Timothy Prickett Morgan
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A Few More Power Systems Features in Last Week’s Blitz
April 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn addition to the new Power Systems 700, 701, and 702 blade servers and the i 7.1 operating system, IBM tossed a few Power Systems features into the product catalog.
First, there’s a new cryptographic co-processor that plugs into PCI Express peripheral slots in the Power Systems server lineup. I know what you are thinking: isn’t that what the on-board AltiVec vector math units and floating point units in the Power6, Power6+, and Power7 chips are for? Well, sometimes, you need something even more powerful, and that is what features 4807, 4808, and 4809 are all about. They are also
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IBM Peddles Baby BladeCenter PS700 Express Blade Box
April 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power7-based Power Systems 701 and 702 blades, which have eight or 16 activated cores in their base configurations and which we detail in the lead story in this issue, are a bit overkill for a lot of SMB shops. And so IBM has sensibly created a preconfigured BladeCenter PS700 Express configuration with fewer cores activated.
The PS700 Express has the same basic hardware as the PS701 blade, except that it only has four cores that work and only eight DDR3 memory slots instead of 16. The clock speed on the Power7 chip is the same 3 GHz, and
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RPG Gets Custom Data Streams with Open Access
April 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOf all the things that are coming out with the new i For Business 7.1 operating system for Power Systems, perhaps the most exciting to both end users and software developers is what was called Open I/O when it was in development, was briefly called Open Access for RPG in the months ahead of the i 7.1 launch (when that operating system was lovingly referred to as “i Next”), and what we now know as Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. Call it what you will, it is all the same good thing.
As The Four Hundred has been hinting for
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i For Business Gets to Lucky Number 7–Dot 1
April 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been a long time since the OS/400 and i platform got a big software release, and considering how much of the changes that come with the just-announced i For Business 7.1 relate to the integrated database, the virtualization hypervisor, related systems management tools, compilers, and Web application serving middleware, you could make a credible argument that there is not a huge difference between the 6.1 release and the 7.1 release. But, the whole point of the IBM midrange systems for more than 40 years is that there is not really an operating system so much as an integrated
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IBM’s Power7 Blades Pack a CPW Punch
April 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power7-based Power Systems lineup got a little rounder and fuller last week as IBM kicked out two new blade servers based on the eight-core Power7 chips that made their debut in midrange rack-based servers back in February. The new Power Systems 701 and 702 blades pack a serious performance wallop, as they must do to compete with very aggressive X64 alternatives from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
The new PS701 and PS702 blades also offer a lot better bang for the buck compared to the prior Power6+ JS23 and JS43 blades they replace, at least based on the
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Admin Alert: Some Simple Ideas for Getting the Best System i Lease
April 14, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreBuying a new Power i machine can be complicated. Not only do you have to correctly size everything for future growth, you also have to purchase the hardware, software, and maintenance at a reasonable price. And if your organization wants to lease its new machine, you may wind up scratching your head wondering just what those leasing numbers mean, or if your organization is being taken advantage of.
This issue, I’ll describe a way to approach a new lease, such that you can put yourself in a better bargaining position and better understand how the leasing company is pricing your
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Update One File Based on Another File
April 14, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreIt’s not uncommon to have to update one file based on data found in another file. In fact, it’s a very common requirement, due to the way that data is “normalized” in relational database management systems. When only one field links the two files–the file that is being updated and the file that contains the search criteria–the SQL syntax is simple. But joining on two or more fields requires more challenging syntax.
Here’s an example of an update when only one field joins the two files. I add a week to the scheduled ship date of orders of type B
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Query Control
April 14, 2010 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreQuery is the system killer. The lights dim. The system slows to a crawl. It must be a user running an interactive query.
Enough! No more interactive query for users–we are removing the *INTERACT option on the ALLOW parameter on the RUNQRY command. Sound familiar?
This extreme reaction of disabling interactive query is both unnecessary and, to be blunt, downright unfair to users. By disabling interactive queries, you also disable the ability to use the F5 (Report) key in Query, which is probably the most used function. And that, in turn, gets users into the frame of mind that, if
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Qlik Technologies to Take Itself Public
April 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere’s something you don’t see every day in the tech industry, and you certainly don’t see very often in any company affiliated with the IBM midrange: one of them going public.
Qlik Technologies, which peddles Windows-based business intelligence that interfaces with AS/400 and i systems, has been growing like crazy in recent years and is ready to get some cash from Wall Street to take it up to the next level. The company filed its S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to kick off the process, which you can read here.
The Swedish company moved
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Four-Socket Power7 Boxes Get Energy Star Rating
April 12, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast May, as The Four Hundred previously reported, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, along with two and a half years of input from the IT industry, established an Energy Star power efficiency benchmark and rating system for servers. That initial spec was for what was called computer servers, meaning single-socket and two-socket boxes. In February of this year, the spec was expanded to include what are called enterprise servers, which means machines with four or more sockets.
As it turns out, the new Power7-based Power 750 machines and their special supercomputer variant, the Power