprising, even. What was even more surprising to me was finding out I made a big error configuring the Power System 701 blades and a small one setting up the AIX blades. And those errors make the i blades look downright awful compared to the AIX blades.
First, the big mistake. IBM