Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Changes Ahead For IT Jungle In 2015
December 8, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe are closing out one year, and looking forward to another one. It is hard to believe that The Four Hundred has been around since the summer of 1989, and that writing this newsletter was my first real job out of college. We have changed a lot over the years, and we must still be learning because we are still changing.
You will notice a few changes as 2015 comes around on the guitar. First, we are moving to a wider column format for stories that is reflective of the higher resolution screens that most PCs and mobile devices have
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Happy Holidays From All Of Us
December 8, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is that time of year again, when I am surrounded by fruitcakes that are slurping up kirschwasser like hungry babies, turning them into full-blown, holy day, celebratory, and damned near incendiary, bricks to commemorate the ending of one year and, if need be, to be used as food or fuel in an uncertain New Year.
I mean, that is what fruitcake is all about. Living through an uncertain and possibly dark time to make it through to the spring and the renewed Earth. And when you think about all of that wonderful dried fruit, the four different kinds of
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Entry Power8 Systems Get Express Pricing, Fat Memory
December 8, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe systems that IBM uses to make its product announcements like to play a bit of cat and mouse with all of us, and those of you who know me know that I check the system religiously to see if anything interesting has come out. Before the Thanksgiving Day holiday, Big Blue did make a bunch of IBM i-related announcements, but they did not show up on my account until after we had already put the December 1 edition of The Four Hundred to bed.
The important thing is that IBM has finally gotten around to providing Express Edition pricing
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Admin Alert: What Should An IBM i Administrator Do, Part 1
December 3, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWith remote monitoring and lights-out data centers, people think there isn’t a need for system operators any more. And they’re right-ish. There’s little need for low-skill operators whose main function is watching the system and printing reports. But IBM i operations work isn’t obsolete; it’s just changed into a systems management function. Given that, here’s my take on tasks a lower level IBM i system administrator can perform in 2015 and beyond.
Why You Need Day-To-Day IBM i Administrators
For IBM i shops, it’s important to define the difference between project management and day-to-day operations. IBM i project managers are
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Fuzzy Matching In RPG
December 3, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
SQL allows you to use wildcard characters with the LIKE operator to search a column for a pattern. As they say in the GEICO commercials, “Everybody knows that.” Well, did you know you can do the same thing in RPG programs?
If you’re not familiar with LIKE, read about it here. You can use the LIKE operator to find data with inexact matches. For instance, find all customers whose names contain “ACME”.
select * from cust where name like '%ACME%' ID NAME ===== ========================================== 19883 ACME
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IBM Adds Enterprise Power8 Systems To Trade-In Deal
December 1, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn the wake of the launch and now the delivery of the initial models in the Power8-based Power E870 and E880 machines, IBM is adding the high-end boxes to a long-running trade-in deal.
The Power Systems Trade-In Program was last modified back in June, when the scale-out variants of the Power8 systems, which have one or two sockets, were added as target machines in the deal, offering customers between $500 and $2,000 if they got rid of ancient AS/400, iSeries, System i machines or any number of other Unix and proprietary machines. The deal also covers customers who want to
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Reader Feedback On Microsoft Loves Linux
December 1, 2014 Hey, Dan
… Read moreAs you pointed out in your story, in mid-November Microsoft announced that it’s open sourcing its full server-side .NET stack, which thereby, at least in theory, expands the .NET stack to Linux and Mac OS X (which is really Unix) platforms.
Here are my six take-aways from that announcement:
No surprise. The November 12 announcement wasn’t a surprise as much as it was a reaffirmation of Microsoft’s open source software (OSS) strategy over the last couple of years. Microsoft open sourced some .NET components (including ASP.NET MVC and its Web API) a couple of years ago. This was a
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Aiming High, And Low, With Power Chips
December 1, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo weeks ago, ahead of the SuperComputing 2014 conference in New Orleans, IBM announced that the U.S. Department of Energy had chosen Big Blue and hardware partner Nvidia to build two massive parallel supercomputers, nick-named Sierra and Summit. This deal, along with IBM selling off its System x server business to Lenovo Group and its chip manufacturing operations to GlobalFoundries, gives IBM a tighter focus on its Power Systems line, and importantly, gives IBM the resources to focus on Power chip development and systems design.
I am a firm believer in the trickle-down theory of technology adoption, but not
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IBM Scores $325 Million Power Supercomputing Deals With DOE
November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe Power Systems ecosystem just got a huge shot in the arm now that IBM has landed a $325 million contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to build two new massive supercomputers, the largest of which, called “Summit,” could scale to as much as 300 petaflops of aggregate number-crunching performance.
The Summit system will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home to Titan, one of the largest supercomputers in the U.S. and indeed one of the most powerful machines in the world. The Sierra system will go into Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where IBM sold its first prototype
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Time To Update Power Systems Site, Sales Pitch
November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has spent billions of dollars and many years to bring the Power8 systems to market, and as we all know, it is not quite done rolling Power8 gear into the field. The company is also not quite caught up on updating its Power Systems website to reflect its new machines and its new focus on competing against X86 iron for transaction processing, analytics, and technical computing workloads.
This is a problem, and one that a $100 billion IT giant should not have.
If you go to the Power Systems sub-site on the IBM website, and then go to the