Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Brian Kelly Takes a Run at Congress and for Congress
April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBrian Kelly, one of the Four Hundred Gurus here at IT Jungle, is running for Congress.
Kelly, who lives in the Wilkes-Barre suburb of the coal-producing city of Scranton in Northeast Pennsylvania, is challenging Democratic incumbent Paul Kanjorski from District 11 for his seat in Washington. As you can see from his campaign Web site, cap and trade carbon taxes and the new healthcare reform law are not two of his favorite things, like many other people in the Scranton area and around the country.
“We must create jobs, not destroy them,” Kelly said in announcing his run
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IBM Chops Power 570 to 770/780 Memory Upgrade Tags
April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith more than two decades of stories sprinkled with typos and the occasional math errors, I would be the last one to criticize when someone else slips up when they are tired. But it looks like someone at IBM didn’t key the right number in as part of the new Power 770 and Power 780 server launches from February.
Last week, in announcement letter 310-164, IBM cut the price of converting large blocks of DDR2 main memory (256 GB of activations, to be precise) on a Power 570 to 100 GB of memory activations on a new Power 770
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Advanced Job Scheduler Prices Go Up Dramatically
April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM rarely explains why it raises prices on its software, and last week was no exception when prices for most of the features affiliated with the Advanced Job Scheduler for i were jacked by Big Blue.
If you read announcement letter 310-163, IBM said that it had raised the price on the Advanced Job Scheduler edition related to the OS/400 and i5/OS V5 releases, which is product number 5722-JS1 in the IBM catalog. This version has been around since April 2001 and has been enhanced through January 2006; it will be withdrawn from marketing in January 2011, when support
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SAP Tests Prove i 7.1 Performance Boost Over i 6.1
April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe new i For Business 7.1 operating system for Power Systems servers is not just about gussying up i 6.1.1 a little and slapping a new label on it, but making some real changes to the operating system to goose performance on a number of workloads. As The Four Hundred reported last week, IBM made a bunch of improvements in the DB2 for i database, and as it turns out IBM has put the new Power 750 server through some benchmark paces to show how the upgraded software can goose even a new machine.
While i 6.1.1 will technically
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Looks Like Two Entry Power7 Systems Are On The Way
April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI had been hoping, like many of you, that IBM had kept some of its Power7 server powder dry for the COMMON user group meeting in Orlando, Florida, next week. Perhaps divulging its plans for an entry Power Systems machine to succeed the current Power 520–I have been calling it the Power 720–and to maybe get back into the fight against entry X64 iron machines with a truly entry server–what I am calling the Power 710.
Well, it doesn’t look like this is going to happen. As far as I know, there are no additional Power Systems announcements coming at
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Power Systems Slammed by Power7 Transitions in Q1
April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM may have announced new Power Systems iron based on Power7 processors in the middle of the first quarter, but because they didn’t ship until a few weeks later, the new machinery did not do all that much to help Big Blue’s finances during the first quarter. But IBM is, by design, an engine with multiple cylinders, and luckily even while the Power Systems and mainframe pistons were sticking a little, X64 servers and software were firing nicely and helped fill in some gaps.
In the quarter ended in March, IBM’s overall sales rose by 5 percent to $22.9 billion,
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Stacking Up New Power7 Against Power6/6+ Blades
April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMajor Correction: In this story, I thought the price to activate either i 6.1 or i 7.1 per core on the new Power Systems 701 blade server was $2,250 a pop plus $250 per user, as it is on the Power Systems 700 blade, since both are single-socket blades. Nope. The PS701 blade has the same ridiculous price as the two-socket PS702 blade. So my analysis below is for the PS701 is not correct. I have updated this analysis and the price/performance table in the May 10 issue, which you can read here.
When IBM announced the new Power7-based
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More on Whether IPLs Help System Performance
April 21, 2010 Hey, Joe
… Read moreIn your article on IPLing for system performance, you stated that it’s difficult to find a definitive listing of all the steps that i/OS performs during an IPL. Here’s a link to an older list of IPL status progress codes. While it’s not the most up-to-date list, it should give you a good idea of what’s happening during an IPL.
–Dave Flint
Thanks, Dave. The only problem I saw with your link was that it only references the C6xx xxxx IPL status codes, which only tells part of the IPL status code story. Many IPL status codes
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FAQs for MySQL and the DB2 Storage Engine
April 21, 2010 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIn a couple of past tips, I’ve been exploring aspects about using MySQL on i and especially the ability to use the DB2 for i Storage Engine to make the MySQL data accessible from “native” DB2-based applications and tools. In this tip, I’ll cover a couple of questions that often arise related to this topic.
How does database object security work with MySQL and the DB2 for i storage engine?
MySQL has its own security implementation that governs how users may access data. Users and their authorities to databases and tables are set up in MySQL and are unrelated to
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Tell COMMON Europe What Your Top Concerns Are
April 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA new Power Systems development cycle is starting with the delivery of i 7.1 and the expectation that IBM will deliver another new version, hopefully called something sensible like Power OS 8.1, in two more years means now is the time to start telling Big Blue what you need and what you want in the platform.
COMMON Europe, the European IBM midrange user group, is doing its part by gathering up the top concerns that OS/400 and i shops. The way it works, COMMON Europe has 37 initial top concerns that customers have, and it wants input from the