Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Unix, Other Servers Still Wobbly in Q4, Says IDC
March 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I drilled into the quarterly server sales and shipment stats from Gartner, and this week, it is time to take a look at the similar, yet different, set of stats coming out of Gartner’s rival, IDC. The latter companies cuts up and talks about the server racket a little differently from Gartner, and by looking at both, you get a better sense of what is going on.
By IDC’s reckoning, server revenues fell by 3.9 percent to $12.95 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, with shipments actually up
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i 7.1 Due April 14, with Open Access for RPG, Other Goodies
March 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe word on the street is that the next iteration of IBM‘s i for Business operating system, i 7.1, will be announced at an unusual Wednesday press conference a little more than a month from now on April 14. While that may seem like an odd time to do an announcement, that just so happens to be the last day of the Northeast IBM i User Groups Conference, which runs from April 12 through 14.
NEUGC is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and if you didn’t want to (or couldn’t) wait until COMMON‘s 50th anniversary, which runs from May
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Admin Alert: Preparing Your CBU For a Real Emergency
March 3, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreAlongside human tragedies, computer tragedies can also occur when a critical i/OS production system stops working and a shop must unexpectedly rely on its Capacity BackUp (CBU) system as its production box. Because a hard CBU cutover can offer more challenges than a planned switch test, here are some additional configuration tasks that can help you account for the unexpected challenges that go along with an emergency CBU switch over.
When Those Who Stand and Wait No Longer Wait
Like a good insurance policy, you hopefully never have to use your CBU. Unfortunately, there are a number of situations where
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Variable Program Calls in Free-Format RPG
March 3, 2010 Jon Paris
… Read moreMany RPG programmers are familiar with the notion of using a variable, rather than a literal, to define the target of a program or procedure call. The problems usually begin when they try to utilize this technique in a /Free program because the “translation” of such calls into /Free is not an obvious one.
The PGMCALL shown below is a simple “old-style” RPG program that demonstrates the basic principle for those of you unfamiliar with the technique. As you can see, it simply requests the name of a program to call, calls the program, and issues an error message if
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Intelliden Snapped Up by IBM for Network Management
March 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM doesn’t have a homegrown networking hardware business, and has been pretty careful to not tick off Cisco Systems, positioning itself as a kind of Switzerland in IT networking, even as Cisco jumps into servers, which is more than a bit annoying to IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and now Oracle.
But just because IBM wants to sell any and every major networking product and spread its partnerships across Cisco, Brocade Communications, Blade Network Technologies, Juniper Networks, Voltaire, and Mellanox Technologies does not mean Big Blue does not have its own networking aspirations (or
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IBM Assigns Per-Core Pricing Metrics to Power7 Chips
March 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe funny thing about IBM‘s performance-based pricing metric for much of the systems and application software that it sells on its own and others’ servers is that the Processor Value Metric has become an increasingly arbitrary number. It really is not based on relative performance at all–and that is a good thing for IBM’s own customers.
In the wake of the launch of the Power7 chips and the initial Power 750, 770, and 780 systems on February 8, IBM put out revised PVU tables that added the new Power7 chips used in these machines, which can have four, six,
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MKS Recovering Nicely From the Economic Storm
March 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA year ago, at the peak of the economic meltdown, application lifecycle and software change management software maker MKS was doing comparatively well financially as gauged by its peers in the software biz. But no company can outrun the economy for long, and MKS had its share of revenue declines in fiscal 2010. But as MKS finished up its third quarter of fiscal 2010 ended January 31, the numbers were all pointing northward.
In the quarter, MKS said that its software license sales were up an astounding 34.1 percent, to just under $5 million. (Although MKS is based in Waterloo,
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No Power 750, 770, and 780 Prices for i Configs? What Gives?
March 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are interested in the new Power7-based servers from IBM and you like all the good things you have been reading about them in The Four Hundred, you might want to try to figure out what it costs to buy one of these boxes. Particularly since the Power 750 Express models started shipping two weeks ago and the Power 770 and 780 will ship a few weeks from now.
Well, forget about getting configured pricing for the Power 770 and 780 machines, because it isn’t out there on IBM’s Web store. (You can see the lack of pricing
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IBM Cuts Power 595 CPU Prices, Offers Remote Server Migration
March 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhile I was off on Winter Break with my wife and kids in the mountains of Vermont two weeks ago, IBM snuck out some price cuts on processor features in the current generation of Power 595 boxes.
In announcement letter 310-127, IBM cut the prices on the four-socket processor books used in the Power 595s as well as on the activation fees it charges for turning on Power6 cores within the boxes using its Capacity On Demand (COD) feature. The features that had their prices chopped are all on the 9119 series of machines, which only have Power6 chips,
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Custom Baby Data Centers Coming from Big Blue
March 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are like many midrange shops, your data center–or what might be more accurately described as a data closet if you are lucky–is a bit informal. The AS/400 and its progeny were invented to be office systems, excepting the very largest machines. They are rugged enough to be tucked almost anywhere and use regular wall power, which means they are often running in the most bizarre places. But this is the 21st century, and you probably ought to have your IT equipment in a safer and more secure location.
That’s why IBM’s data center engineers have cooked up a