Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Why Node.js?
May 3, 2016 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreIn case you haven’t noticed, IBM’er Tim Rowe and his team have been delivering a tremendous amount of open source the past few years–sometimes through vendor relationships and sometimes directly from IBM. While frequency has increased as of late, open source has actually been a mainstay on IBM i and its predecessors for a very long time. It started with the Apache web server, then Java, then PHP and MySQL, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and even more you haven’t even heard of. Open source (in particular Node.js) will be the topic of this article. But first, let me give you some
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Making The Case For Flash Over Disk In Power Systems
May 2, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo weeks ago, concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.3, Big Blue announced a slew of new flash storage drives and storage controllers, which we told you about based on the announcement letters as we normally do. Since that time, we have got our hands on some internal analysis that IBM has done for Power Systems partners and customers, and are sharing that with you to help in your buying decisions as you contemplate adding flash to your systems or, perhaps, even going all flash.
Enterprises are doing it, now that the price for effective capacity after data compression
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IBM i Scalability Stays The Same With 7.3
April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAll operating systems are not created equal, at least not when it comes to NUMA scalability. For a long time now, the IBM i operating system has trailed the scalability of its peers, AIX and Linux, on Power processors when it comes to spanning the large number of cores and threads that IBM forges into its Power machinery.
Back in the dawn of time, and many of you were there with me, it was a very exciting thing to even be able to have a two-processor, two-thread machine like the AS/400-D80, which made its debut in April 1991 and which
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New Financials At IBM Can’t Mask Growth Issues
April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is easy to say that the IBM we know today, or more precisely are trying to get to know as it undergoes its changes, is far different from the one that we were trying to understand two decades ago as it was going through another tumultuous transformation. The Big Blue from the middle 1990s was a systems company before and after that change, but it is harder to see the International Business Machines skeleton inside the new Big Blue.
But if you dig around, that core systems business is still there, even after IBM has completely reclassified its financials
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Refacing Your Database, Part 2
April 19, 2016 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreThe whole purpose of refacing our database is to give proper names to tables and columns. So we have to spend some time ensuring that our names are right. In this article, the second in a series of three, we continue the refacing process by analyzing and correcting our new naming.
In my first article, we had reached the stage where we had extracted table and column definitions into our two conversion tables (TABLE_TRANSLATION and COLUMN_TRANSLATION), as shown below:
Analyzing the Names
Since the new column names were generated from the text descriptions of the original fields, there is
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View Scheduled Jobs with Excel
April 19, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreAt the recent RPG & DB2 Summit in Dallas, I presented a session that dealt with the use of SQL in CL. One of my examples used the SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO view to retrieve scheduled jobs from the IBM i job scheduler. After the talk, one of the attendees gave me a great idea, and I’ve just got to pass it along to you.
SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO returns the same information that you can see with the Work with Job Schedule Entries (WRKJOBSCDE) command. It’s one of the IBM i Services. The gentleman told me that he and others in his shop had been
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Sundry April Power Systems Announcements
April 18, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we reported last week in discussing IBM‘s Power processor roadmap for the next five-plus years, there is not going to be a Power8+ revamp of existing Power Systems machines. Instead, IBM has rejiggered the Power8 chip to create a variant aimed at supercomputing and deep learning workloads that allows for high-speed NVLink coupling between Nvidia “Pascal” Tesla GPU coprocessors and the Power8 chip.
That means there is no performance boost or list price cut (or both) that is normally expected and delivered with a “plus” variant of the Power chips. But as we expected, IBM has made a
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OpenLegacy Partners with ‘Nearshore’ IT Services Provider Softtek. . . Linoma Adds 2FA from RSA to GoAnywhere MFT Suite. . . RVI Partners with Accounting Software Maker. . .
April 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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OpenLegacy Partners with ‘Nearshore’ IT Services Provider Softtek
OpenLegacy, a provider of legacy modernization solutions for IBM i and mainframe shops and their applications, this month unveiled a partnership with Softtek, a provider of outsourcing services headquartered in Mexico.
The partnership gives OpenLegacy customers access to the development resources of Softtek, a Monterrey-based IT services provider with 30 offices around the world, including United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, China, and India. The company, which trademarked the term “Global Nearshore,” positions itself as a closer provider of outsourced IT services than those based in India.
“Our strategic partnership
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Thank You, IBM
April 12, 2016 Brian Kelly
… Read moreThe IBM Corporation was run as a benevolent dictatorship through 1971. Thomas Watson Senior, and then Thomas Junior, ran IBM as if they owned it. They both had an entrepreneurial flair and few would deny that when they were in charge of IBM, they ran the company as if it were a sole proprietorship. They had many wonderful policies such as taking care of the people so that the people would take care of the business, and of course the classic: “Respect for the Individual.”
IBM believed in Wild Ducks and chairman Watson Junior wrote about them. He was not
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IBM Puts Future Power Chip Stakes In The Ground
April 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo important things happened at the OpenPower Summit last week. One of them concerns IBM i shops directly and the other one affects them indirectly and perhaps more importantly. The first is that IBM rolled out an official roadmap for Power chip development for the next five-plus years. The second was that search engine giant Google and cloud operator Rackspace Hosting said that they were collaborating on a design of a future system based on the Power9 chip.
Google has been experimenting with Power8 chips for at a couple of years, and we suspect (without any corroborating evidence at all