The Four Hundred Archives - Page 499 of 1511

The Q3 Server Market And IBM’s Place In It

December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The figures are out for server shipments and revenues for the third quarter from Gartner, and they shed a little more light on what is going on in the IBM customer base and in the market at large. A number of different factors are making it tough on Big Blue and these have short-term and long-term ramifications for IBM i shops and indeed any customers who are deploying Power-based systems.

The most important thing to realize is that while server shipments are continuing to grow, revenues are not and I suspect that profit margins have fallen even faster than

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Reader Feedback On As I See It: Poisoning The Well

December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Victor:

Warning: Many generalities, and complaining, follow.

I agree that complaining is not always the best way to deal with a problem.

But if one thinks that there are situations that involve someone like the Pointy Haired Boss in Dilbert (and I do), and if you feel stuck in that situation for any number of reasons, then some complaining may be a way of seeking sympathy from others who have similar feelings.

Maybe the point of your article is that this is not a good thing, but sometimes “letting off steam” let’s you get back to work.

If you feel

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IT Hiring And Salaries On The Rise For 2014

December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is that time of the year again, when all of us look at how we did this year and wonder if we are going to better than this next year. For the IT departments in the United States, the outlook is a good one, according to the latest data coming out of Computer Economics.

The company has just completed its annual survey of 140 IT shops in the United States, and it looks like companies are expecting that inflation will go up a tiny bit in 2014. Inflation will be kept in check by the relatively high unemployment

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IBM Gooses DS8870 Disk Array With Power7+ Chips

December 9, 2013 Alex Woodie

IBM last month unveiled a refresh of its high-end DS8870 SAN disk array that features the latest Power7+ processors, which Big Blue says will deliver a 15 percent increase in data throughput for transactional workloads. The refreshed SAN also features a pair of new hard drive options, new security features, and new optimizations for Flash drives.

IBM first rolled out the DS8870 over a year ago to serve the data storage needs of its most demanding customers. Users can mix and match a variety of different drives to house hot and not-so-hot data–up to 2.3 PB of it when four

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Big Blue Buys Another Cloud-Ish Business

December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has promised Wall Street that it will have a $7 billion cloud business by the end of 2015, and it has gotten out the checkbook once again to help it along its way to that goal.

Last week, IBM said that it has inked a deal with Dexia, a financial services company based in Brussels, Belgium, to take over the operations of its Associated Dexia Technology Services unit. ADTS is a service company not unlike IBM’s own Global Services that provides services to Belfius Bank, Belfius Insurance, International Wealth Insurers (IWI), Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (BIL), Dexia and Dexia

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Technically Speaking, SMBs Struggle To Compete

December 9, 2013 Dan Burger

The inability to afford many of the new information technologies and lacking the skills to implement those they can afford is a tightening rope around the neck of many small to midsize companies. It certainly contributes to the lack of application modernization projects that are discussed in two other articles I’ve written in this issue.

Any organization, but especially the small to midsize organizations, looks at IT investments in terms of spending money to save money. That’s pretty much a universal business fact in these times of fast-paced IT evolution. For every operational efficiency promised, there needs to be a

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End-Of-Year Feedback

December 4, 2013 Hey, Esteemed IBM i Professional

I hope 2013 was a good year for you. It was my best year in a while. I left a dysfunctional bureaucracy for a company where I can make a difference. I renewed several old acquaintances. And I found out from LinkedIn that I know someone who knows someone who knows Haynes Brooke, the guy who plays the sun in the Jimmy Dean sausage commercials. Let’s close out the year with some of the feedback you’ve been kind enough to send to me.

Hey, Ted:

In Alan’s Easy Method For Building A CSV File From A Report, you

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Three Powerful SQL Words

December 4, 2013 Ted Holt

Louisa May Alcott said, “I like good strong words that mean something.” So do I, especially when they’re good strong SQL words. It gives me great pleasure today to share three powerful SQL words with you.

Consider the following summary query:

select d.ItemNumber,
       sum(d.Quantity) as Qty,
       sum(d.Quantity * d.Price) as Extended
  from InvoiceLines as d
 group by d.ItemNumber
 order by 1

Here’s the result set:

ITEMNUMBER      QTY      EXTENDED
  A-1             8         88.00
  A-3             7         35.00
  A-7             7         52.00
  B-1            26         51.25
  Z-3             2         18.00

Standard stuff, yet very powerful. It beats writing an RPG program to read a file, check

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Admin Alert: Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition, Part 1

December 4, 2013 Joe Hertvik

I’m currently working with a client to migrate three IBM i partitions to new Power 7+ machines located in two data centers in different states. While there are several ways to approach migration, over the next two issues I’ll discuss four specific techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a new location and the different tasks you have to perform for each technique.

Four Ways To Move An IBM i

In general, there are four techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a different machine:

Restore the partition in place or to a new location using the same

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Help/Systems Teams with DSI to Sell VTLs

December 4, 2013 Alex Woodie

Help/Systems last week announced it formed a partnership with Dynamic Solutions International that will see DSI selling Help/Systems backup software for IBM i into its installed base.

DSI is an Englewood, Colorado-based company that sells a range of storage solutions, including disk-based VTLs; LTO tape drives, autoloaders, and libraries; and storage management software. The company has close to 40 years of experience and counts about 2,000 organizations as customers.

The IBM i market opportunity and the partnership with Help/Systems came about as a result of DSI’s work with IBM‘s System z mainframe customers, says Leo Salvaggio, vice president of

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