Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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
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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,
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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
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Paging Cursors And Position To
June 2, 2015 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
I had a reader email in relation to my article Paging Cursors. The article described a method for paging large lists using embedded SQL in RPG, and the reader was wondering if there was a way to position the list at a certain value. Of course there is!
Please refer to the original article for all of the gruesome details but the basic concept is that you have a subprocedure that returns a “page” of rows from a result set. A page can be any number of
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Thoughts On The Power E850 And I/O Contraction
June 1, 2015 Hey, TPM
… Read moreSorry to be so late making my comment about your very good article concerning the Power E850 and IBM i. I agree with most of what you said in the article. I have had a couple of exciting conversations about the Power E850 with Mark Olson, who is an old friend from my Rochester days. The E850 brings back memories of when I worked for Rochester as the interface with Software Group and we were always two years behind on support for all the WebSphere products. It was all about the optics of being behind, not about the immediate need
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Power8 Iron Gets New I/O Options
June 1, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the rollout of slightly faster processors for the entry Power8 processors and the fleshing out of the high-end of the Power Systems line a month ago, IBM rolled out a bunch of new peripheral features and a new set of peripheral expansion units that will allow for Power8 shops both high and low to expand the amount of PCI-Express 3.0 peripherals that companies can attach to their systems than is currently possible on these machines.
Such I/O and storage expansion is important, given the ever-increasing amount of compute and memory that is being put into ever-smaller system
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Job User Name And Current Job User
May 19, 2015 Patrick Botz
… Read moreI see developers make one mistake way more often than any other. They assume that the job user name also represents the user profile under which a job is currently executing. This is, and always has been, an invalid assumption. The job user name only represents the userID under which the job was originally started. The user profile that a job is executing under at any given point in time (i.e., the current user) may or may not be the same as the job user. This may seem like a trivial and harmless mistake. But it often isn’t.
In previous
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Prevent Overlapping In Range Tables
May 19, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreIn Joining On Ranges, I demonstrated that range tables are a practical replacement for attribute columns. As a rule, ranges should not overlap. (Perhaps there are exceptions.) Here’s why, and also what to do to prevent overlapping values.
Overlapping ranges cause too many rows of the range table to join to a single row of another table, which in turn causes too many rows in the result set. For example, assume the following range table.
FROMITEMNUMBER THRUITEMNUMBER ITEMCATEGORY 134 134999 1 1341 134199 1 488 488999 2 2 299999 3Item 134120 would join to the first two rows
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Is There No Midrange In The IBM i Midrange?
May 18, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs we reported in last week’s issue, IBM has indeed launched the four-socket Power E850 server that has Power8 engines. They run AIX. And of course they run Linux. The have support for the PowerVM hypervisor and they do not require the PowerKVM hypervisor that only supports Linux. The one thing that they do not support is the IBM i operating system and integrated database.
This is a remarkable moment in the history of the IBM midrange, and it is perhaps one that reflects the reality of the IBM i market or one that shows IBM is, once again, giving
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New Power8 Midrange, PurePower Kicker To PureSystems
May 11, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is hosting its Edge2015 Power and System z conference in Las Vegas this week, and with the System z13 mainframes already launched in January to help that ramp get underway and bolster the company’s hardware sales, that leaves the final rounding out of the Power Systems line with Power8 processors as the star of the show. As expected, IBM is indeed launching its Power E850 four-socket midrange system, complementing the Power E880 high-end system that IBM let fly early (for some reason) ahead of the event. IBM is also including a new preconfigured cluster called the PurePower System, something