• IBM And Lenovo Settle Down Strikes In Shenzhen Plant

  March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, IBM‘s $2.3 billion deal to sell of its System x server division to Lenovo Group touched off a protest in Big Blue’s factory in Shenzhen, an industrial area outside of Hong Kong. The Shenzhen facility is important to Power Systems shops for a number of reasons. First, the factory doesn’t just make X86-based servers. For the past several years, it has been used as a staging area to refurbish Power-based systems and, while IBM doesn’t like to talk about it much, the factory also manufactures low-end Power

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• Saxena Leaves IBM, Watson Not Talking

  March 17, 2014 Dan Burger

  I wonder if Watson saw this coming? We all know Watson, the cognitive computing in a can with a resume that includes TV star and all-time Jeopardy! king of the hill; medical advisor at the Cleveland Clinic, MD, Anderson Cancer Center, WellPoint, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; and high profile shopping assistant with clients such as The North Face, MD Buyline, Welltok, Travelocity, and Kayak. IBM has placed a $1 billion bet on the hotshot Watson, believing the cognitive capabilities will fit comfortably inside a set of products that within “the next 20 years will change computing as we

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• Modernize Your Skills at the Northeast Tech Conference

  March 17, 2014 Dan Burger

  IBM has its ongoing Global Skills Initiative. COMMON has its Annual Meeting and Exposition. You’ll find high-quality educational opportunities at each, but time and your training budget may not be on your side. For less time away from the office and a lower cost of registration, travel, and lodging–at least if you live in one of the New England states–the Northeast User Group Conference (NEUGC) is a training and education gold mine. It’s scheduled for April 7 through 9 in Framingham, Massachusetts. The IBM i running on Power Systems is a modern marvel compared to its predecessor machines: the IBM

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• IBM Offers Europe A Power Blade-To-Flex Migration Deal

  March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Resellers pushing new Flex System nodes to customers with BladeCenter blade server machines using Power-based nodes can get a deal from IBM to help cushion the blow migrating to Power-based Flex System nodes. The deal is being offered to resellers across Europe, but there is a bug in Big Blue’s announcement system and it is only showing up for resellers in Italy as we go to press. IBM is advertising this deal in websites and marketing campaigns, and resellers are supposed to pass the rebate down to the solution providers, who in turn pass it on to end user customers.

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• Who Needs Custom Perspectives In RSE?

  March 12, 2014 Susan Gantner

  Who needs custom perspectives in RSE? Just about everyone. At least everyone could probably benefit from them. As you know if you’ve read my earlier tips, I’m a huge fan of the Remote System Explorer that is part of WDSC, RDi and/or RDP. But I rarely use it as it comes “out of the box” from IBM/Rational. I customize it in many ways, including creating my own custom perspectives. I use custom perspectives primarily for two purposes: To provide a good target for “reset perspective. . . “ To create special-purpose editing environments. In this tip, we’ll look at

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• Quick And Handy RPG Output

  March 12, 2014 Ted Holt

  Are you one of those people who thrive on complexity? Do you love bureaucracy and paperwork? If so, you’re reading the wrong newsletter. I like everything to be as simple as possible. Today I have a simple routine that is a time-saver for me. I hope you find it useful. My little routine lets me print anything with minimal effort. I can print character variables, numeric variables, data structures, the results of expressions, and anything else that can be assigned to a character variable. I developed it because I needed a quick way to add output to RPG programs without

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• What Should I Monitor For On My IBM i Partition?

  March 12, 2014 Hey, Joe

  I want to shore up my IBM i monitoring plan but I need ideas on what to monitor for. I know a problem when it hits me, but I’m not always sure what to look for. What should I be monitoring? –Victoria IBM i and Power i system monitoring is an important topic because like a shipping manager, your number one priority is to keep the production lines running. You need to find problems both before and after they occur. Here are the general areas I believe every IBM i administrator should be watching on a daily basis. In the

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• Rumors Say Power8 Systems Debut Sooner Rather Than Later

  March 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power Systems division in a secular revenue decline, as Wall Street calls such things, following down the Unix market and Intel having completely revamped its Xeon E5 and E7 chips with “Ivy Bridge” updates, IBM can’t afford to wait a day longer than necessary to get the Power8 processors into the field to counter the push that the Intel marketing machine will bring to bear on Unix and proprietary platforms. So it is not a surprise, then, that the word on the street is that the Power8 chip will appear in machines sooner rather than later this year.

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• Problem Solved: IBM i Skills Initiatives Need Partners

  March 10, 2014 Dan Burger

  Technology readiness levels assess and evaluate when implementation success exceeds implementation risk. One component of that assessment is the skill level of those doing the implementing and on-going maintenance of the technology. The IBM midrange computer is a good example. The system has been advanced and enhanced in many areas. We have application modernization, database modernization, storage modernization, and the technology roadmap goes on. What about skills modernization? It is an issue that does not go away. Investing in the system means investing in the skills. IBM has two programs designed to handle the ongoing need for new skills and

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• Cheap Servers Sell Like Hotcakes, Big Systems Not So Much

  March 10, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The box counters at Gartner gave their assessment of the state of the systems business in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, and this week we turn to the market data from IDC to get a slightly different view of the same system landscape. The most jarring thing about the modern systems market–and something that is making it difficult for all server makers to meet their price points and profit margins–is how sales of rack and modular machines to hyperscale datacenters continues to ramp on public clouds and public Internet application providers such as Google, Facebook,

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