Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The IBM i Base Not As Jumpy As It Has Been
March 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The backwards compatibility of RPG and COBOL applications on new hardware and new operating systems in the IBM midrange is unheralded in the IT sector, and perhaps is only rivalled by the longevity of applications running in Big Blue’s System z mainframes. Somewhere out there in the world are applications running on IBM i platforms that could be running code that stretches all the way back to 1969 with the System/3.
Change is measured in the IBM i base, and with good reason. Small and medium businesses are conservative by nature because they don’t want to run any unnecessary risks, …
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The Lowdown On Pricing For The Power S812 Mini
March 20, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back on Valentine’s Day, IBM rolled out geared down variant of the entry Power S812 single-socket Power8 system for its IBM i and AIX customer bases, giving some of the low-cost love that it has heretofore reserved for its growing base of Linux customers on Power iron. The new machines are welcome, and we are told that they are about 20 percent lower cost than equivalently configured Power S822 and Power S824 machines.
We are setting about to try to see if this is true, and as a first step, we have been hunting around for weeks to get configured …
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The Feeds And Speeds Of The IBM i Base
March 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Without change, nothing new happens. But change is always difficult, so there is always this push and pull between the way we have always done it and the way we might improve it, and there is also a kind of gravity associated with capital investments in hardware, software, people, and processes that impedes change – and often for the best. Otherwise, we would be changing everything all the time and no one would know what state anything is in.
The very stability of the IBM i platform, as measured in the way it runs and supports the applications on it …
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IBM i License Transfer Deal Comes To The Power S812 Mini
March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the early days of the AS/400 midrange system, the processor, memory, networking, and disk and tape storage hardware embodied in the system was by far the most costly part of that system, far outweighing the cost of the systems software that ran atop it. We don’t have the precise numbers at hand, but it was something like 85 percent hardware cost and 15 percent software cost.
Fast-forward a few decades, and the Moore’s Law improvements in every component in the hardware means that hardware is far less costly. But software doesn’t have a Moore’s Law scaling; in fact, …
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Servers Hit The Skids Last Year, This Year Might be No Better
March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As the first building block of any system is the server, and watching how these are acquired, managed, and disposed of tells you a lot about what is going on with applications in the datacenter and who is making money off of them. It has been a long time since the Power Systems division at IBM has been an economic powerhouse in the server space, but now even the X86 platform, long dominated by Intel, is starting to show some signs of losing its luster.
It stands to reason. In the final quarter of this year, X86-based machines accounted for …
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IBM Gives The Midrange A Valentine’s Day (Processor) Card
February 20, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As expected, IBM rolled out a Valentine’s Day surprise for its IBM i and AIX customer bases with a new pair of machines aimed at giving a low powered, lower cost option for the customers running its legacy applications instead of Linux, which is the darling of the Power Systems business these days even though it does not come even close to representing the majority of the Power Systems revenue stream.
The Power Mini or IBMini, as I have been calling the machine affectionately, turns out to be a variant of the existing single-socket Power S812 system that IBM has …
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More Insight Into The Rumored Power Mini System
February 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the day, when IBM wanted to get customers to move ahead to new iron and the Moore’s Law increases in processing capacity meant that it needed to gear down boxes to bring customers forward, IBM actually did something about it and offered a cut-down machines with lower – and competitive – prices.
Remember the AS/400 Model 150 machines launched two decades ago, and then the breakthrough “Invader” AS/400 Model 170 machines, using the “Apache” and then “Northstar” PowerPC processors that followed them in 1998 and 1999? These systems, in a very real sense, saved the AS/400 business. Back …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 5
February 8, 2017 Doug Bidwell
For the past nineteen years now, Doug Bidwell, the PTF slinger who owns IBM midrange business partner DLB Systems Associates, has been putting together a guide to help OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops figure out what to patch in their operating systems for midrange gear every week.
For as long as we can remember — and that is not long as we are getting a bit gray or white, depending — we have been publishing Bidwell’s IBM i PTF Guide, and we are thrilled to be getting it back on press and to be incorporating it into the …
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Geared Down, Low Cost Power IBM i Box Rumored
February 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been talking for a long time about the impedance mismatch between some IBM i shops in terms of what processing, memory, storage, and I/O capacity they need and what IBM delivers to them with each new generation of Power Systems iron. For many shops, even the smallest machine that Big Blue currently delivers is too much of a box.
This is a testament to the efficiency of the IBM i platform and its integrated relational database management system in that it takes very little iron to get useful work. It also shows that for many customers, transaction processing …
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Guru: Passing Parameters From The Command Line
February 6, 2017 Jon Paris
In my previous “Fundamentals” tips, I discussed the importance of making sure parameters are the correct size and how to correctly handle omitted parameters. In this tip I want to address what has to be the most frequently asked question about parameters.
The most frequently asked parameter question comes in many forms, such as:
- “How do you pass them from the command line?”
- “Why do I see garbage in the back end of my character parameters?”
- “Why are my numeric values passed incorrectly?”
Usually these questions arise when a programmer wants to simplify the testing of a program and does …
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