• Intel’s New Xeon E5s Push Back Against Power7+ Processors

  September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The tug of war between the Xeon and Power processor lines from Intel and IBM continued last week as the largest chip maker in the world got its “Ivy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors into the field. IBM, of course, has just finished rolling out its eight-core Power7+ chips across the Power Systems and Flex Systems lines, and only last month was previewing the capabilities of the future 12-core Power8 chips due maybe in the middle of next year. Now it is Intel’s turn, and it is starting with the rollout of chips for the workhorse two-socket servers that dominate

  …

  Read more

• Help/Systems Takes Power7 Trends And Tech Tour On The Road

  September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM and the major user groups like COMMON are not the only ones that bring together experts and users to talk about technology and business trends as they relate to shops who use Power Systems iron. Help/Systems, which is very likely the largest independent software vendor in the IBM i marketplace and which has been expanding into Unix and Linux in recent years, is taking its Power7 Trends and Tech show on the road, possibly to a city near you. Tom Huntington, who is vice president of technical services at Help/Systems, will be hosting four events to go over

  …

  Read more

• Some Tweaks On Deals And Flex System Price Changes

  September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the fall, and IBM is trying to wrap up its third quarter in two weeks. So don’t expect a lot of wheeling and dealing through formal announcements. Depending on how the third quarter goes, IBM could keep the dealing more informal, but if it has specific goals and wants to rein in both its salespeople and resellers from getting too carried away, it will do some formal deals in the fourth quarter. In the meantime, you need to be aware of some tweaks to existing deals and price changes on Flex System iron. First up, in announcement letter

  …

  Read more

• IBM Sells Off BPO Services Biz To Synnex For $505 Million

  September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is always rebalancing its workforce, which is a euphemism for layoffs at the company, and it is also looking to add to its portfolio of products through acquisitions or internal development as well as divesting itself of products it no longer feels are core to its business. Last week, IBM’s Global Services did a divestiture, something we don’t see very often. Specifically, IBM sold off its business process outsourcing services business to a company called Concentrix, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Synnex. According to Synnex, this business generates more than $1.2 billion providing customer

  …

  Read more

• Retrieve The Call Stack In DB2 For i

  September 11, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here. Troubleshooting problems is often a costly component of application maintenance. Consider the case when the user reports an application crash. Exactly what program crashed? Was it the UI logic or business logic embedded in a service program? If it was a service program, what procedure was running? What was the chain of events that led to the problem? Knowing what the call stack looks like can help answer many of these questions, thereby reducing costly investigation time. Since writing “persistent stored modules” (a.k.a., SQL routines) is increasingly popular

  …

  Read more

• Thinking In Pointers

  September 11, 2013 Ted Holt

  Suppose you were to ask me how large an alphanumeric variable should be, and I replied that I didn’t know, nor did I care. Wouldn’t that sound odd? Those of us who have been programming in business languages such as RPG, COBOL, and CL since the French and Indian War always think it’s important to know the size of a variable, otherwise we won’t be able to define it properly in a program. But when you work with pointers, a variable’s defined size doesn’t necessarily matter. Let me show you what I’m talking about. Consider a command: CMD PROMPT('Do something')

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Six Tips For Managing IBM i Spooled File Storage

  September 11, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  While recently reviewing system storage on an IBM i partition, we were shocked to discover that spooled files (SPLFs, pronounced spliffs) took up over 10 percent of our usable system storage. Based on that experience and what my shop learned cleaning it up, here are six techniques for keeping your spooled file storage under control. The Big Six For Spooled File Storage Management Don’t have FNDBIGSPLF? Get FNDBIGSPLF!!! Check your IBM i cleanup parameters (GO CLEANUP) to delete old job logs and system generated output Check for automatically scheduled jobs that are generating unnecessary spooled files The 2.5 million-page

  …

  Read more

• IBM Data Studio Deserves a Closer Look

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Good developers are always on the hunt for new tools that allow them to accomplish their everyday tasks faster, cheaper, or better. For IBM i developers who like to stay within the comfy confines of Eclipse, there’s a little-known database management utility called IBM Data Studio that could become a go-to tool, particularly when it comes to graphically debugging SQL and Java stored procedures on the IBM i server. IBM Data Studio is a free graphical development tool based on Eclipse that previously went by a couple of names, including IBM DB2 Developers Workbench and IBM DB2 Development Center. The

  …

  Read more

• Vision Touts Cloud Readiness of MIMIX DR

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  MIMIX DR is ready to start protecting IBM i customers from the cloud. That’s the message coming from Vision Solutions, which is ramping up its marketing machine in the hopes of sparking cloud sales of the remote journaling-based disaster recovery (DR) solution for itself, and its managed service provider (MSP) partners, too. MIMIX DR is a new piece of DR software that Vision unveiled in May. The software is nearly identical to the full MIMIX product that has been synonymous with high availability since the days of the AS/400, except for the lack of an automated failover process

  …

  Read more

• RTC Now Lets You Simulate IBM i Dependency Builds on Windows

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i and z/OS shops that use IBM‘s Rational Team Concert (RTC) software to manage their development processes will get a new “simulation mode” that allows time-saving dependency builds to run on any platform, including Windows. The new feature is included in the latest release of RTC, version 4.0.4, which shipped in late August. The new functionality will allow users to run a simulated dependency build for IBM i and z/OS applications on any platform, including Windows, IBM says. “This makes it possible to create all the dependency metadata [build maps and so on] of a build without running

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles