Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Internal Disk Arrays Prop Up Storage Sales in Q4
March 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe way disk array storage vendors have been talking for two decades, you would think that the day would never come when storage revenues would cease growing. Well, the economic meltdown last year sure saw that trend come to an end. But spending has taken off again as 2009 came to a close, and while it is too early to call this a recovery, much less a return to high growth, there certainly is more optimism in the storage racket now than a year ago.
“Although 2009 might have gotten off to a rough start, it ended on a strong
-
Power 750 Servers Running i Get SAP Benchmarks
March 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreComparisons are odious, the old saying goes. But, that’s what we do whenever we are buying any kind of electronics, and servers are no exception. IBM, like every other server maker with a new product, wants to show off the performance and scalability of its new Power7-based servers. But it doesn’t want to make the comparisons too easy between the i and AIX platforms, or between the i versions of the boxes and other machines like X64 servers running Windows, as has been the case for many years.
But to IBM’s credit, the company provides its rPerf and CPW
-
IBM Cuts Prices for Upgrades to Power 595s
March 15, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe big iron boxes in IBM‘s Power-based server lineup have always tended to come to market later than midrange and entry boxes. With the AS/400 and its progeny being predominantly a midrange platform, and the RS/6000 and its progeny proliferating in the low-end and only gradually coming to be known as a big iron box, it stands to reason that Big Blue would start the Power7 launch in the middle, with the Power 750, 770, and 780 servers.
That said, when it comes to generating revenues and lots of profits, you just can’t beat the big iron boxes like
-
Admin Alert: A Skeleton Checklist for Performing Power i Upgrades
March 10, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreA checklist is a great foundation for performing a complex job. Properly constructed, checklists allow you to quickly perform all necessary tasks to accomplish a goal. This week, I’ll present a skeleton checklist for performing Power i upgrades, listing off universal tasks that must be completed for a successful hardware or software upgrade. Use this checklist as a starting point for your own upgrades, adding specific tasks as needed.
The Skeleton Checklist
The skeleton checklist was created to ensure that whenever my shop undertook a hardware upgrade–whether it was a small upgrade or a complete system replacement–that we didn’t forget
-
Job Descriptions: Underused and Underappreciated
March 10, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreIf every machine attached to the Internet were running a robust operating system like the IBM i, I doubt the malware problem would be nearly as severe as it is. Having said that, I wonder once again, as I do from time to time, why those who use IBM i neglect so many of its wonderful features. Today my thoughts turn to job descriptions.
Before talking about job descriptions, let’s consider for a moment what a job is. Early in my career I acquired the bad habit of referring to a program or group of related programs as a job.
-
A Case for CASE
March 10, 2010 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreThe CASE operation is common to several programming languages on the IBM i. This includes SQL in DB2 for i, where it is available as the CASE statement for use in conjunction with a SELECT statement, or CASE expression for use in conjunction with the DB2 for i SQL Procedure Language.
If you aren’t familiar with CASE from an SQL perspective, it’s a really effective mechanism to easily handle one or more forms of simple or complex conditional processing within the same SQL statement.
The Two Forms of CASE
There are two forms of CASE: Simple WHEN clause and searched
-
Arrow ECS Adds Professional Services
March 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs it promised it would last fall, the Enterprise Computing Solutions group of master reseller Arrow Electronics has launched its own professional services business.
Arrow ECS is one of the two big master resellers of servers in the world, the other being Avnet, and both buy from server makers in bulk and sell downstream to thousands of other resellers worldwide. Last October, as The Four Hundred reported, Arrow created a vice president of worldwide services position in the ECS group and tapped Joe Burke, a senior-level executive who has done a lot of different jobs within the company, to
-
Impending Xeon Blades and Racks Offer Flexible SMP, Memory
March 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust when you think you have IBM figured out, it does something unexpected–and interesting. In previewing its upcoming rack and blade servers based on Intel‘s eight-core “Nehalem-EX” Xeon processors and Big Blue’s own eX5 chipset, IBM took a chip that is aimed at high-end servers with many sockets and tweaked it to make midrange machines that offer processor and memory scalability independent of each other.
The Nehalem-EX processors, which sport eight processor cores with HyperThreading, on-chip DDR3 main memory controllers, and the QuickPath Interconnect point-to-point interconnect, were conceptually at least designed to put the Xeon family of servers into
-
IBM Starts Cutting U.S. Jobs Again
March 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSo much for my whole idea of Colonizing Endicott from a little more than a year ago. IBM‘s strategy is more like Colonoscopy Endicott–and a whole slew of other facilities in the United States. Last year, IBM chopped an estimated 10,400 workers in its supposed home country, reducing its workforce here to around 105,000. And on March 1, it started cutting again.
According to counts made by Alliance@IBM, the local of the Communications Workers of America union that has been trying to organize IBM for longer than I have been in the IT racket, as of Thursday night,
-
Disk Array Sales Decline in 2009, First Time Since Dot-Com Bust
March 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn case you were happily sleeping away under an apple tree for the last year and missed the economic meltdown and its affect on sales of all kinds of IT hard and soft wares, you might awake and be surprised to find that disk array sales actually declined in 2009. That’s the first time disk array revenues have declined since the dot-com bust coincided with the recession in 2001, causing a 2002 that many wish they could have slept through.
According to the latest stats from Gartner, sales of disk arrays external to servers (and not including internal disk