• The World Can’t Get Enough Disk Array Capacity

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While processors have hit a gigahertz wall somewhere around 3, 4, or 5 gigahertz, depending on the chip architecture, forcing chip makers to shift the use of Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing to multicore devices to pack more capacity into a single slice of silicon, disk makers have not, thus far, hit a capacity wall on drives. And as far as anyone can tell, the appetite for gigabytes just keeps on growing and growing. It is really quite astounding, especially when you consider the amount of garbage that must be stored on computers the world over. According to the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: iPhone Home

  June 16, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  What did the extraterrestrial called ET in the eponymous 1982 Spielberg film use to save itself from a cadre of government agents? A phone. Twenty years later, people routinely phone home and everywhere else from anywhere. This hasn’t distracted the technologists caught up in arguments about thin versus thick clients, but now there’s a new Apple iPhone. It might ring loudly enough to be heard above the bickering advocates of various clients. A client as well as a phone, it could shift the focus of the user interface debate from technological means to budgetary goals. In a sense, Apple helped

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• IBM Is Enjoying the Role of Green Giant

  June 16, 2008 Dan Burger

  If you believe there is an energy crisis in your data center, there’s a lot you can do about it. It makes no difference if you are Save the Planet green or Save the Bottom Line green. It’s clear that both are closely tied. For that reason, IBM is putting green-job-driven economics into practice. If it helps companies save money by reducing power consumption, Big Blue makes money by selling hardware, software, and services. And there will be plenty of green to go around. When IBM announced in May 2007 that it was investing $1 billion in an energy efficiency

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• Reader Feedback on Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You live, you learn. And most of the time, it is a collective effort, whether we all want to admit it or not. I didn’t claim to be the king of the job posting engines of the world in last week’s story, Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs. In that story, I queried the big three job sites in the States–Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster–for jobs that had been posted within the past 30 days and ranked job hits by various terms. The AS/400 and the iSeries did not do so well when ranked against

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• Another i5/OS-i Security Vulnerability Surfaces

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You have to work pretty hard to find a security vulnerability in the OS/400, i5/OS, and i operating systems, and according to a posting from computer security research and development company Secunia last week, to find the latest one, you have to look in a very unlikely place: the system modem. According to a Secunia advisory published last week, a security vulnerability in an operating system module with the name BrSmRcvAndCheck, which can apparently be exploited to cause a buffer overflow when running diagnostics on the modem port. Secunia rated this as a “less critical” patch when it issued

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• There’s Still Money in Operating Systems, But Disruptions Loom

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before the Internet, the operating system was your computing environment, and even though machines might be networked, the operating system on your desktop and the servers it was connected to were not just the dominant way you did computing, but the way you thought about computing. The advent of the Internet, the World Wide Web HTML abstraction layer, and various scripting languages has, as Netscape correctly foresaw when it went public more than a decade ago, changed not only the way we do computing, but also the way we think about computing. So you might be thinking, the operating system

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• SPEC Members Start on Energy Benchmark for Web Servers

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There’s an old adage: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. As most data center managers and server and storage arrays makers have been well aware of for years, we have some pretty serious power and cooling issues affecting IT operations. (As I write this, the 95-degree temperatures in New York City have me worrying about keeping IT Jungle’s Linux-Windows cluster cool once again drives the point on home.) While we have many different benchmarks for determining performance of computers, there are few workloads that have been tweaked to provide a standard means of gauging power draw while benchmarks

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• Enterprises Are Judged by the Measure of IT Performance

  June 16, 2008 Dan Burger

  Some planning and problem solving can go a long way toward better IT management and performance management. Of course, that’s much easier said than done. However, getting it done becomes much easier with the help of organizations like the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), which consists of the information technology professionals responsible for planning, measuring, and managing the performance of the world’s largest IT infrastructures. Effectively managing performance requires a focus on specific activities and a plan that can handle problems if and when they occur. Presenting information and techniques that can be applied to managing IT capacity and quality of

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• Keeping 5250 Alive

  June 11, 2008 Tom Van Looy

  Some time ago, we had problems with Client Access sessions being reset. It seemed that these connections were traveling over a VPN that got disconnected after being idle for a while. Because we were not in charge of the VPN, I used TCP keepalive as a workaround for this problem. Keepalive A TCP connection can set the SO_KEEPALIVE option with the setsockopts() system call. When the TCP connection is idle for a specified period of time, a keepalive packet will be sent to keep the connection open. (In practice, this keepalive packet is a request for acknowledgement of the previous

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• Seeking Advice on REXX

  June 11, 2008 Hey Bruce

  I want to call from CL program a REXX program, where the REXX program returns a calculate of date (yymmdd). Do you have an example you could send me? Thanks in advance, –Larry Larry, REXX can’t directly return a value to CL the way other languages do. You’d have to have your REXX procedure write the data to a file or use the REXX External Data Queue. To use a file you’d have to first override STDOUT to a file of your choice, then use “SAY” to write the data. In your REXX procedure you could do this: 'OVRDBF FILE(STDOUT)

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