• Sundry Power Systems Announcements

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As is always the case when IBM revamps a server line, there are a lot of little details and announcements that are overshadowed by the new servers and systems software. In this Power6 revamp of the former System i line, which is now but one platform on the unified Power Systems platform, IBM has staggered the operating system and hardware announcements throughout early 2008. And last week, there were still some loose ends to tie up. The existing Power6-based System p and System i servers as well as the new boxes announced in the past two weeks have a whole

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• As I See It: Goldilocks and the Zen of IT

  April 14, 2008 Victor Rozek

  All right kids, grab your blankies and pillows, get comfy, and I’ll tell you the story of Goldilocks, the IT Zen masters, and the three migration options. Once upon a time, there was a CEO everyone called Goldilocks because she had curly blond hair and the people in her company suffered from a paucity of imagination. Goldilocks had a problem. Her enterprise system was toooo old, her employees were toooo inefficient; and, if things didn’t change soon, her annual bonus was going to be toooo small. Goldi had two migration choices and both were real bears. There was the “big

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• Albert Simon Barsa, Jr., 1953-2008

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the AS/400 community has been shocked to learn, Al Barsa, one of the strongest if not the strongest proponent of the OS/400 platform, died while attending the COMMON midrange user group meeting that he was also a staunch supporter of. His death came as a shock, and the timing and location were nothing short of ominous. And ironic. Al was born in New York City, and lived outside of the city in Rye, nearby IBM’s Westchester County stomping grounds, and that means he was destined to have a certain kind of humor that those of us on the East

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• Reader Feedback on Goodbye, AS/400, Old Friend

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Brian Kelly’s historical tribute to the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform last week, Goodbye, AS/400, Old Friend, was a cathartic experience for a lot of us, especially those who were around during the System/3X days before the AS/400 came to market. As you might imagine, plenty of people do not agree with IBM’s merging and homogenization of its server platforms, which they see as detrimental to the AS/400 and its ecosystem. Here’s a sampling of some of the feedback we received on that story, including one reader who was moved to poetry. I wrote this back in 2000

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• New Customer Sales Pump Up Lawson Software’s Q3

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application industry juggernaut Oracle maybe have given Wall Street a scare a few weeks ago when it reported application software sales that were lower than expectations, but over at Lawson Software, new application software sales are up smartly. We’ll have to leave it to the geniuses on Wall Street to figure out which is a better bellwether for the economies of the world. Maybe Larry Ellison was right and Oracle was just facing a tough compare in its most recent quarter? Anyway, over at Lawson, the combination of the Lawson and Intentia application software lines and a business that

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• ACOM Wants to Add 200 Resellers in Three Years

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You looking to make some money peddling solutions to your AS/400, iSeries, System i, and soon Power Systems customers? Then ACOM Solutions, the long-time maker of document management and content management software for the IBM midrange and Windows platform, wants to talk to you. The Long Beach, California, company put a stake in the ground, saying that it wanted to add 40 new reseller partners before 2008 is done, and add a total of 200 in the next three years. ACOM, which was founded in 1983 and has over 4,000 customers worldwide, has had resellers since its inception, and

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• IBM Buys FilesX for Continuous Data Protection Software

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Seeking to bolster its position in the continuous data protection (CDP) market, IBM last week acquired FileX, company located in Newton, Massachusetts, that was founded in 2000 by Jacob Herbst, who IBM midrange shops will remember as the cofounder of IIS, a maker of IBM-compatible SNA communications gear from back in the dawn of time. FileX is one of the myriad companies out there trying to make operating systems, their applications, and their data more resilient without having to go full-tilt-boogie with high availability system clustering. For a lot of customers, particularly small and midrange shops, a CDP solution

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• Windows and Linux Get a Skinny Blade Server from IBM

  April 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is intent on getting its BladeCenter blade servers into the data centers and data closets of small and medium businesses, and last week continued the revamping of its blade products to make them more suitable for SMB shops with the addition of the HS12 entry Xeon blade server. The launch of the single-socket HS12 Xeon-based blade server follows a week after Big Blue announced the JS12, also a single-socket blade, but one that is uses IBM’s own dual-core Power6 rather than Intel‘s dual-core and quad-core Xeons. The HS12 comes in two flavors. The 8014 machines support a single-core

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• SQL Doesn’t Like Logical Files

  April 9, 2008 Ted Holt

  I had a great time at COMMON last week in Nashville, Tennessee. I saw some old friends and met a lot of nice people. I listened to some great presentations put on by some very intelligent people, and that means I have some new tips that I can pass along to you. Here’s a tip from IBM‘ers Jarek Miszczyk and Tom McKinley. Today’s tip: Don’t put DDS-defined logical file names in your SQL statements. To understand why, let me give you a little background. When you execute an SQL command, the system determines the best way to carry out

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• Performance Advice from a Mysterious Friend, Part 4

  April 9, 2008 Ted Holt

  I’ve already published three performance tips from one of your fellow subscribers, a consultant who has found these techniques to be helpful. Here’s tip number 4. Our friend’s advice: “Use journal cache support.” Journal caching is similar to file buffering. Caching directs the system to cache journal entries in main storage before flushing them to disk. You do not get journal caching automatically. It is a separately chargeable feature of i5/OS. The performance advantage is like that of buffering files. Normally the system writes a journal entry to the journal receiver before continuing with the next I/O operation. Caching allows

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