Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The System iWant, 2010 Edition: Blade and Cookie Sheet Boxes
February 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI’ve done big boxes, and little boxes, and in-between boxes in my theoretical and completely hypothetical System iWant, 2010 Edition, Power7-based machines. As I sit down to write the next installment in the System iWant series, IBM is getting ready to launch some kind of Power7-based servers on February 8, and as far as I know, blades are not part of the announcement. So I feel perfectly comfortable in giving Big Blue whatever advice I can come up with to make its Power7 blades better.
With the Power7 server designs, IBM could do some really interesting things with blade servers
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The i/OS Roadmap Revealed–Sort Of
February 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is an understandable amount of cynicism among the AS/400 faithful that IBM has neglected the OS/400 operating system, stealing all the best goodies from OS/400 and weaving them into AIX and then not adding some nifty features, such as live partition mobility for PowerVM, to i/OS, the modern instantiation of OS/400. Moreover, i/OS releases are anything but regular and Big Blue doesn’t roll up dot releases like other operating system makers do.
On the former, I cannot report, I am sad to say, that much has changed. But I can tell you, based on internal IBM roadmaps that I
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The Power7 Rollout Begins In The Middle
February 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs you read this story on Monday, I am dressed up in my journalist monkey suit–tan chinos, a colorful oxford shirt, a brown corduroy jacket, and comfortable shoes–attending a Smarter Planet press event at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Ballroom off Columbus Circle in my hometown of New York, New York. The event, of course, is hosted by IBM, and the main reason I care enough to make myself presentable is because this is the coming out party for the first of the Power7-based servers from Big Blue.
Someone said something about lunch, too, of course. But I will be
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Admin Alert: Did You Lose ECS on February 1?
February 3, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreOn February 1, 2010, some i/OS V5R3Mx, V5R4Mx, and V6R1Mx systems lost their ability to call IBM service. On that date, IBM changed some of the Host Names and IP Addresses that i/OS systems use to automatically call service via ECS and ESA. As a result, many iSeries, System i, and Power i systems can no longer automatically contact service unless certain PTFs are installed. Was your system affected?
What Happened?
I discovered this change too late to publicize it before February 1. But better late than never, and this article tells you how to detect if your partitions have
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What a Lifelong DB2 Fanatic Sees in MySQL
February 3, 2010 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIn my mind, you can’t beat our database. It’s not only integrated into the operating system, it’s also incredibly flexible. You can use SQL to create and access data just like databases on other systems but you can also use the native DDS, RPG, COBOL and other languages with the same data. No other database out there–not even other members of the DB2 family–has that kind of flexibility. It is currently known as DB2 for i, but I think most of us just think of it as “the database,” which is appropriate because, unlike just about every other system
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SAP to Finally Ship Business ByDesign SaaS Suite
February 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo weeks ago, The Four Hundred told you that German application software giant SAP was projecting that it would beat Wall Street’s expectations for sales in its fourth quarter as it was at the same time saying that it would be rejiggering its support fees, presumably to counter complaints from customers that they needed cheaper support than SAP was providing. In its discussion of its results, the company said that it would finally be shipping its Web-based, hosted Business ByDesign suite this year.
For the quarter ended December 31, SAP’s sales were pretty much the same as the preliminary results
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Oracle Sues Rimini Street Over Support Intellectual Property
February 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOracle, the second-largest application provider in the world and a company that aspires to rise to the top of the IT biz, has sued another company offering third party support for its applications. In 2007, it was the TomorrowNow unit of rival SAP that was slapped with a lawsuit, and three years later, it is Rimini Street, which has filled in the gap since SAP shut down the TomorrowNow unit in July 2008.
Oracle has hired hot-shot law firm Boies, Schiller, and Flexner and filed a lawsuit against Rimini Street and Seth Ravin, the company’s president and chief
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The Q4 IBM Server Drilldown: It Could Have Been Worse
February 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs I do each quarter two weeks after IBM reports its financial results, I diced and sliced and mished and mashed up the facts and figures that Big Blue presents to give investors an idea of how its systems business is doing. The fact is, it could have done worse, considering how many product transitions the company is juggling.
As I speculated three months ago when analyzing IBM’s third quarter results, there was no way, given the economic meltdown, that Big Blue could draw even for 2009 compared to 2008, which didn’t exactly end on a high note. Based on
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Craig Eugene Johnson, 1958-2010
February 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCraig Johnson, one of the two co-product managers of the Power Systems i platform at IBM, died tragically in a 39-car pile up during a blizzard on Interstate 35 near Latimer, Iowa, last Monday. He was 51.
According to the obituary in the Rochester Post-Bulletin, the local paper in Rochester, Minnesota, where Johnson worked on the i/OS platform, he and his wife, Kathleen, who also works for IBM, were in the accident. Johnson exited the car to assist his injured wife and was struck by another vehicle. According to another report in the paper, the Iowa State Patrol
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Oracle Goes Back to IBM’s Roots with Sun Deal Done
February 1, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI know it is hard to believe, but Oracle, which is now a systems provider thanks to the $7.4 billion acquisition of the former Sun Microsystems, actually wasn’t kidding when it said it wanted to be in the systems business. Forget that Oracle was really only initially interested, according to rumors, in Java and Solaris. Somewhere, the top brass at Oracle came to the conclusion that maybe getting into hardware might be the right move after all. And emulating IBM–the Big Blue that dominated the early years of commercial computing, not the services-obsessed behemoth you know today–was the