• As I See It: Weighty Matters

  January 14, 2008 Victor Rozek

  The package arrived the day before Christmas. It came all the way from the East coast courtesy of my in-laws. As soon as my wife saw it, she got a sly look on her face and urged me to open it because, she said, it was “time sensitive.” But my father-in-law is to packaging what Madonna is to restraint, so opening one of his packages requires a great deal of patience and resolve. Having a modest cache of explosives wouldn’t hurt either. So I gathered a chisel, a hammer, a sharp knife, and a sturdy pair of pruning shears and

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• SOA Remains Hard to Define, but Projects on the Rise

  January 14, 2008 Dan Burger

  The concept of service oriented architecture (SOA) remains a slippery fish to grasp. For many people, SOA defies an accurate and meaningful description. Some deny that it is anything new. It can be said that it entails new standards-based ways of tying business processes together, another way of saying interoperability, and that is perhaps its most valuable benefit. Not being able to precisely describe it doesn’t stand in the way of people claiming to know it when they see it. Because SOA is thought of so differently depending on the person you ask, the very nature of surveys on this

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• Rocket Software Buys the Assets of Arkivio

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Rocket Software is a hungry software company these days, and has made another acquisition after gobbling up NetManage for $69 million only a few weeks ago. Last week, Rocket Software announced that it had picked up the assets of a privately held information lifecycle management (ILM) software maker named Arkivio for an undisclosed sum. Arkivio, which is not just some made-up buzzword but Italian for “archive,” was founded in December 2000 after four former executives from a company that made network attached storage called Creative Design Solutions was bought by then-relatively healthy disk maker Maxtor a year earlier. (Maxtor was

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• Server Reseller OHC Expands into Services, Softchoice Expands into the U.S.

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many data center managers across the globe have heard of Norcross, Georgia-based Canvas Systems, which is a distributor of new and used servers that run i5/OS, Unix, Windows, Linux servers from IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems as well as storage, networking, IP telephony, and systems software associated with these boxes. Now, Canvas Systems has a new IT consulting and managed services sister company that has been given the name Corus Group. The new company, which will also be located in Norcross and, like its sibling, will serve customers around the globe, is not to be

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• Which Geographies Use the Most Juice for Servers?

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in February 2007, Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at Stanford University, created a model of server installed base and electricity usage for these servers based on data from IDC to try to get a handle on how much power servers were consuming and how quickly that consumption was growing. The data in Koomey’s original model was based on IDC stats for the United States and the world as a whole, and he has now updated it with finer-grained data from IDC to show power use by geographical regions. The original

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• Lawson Grows Sales by 18 Percent in Fiscal Q2

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is starting to look like the acquisition of rival ERP vendor Intentia International was a good idea for Lawson Software despite some of the criticism that investors heaped upon the two companies when Lawson shelled out $480 million in stock to buy Intentia back in June 2005. In the second quarter of its fiscal 2008, Lawson booked sales of $218.6 million in its second quarter of fiscal 2008 ended November 30, up 18 percent compared to the prior year’s second quarter. Importantly, Lawson had double-digit revenue growth across sales of software licenses, maintenance, and consulting revenues. Specifically, software license

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• Surprise, Surprise: Java Coders Don’t Know Jack About “Real” Programming

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This one reminds me of the conversation I had with my father over standard versus automatic transmissions in cars when I was a lazy teenager and there was a cranky clutch that took way too much of a delicate touch to work correctly. Two professors of computer science at New York University who are also the top brass at a company specializing in the Ada programming language, have written a paper that explains why Java is a terrible first language for newbie coders to learn. In a paper entitled Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?,

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• Scrubbing Your Web Data with Elbow Grease and AJAX

  January 9, 2008 Bob Butcher

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Our salespeople were complaining that they could never get at customer information when making customer visits. Everything was green-screen on our AS/400, the VPN was slow, and an initiative was presented to me to see if I could create something Web-based for the salespeople to use in the field. After three months, my project was complete. The new Website, written with Active Server Pages (ASP), connected to our AS/400, and had all the bells and whistles. I was so proud that I had enabled our sales folks to

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• Odds and Ends

  January 9, 2008 Ted Holt

  Happy New Year, distinguished colleagues! I hope everybody enjoyed the holidays and got to take some time off. Christmas was wonderful for me. I am blessed more than I deserve to be. To start off a brand new year is this collection of odds and ends. I hope you find something useful. –Ted Put FTP Information in One Place 1. Most shops do batch FTP this way: OVRDBF FILE(INPUT) TOFILE(QFTPSRC) MBR(mbr_name) OVRDBF FILE(OUTPUT) TOFILE(FTPLOG) MBR(nbr_name) STRTCPFTP RMTSYS(ftp_server) DLTOVR FILE(OUTPUT) LVL(*JOB) DLTOVR FILE(INPUT) LVL(*JOB) where QFTPSRC(mbr_name) looks something like: user_name password ftp command(s) quit This forces you to maintain the destination

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• Admin Alert: Making Educated Guesses on CPU Utilization

  January 9, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  In previous issues, I discussed how to activate and deactivate trial Capacity on Demand (CoD) processors on a System i 550 box. Once the trial ends, however, you have to decide whether the additional capacity helped system performance and whether your organization should permanently activate those processors. To help with that decision, I’ll demonstrate a rough method for comparing before and after CPU performance in a trial CoD situation. The Situation Continuing with the case study discussed in my earlier articles, I activated an additional processor on a partition that was going to experience extremely heavy increased demand

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