TFH Volume: 30 Issue: 12 Archives

The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2

February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the first half of our analysis of the IBM i installed base, we looked at the number of machines and the number of logical partitions that respondents of the IBM i Marketplace Survey for the 2020 report gave last fall when they took the poll. We did some math and analysis on this to show that there is a large block of customers with lots of machines and lots of partitions that are just as important to Big Blue as those with big, fat NUMA servers.

In the second half of this series about the state of the IBM …
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FlashSystem In, Storwize Out After IBM Storage Shakeup

February 17, 2020 Alex Woodie

IBM rejiggered its storage array lineup last week when it consolidated the old Storwize arrays into the FlashSystem line and introduced several new FlashSystem offerings. Big Blue now uses NVM-Express drives almost exclusively across the FlashSystem family, which will support deployments in hybrid cloud configurations, while also offering new options for performance-enhancing storage class memory.

Like other storage vendors have done, IBM has elected to reduce the number of product lines in an attempt to not only simplify naming conventions, but to reduce technical complexity for customers. For IBM, that means eliminating the Storwize brand by merging it into the …
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Guru: Using Identity Columns For Complex Keys

February 17, 2020 Paul Tuohy

In September 2019, Ted Holt published an article that demonstrated how an identity column can be used to generate a unique key in a table. In this article, I want to expand on that theme and examine another use of an identity column — replacing complex keys.

Using an identity column in place of a complex key makes for much faster joins between tables, as you are joining based on two numbers as opposed to values of multiple columns. Identity columns also make for joins that are easier to comprehend, since they are based on just one column. This approach …
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IBM Tweaks Prices Up And Down On Memory And Storage

February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue usually tells customers about price changes on Power Systems hardware and related software, but we have not seen any such price changes in a long time. As it turns out, IBM is telling business partners through their normal announcement channels about any tweaks to price changes, but these are not showing up in the customer feeds that we have subscribed to for three decades.

This could be deliberate, or accidental. We have no idea, and honestly, it would take too long to ask. But now we know, and an intrepid reseller made us aware of a recent price …
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The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We use the term legacy a lot in the IBM midrange and mainframe markets, and not necessarily in the good way we talk about political leaders or business executives or sports stars all leaving a legacy behind of their body of work. I use the term when it means something precise – legacy applications, for instance, are the ones that originated back in time and that have not been modernized in any substantial way because perhaps they don’t need to be.

I prefer the term vintage when I am talking about hardware and software releases because that conveys a …
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The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2

FlashSystem In, Storwize Out After IBM Storage Shakeup

Guru: Using Identity Columns For Complex Keys

IBM Tweaks Prices Up And Down On Memory And Storage

The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

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