Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Negotiating The Upgrade Paths To Power8 Enterprise Systems
November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThis week, IBM will start shipping the first of its line of high-end Power E870 and Power E880 machines. These are the largest NUMA-style shared memory machines that Big Blue has designed using its Power8 processors, and they replace the existing Power 770, Power 780, and Power 795 machines in the lineup. Eventually, a full-bore, 12-core Power8 chip will be available in the top end Power E880 machines, offering significantly more performance in 16 sockets than a Power 795 could deliver in 32 sockets.
To recap: IBM intends to offer a Power E880 that scales to 128 cores using an
-
The Windows Of Opportunity
November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been a long, long time since the AS/400 was the dominant, and some cases the sole, platform in use at most IBM midrange shops. As we all know, the client/server revolution took the data center by storm in the late 1980s and early 1990s, first on the desktop with the PC being used as a kind of intelligent monitor for back office systems and then later with the popularity of NetWare, Unix, and eventually Windows on servers, in the data center itself as adjunct coprocessors for systems like the AS/400.
Because Windows was familiar and then ubiquitous on
-
Flip This Job Number: Adjusting The Job Queue Control Utility For Job Number Resets
November 12, 2014 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI just read your article on creating a skeleton program for controlling IBM i job queues creating a skeleton program for controlling IBM i job queues. In your job queue physical file (WRKJOBQPF) that contains the list of jobs inside a specific job queue, you keyed that file by the six-digit job number of each job in queue. I think that’s a bad idea. Here’s why. . .
–Charles
Charles continues:
“On busy systems where the job number can flip (over to 000001) daily, it introduces a period of time where the results will not be desirable. Needless to
-
SQL Functions You Didn’t Know You Had, Part 2
November 12, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreIn SQL Functions You Didn’t Know You Had, Part 1, I showed you how to make an SQL function that runs a subprocedure in a service program. What I showed you is fine up to a point, but it’s not the entire story.
The technique that I shared with you breaks down when null values enter the picture. First, the subprocedures in the ADDR service program cannot accept null arguments into parameters. Second, those subprocedures cannot return a null value to the SQL query.
These behaviors are specified in two clauses of the CREATE FUNCTION statement:
- PARAMETER STYLE GENERAL
-
Unlocking The Power8 Features With IBM i
November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe talk a lot about the hardware features of the Power Systems platforms as they roll into the market, and the idea is always to look at the processors and related technologies specifically. But the performance metrics are always a lot more generic, and as we all know, the variety of applications that can be created for the system is broader than what can be modeled with the Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) online transaction processing test.
If there is any lesson that has been relearned by the hyperscale datacenter operators like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook that was well known to
-
Cloud Spending Dominated By SaaS In The Years Ahead
November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere are three different levels to this public cloud racket: infrastructure, platform, and software, or what are commonly abbreviated as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. The higher up you go, the further you are away from the virtual iron. Oddly enough–or perhaps not at all if you think about it for a second–the distribution of revenues for future cloud acquisitions is very roughly mirroring the distribution of spending on systems and storage, middleware and databases, and application software in the industry at large.
This is not something that IDC mentioned in its recent prognostications about the cloud market, but I noticed
-
SaaS Helps Lift Hospitality Software Maker Agilysys
November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLike every other software company in the world that grew up selling software licenses, professional services to customize and install the code, and technical support to support it out into the future, Agilysys is making inroads selling its hospitality applications as a service. But the transition is causes disruptions to the financials over the short term.
In the company’s second quarter of fiscal 2015, which ended on September 30, the results were tweaked to take out the revenues from the prior quarter for its business in the United Kingdom to Verteda Limited, which has taken over the operations that
-
First Pass On Power8 Enterprise Performance
November 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA little over a month ago, IBM launched the enterprise-class Power8 systems, the Power E870 and Power E880. The machines draw on technologies from the prior enterprise-class Power 770 and 780 machines and their predecessors, but also have some advanced scalability and resilience features drawn from the top-end Power 795. Big Blue provided a lot of insight into the architecture of the machines on launch day on October 6, but some important details were missing. One of them was what the expected performance of the systems would be.
As I told you back in October, I would hunt down the
-
IBM Offers Storwize Virtualization Software Freebie Deal
November 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn case you haven’t noticed it, IBM thinks that its Storwize disk and sometimes disk/flash hybrid arrays are a pretty hot commodity. If Big Blue had its way, IBM i shops would adopt Storwize arrays as their primary or “tier one” storage and pay for lots of extra software goodies on them, such as compression or automatic data tiering, to make them a lot more useful, and importantly, to help IBM make some extra money on software with a recurring subscription.
The deal in question is at the moment only available in Australia and New Zealand as far as I
-
IBM Gooses FlashSystem V840 Flash Arrays, Cuts Prices
November 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe FlashSystem 840 is a lot of machine for most IBM i shops, but the potent combination of the Storage Virtualization Controller (SVC) that IBM has been using to front-end disk arrays to provide them with snapshotting, deduplication, and other advanced features for many years is something that many enterprise-class IBM i shops should be taking a look at for their storage capacity and I/O needs.
In a series of announcements last week, IBM made some tweaks to the FlashSystem hardware and the software stack that runs atop it.
In announcement letter 114-179, IBM is expanding the connectivity options