Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Reader Feedback On The AS/400 Turns 27, And Still Has Much To Teach IT
June 29, 2015 Hey, TPM
… Read moreIt’s unreal how often I keep bumping into you. I was intrigued by the title of the article in the attached note, followed these links, and again found an article by you. (And thanks for the reference.) I’ve shared your emotions about IBM and this system, with ever increasing sadness, from the inside.
Still, you laid down a challenge and that reminded me of something I was asked to review by an IBM friend named Phil Vitale. He asked me to review and comment on a paper he had read named The CHERI capability model: Revisiting RISC in an age
-
Take A Peek Inside PurePower Converged Systems
June 29, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen IBM sold off the System x division to Lenovo Group, one of the things that went with it was the modular Flex System chassis. Yes, IBM said it would source the machines from Lenovo and, yes, IBM said that it would continue to make and sell Power-based nodes for the Flex Systems to make its PureApplication converged systems for those customers who want them.
But the fact that there are, a year after the Power8 chips first came to market, no Flex System nodes based on the Power8 speaks volumes about just how IBM is really thinking about
-
iSphere Plug-in Expands RSE/RDi Toolset
June 25, 2015 Susan Gantner
… Read moreFollowers of my Guru tips know that I’m an RSE (a.k.a. RDi) fan. These days I would be lost trying to write or maintain RPG code without things like RSE’s Outline, Error feedback, editor filtering, and Undo. But you know how it is: the more you use a toolset and come to depend on all the great things it can do you for you, the more you also begin to come up with thoughts like but I sure wish it could do X. . ..
One of the great things about RDi (and its predecessors, RDP and WDSC) is
-
The AS/400 Turns 27, And Still Has Much To Teach IT
June 22, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe collective brain trust here at IT Jungle expends a lot of its intellectual and emotional energy on watching the ecosystem of customers who use the progeny of the venerable AS/400. Many of you have been using IBM midrange systems since the days of the launch of the System/38 back in the late 1970s and you have been long-time users of the systems for nearly a decade when the AS/400 made its debut on June 21, 1988, and when this platform made good on the name International Business Machines.
You will have to forgive me for still being in
-
Security Policies Vs. Security Procedures
June 16, 2015 Patrick Botz
… Read moreIt seems that many people don’t understand the difference between security policies and procedures. When I ask to see a customer’s security policy, if I get anything, it is usually documentation about how system security values should be set. Once in a while it contains a description about how certain tasks will be accomplished. For example, updating applications on the production system. While this kind of documentation is useful, it is not a security policy.
In short, security policy identifies acceptable and/or unacceptable uses of various business assets. Importantly, security policy shouldn’t include descriptions of how to enforce, prevent, or
-
Two Ways To Rollup
June 16, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreIn Three Powerful SQL Words, I showed how to enhance summary queries with aggregate values over subsets of grouping columns. Today I continue that discussion by showing the two syntaxes of rollup and illustrating the difference between them.
First, assume a table of accounting transactions.
select department, account, amount from xacts2 order by 1, 2 DEPARTMENT ACCOUNT AMOUNT 1 10 200.00 1 10 250.00 1 30 300.00 2 10 125.00 2 20 175.00 2 20 225.00Here’s a typical summary query using the familiar GROUP BY clause.
select department, account, sum(amount) as tamt from xacts2 group by department, account
-
OpenPower Partners Open SuperVessel Dev Cloud
June 15, 2015 Dan Burger and Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power Tech Open Lab in Beijing, China, is the home to the first open development cloud that IBM is firing up to help developers worldwide gain access to Power8 hybrid systems to create innovative applications. The idea is simple enough: servers ain’t cheap, but without some access to cheap or free iron, developers will stick to the X86 systems they know and can prototype on their laptops.
The development cloud, known as SuperVessel, was created by the IBM Systems Lab and IBM Research arms, which both have facilities in Beijing. (A certain portion of IBM i hardware and software
-
Big Blue Gives MSPs Monthly Rates On IBM i Stack
June 15, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOff and on over the past several years, IBM has tinkered around with special pricing for managed service providers that are building IBM i hosting and cloud businesses. The central issue is that Big Blue charges a perpetual license plus annual Software Maintenance fees for the IBM i stack, but MSPs charge customers by the month. The gap between the initial investment and the initial cash flow can be huge–in fact, big enough that building an IBM i cloud can be prohibitively expensive.
Given the legendary ease of use of the IBM i platform and its predecessors, as well as
-
Enterprise Server Refresh Cycle Gathers Momentum
June 8, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe server refresh cycle is picking up steam, with the market turning in one of the best spurts of growth in the first quarter in many a year and reversing a slight downward trend in server revenues across all vendors and machine types that has been putting pressure on vendors for the past several years since the big bounce after the Great Recession recovery. Some big deals at hyperscale companies, in fact, allowed sales in Q1 2015 to more or less match levels set in the second and third quarters of last year.
According to the IDC quarterly server tracker,
-
EIM Identifier Naming
June 2, 2015 Patrick Botz
… Read moreEnterprise Identity Mapping (EIM) is the technology that allows the IBM i to determine which user profile should be used to establish a connection for a person who has authenticated to an IBM i interface using non-IBM i credentials. EIM is easy to set up, but there is one thing you can do that will save you time and effort later.
A quick overview of EIM will help explain the tip. EIM consists of three categories of information:
- EIM Identifiers representing people and entities (e.g., service userIDs) within the organization that have user IDs
- User Registry Definitions representing the various